Fuck the filibuster

Not to put too fine a point on it but the senate filibuster is not in the constitution, and these days it only ever serves to derail progressive legislation. Republicans got rid of the filibuster for supreme court nominees to ram through their trio of ideologues, and the remaining filibuster never stopped them from cutting taxes for the super-rich.

Democrats should get rid of the filibuster so we can actually pass some goddamn voting rights and equality bills in this country, not to mention raising the minimum wage.

If you live in Arizona or West Virginia, call up Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin (respectively) and yell at them. The filibuster is a Jim Crow era relic and it should be destroyed.

Comments

[PresentPerfect]

My single thought about this is, when Congress eventually flips, how the fuck are we going to stop the Repubs from ramming through all the rights-destroying legislature they want? Isn't this cutting off the nose to spite the face? For all that your statements about where it came from are totally correct.

[forbloodysummer]

5462430 Serious question, in response to both this and the original post - how do other countries handle this situation? Civilised democracies, I mean; obviously I know how China handles it.

[Thought Prism]

The filibuster isn't the problem; it's the Republican party, and by extension, the two party duopoly. The only people whose wills are heard are corporate lobbyists.

[R5h]

5462430
That's a real and important concern. But I do have a couple of responses:

1. Republicans use the filibuster to stop Democrats twice as often as Democrats use it to stop Republicans, according to The Guardian.
2. In 2017, Republicans in the senate voted to get rid of the filibuster for supreme court nominees, and then used this to push their three justices to the supreme court. I have no confidence that the republican party, as it grows ever more insane, wouldn't just remove the filibuster on their own the next time they had a narrow majority.
3. Congress is far more likely to flip if we don't pass far-reaching voting rights legislation, for instance. Right now, the Republican strategy is literally and blatantly to restrict voting rights as much as possible: there are hundreds of newly proposed bills to restrict voting across most of the states in the USA. The John Lewis Voting Rights act would help to stop them, but I don't see how it could get 10 votes from Republican senators right now.
4. The House of Representatives, the courts, the executive, and indeed the voters themselves all serve as potential checks against a Republican-controlled Senate. (I think this answers forbloodysummer's point as well.)

I'm not going to pretend that your worries are groundless. There is indeed a risk to eliminating the filibuster. But there's a hell of a lot more risk, as far as I can tell, to letting Republicans continue to fuck over our country for at least two more years. Our planet is fucking dying and I'm not interested in waiting for Mitch McConnell to grow a conscience before our government decides to save it.

It's my firm belief that more democracy will always be better for us. So fuck letting the minority party obstruct real positive change, and fuck the filibuster.

[PresentPerfect]

5464133
Okay. This all sounds like good reasons!