Fear of Flying Filibusterless

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In an important recent column, New York Times pundit Charles Blow aired a chilling fear. Mitch McConnell, he suggested, might be pulling a Br’er Rabbit-style trick by pushing so hard to save the filibuster.

Blow wrote that demographic change could give Republicans a durable Senate majority. That could make minorities and white progressives helpless to stave off retrogression without the filibuster. Here’s why I think he’s wrong.

The essence of Blow’s fear is long-term demographic change. According to Norm Ornstein, whom Blow quotes:

“By 2040 or so, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. Meaning 30 percent will choose 70 senators. And the 30 percent will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70 percent.”

The result, Blow predicts, will be permanent minority rule in the Senate without a filibuster.

If this is so, we are doomed as a nation anyway. In order to stave off retrogression and reaction, we would have to up the vote to cut off a filibuster from the present 60% supermajority to over 70%. The Senate would become even more of a useless debating society than it is already. Nothing would ever get done in Congress, and our imperial presidency would go on steroids. We would morph from a Republic to an empire, just like ancient Rome.

But none of this is foreordained. The reason is changing demographics within states, specifically in the South.

The open secret resides in another column of Blow’s. There he reported his own relocation from New York City to Atlanta, after 26 years up north. He invited other Black voters to follow, in a reverse Great Migration. That reversal, he wrote, “would create dense Black communities, and that density would translate into statewide political power.”

Black voters in the South may never again have the absolute majorities that they enjoyed immediately after Emancipation, before white terror drove so many north in the Great Migration. But they don’t have to have statewide majorities all by themselves. Now they have allies.

Black voters are not the only group growing in the South. Latinx people and progressive whites are also growing. Black voters are now part of a progressive coalition that supports their push for racial justice and local control of their own communities.

That’s precisely what I had hoped for, supported and predicted in 2017. And it came to pass in 2020—at least in part. Local demographic change flipped Georgia, helping to put Biden and Harris in the White House and giving us Chuck Schumer as Senate Majority Leader. That’s all a done deal now.

But there’s more, much more. We can’t ever deprive any state of its two votes in the Senate, but we can admit new states. Specifically, we can make both the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states. Both trend heavily progressive.

According to the Constitution’s Admissions Clause (Article IV, Section III, Clause 1), Congress could admit new states by simple majority votes, if there were no filibuster in the Senate. If we abolished the filibuster, Congress could get this done before the 2022 congressional elections. (Other states need not ratify new admissions, as they must constitutional amendments.)

There’s still more. We have 11-plus million undocumented immigrants living among us. Give them a path to citizenship, and more of them—neglected and demonized by the GOP—would vote blue. An estimated 1.6 million live in Texas, with its 38 electoral votes. (Scroll down below the table.) That’s more than double Trump’s 2020 margin of 631, 221 votes in Texas.

Then there are voting rights. Only strong, federal voting-rights legislation can reverse the abomination of Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted our Voting Rights Act. Only a new law can make voting simple and easy for everyone. It could insure safe voting by mail (with a paper trail) during the pandemic, uniform early voting nationwide, adequate polling places and drop-off boxes in minority communities, and election days on Sundays or public holidays, so that more working people can vote. Once every citizen has the right to vote for real, not just in theory, Congress can attack the final frontier of voting rights: stopping gerrymandering so that every vote counts equally.

All this would require legislation: new states, new voting citizens, stronger voting rights, and legislative curbs on gerrymandering and other forms of voter manipulation. None of it can be done by the budget reconciliation process, because none of it directly involves money. (I’ve suggested that some progress can be made by imposing conditions on money grants, but recalcitrant states could avoid the conditions by refusing the grants.)

So abolishing the filibuster is vital not just to realizing a progressive wish list. It’s also vital to enacting the parts of that wish list that can entrench a progressive coalition in national politics and in the South. As my 2017 table shows, if Democrats can flip Florida and North Carolina as they did Georgia last year, they can have a lock on the presidency, with 273 electoral votes, without relying on any of Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, without any new states, and without Texas, which could soon flip, too.

More fundamentally, Blow’s fear neglects a hopeful sea change in national politics. Black voters are no longer alone. At long last, millions of white voters like me, plus other minorities, recognize Black voters’ crying need for justice and the power of their political perseverance.

We all know in our souls that Black pols and Black voters, starting with Jim Clyburn, were instrumental in saving our Republic from the Demagogue and from Mitch. They deftly leveraged the great white awakening sparked by the video of George Floyd’s police murder.

Call it a long-overdue epiphany. Call it a renewed instinct for self-preservation. But whatever you call it, it’s real. Black pols and Black voters are not just parts of a new coalition; they are leading it.

The trick now is to keep that coalition growing. To that end, I just re-upped my monthly contributions to the following grass-roots organizers (albeit at a lower level than last year): Black Voters Matter, Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action, Nsé Ufot’s New Georgia Project, Helen Butler’s Coalition for the People’s Agenda, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, the Democratic National Committee (now led by Jaime Harrison), Progressive Turnout Project, Voter Protection and Marisa Franco’s Mijente.

These are some of the groups whose relentless hard work, on the ground, day after day, will transform our nation. They will bypass the expensive media circus and conspiracy-crazed social media. They will avoid the overpaid consultants and “operatives” who drive workers’ justifiable distrust of the “elite.”

So no, Mr. Blow, there is little reason to fear. There is reason to hope. Hope gave us Obama. Hope gave us Biden, Harris and a diminished Mitch. Timidity gave us too small a stimulus in 2009, “Obamacare” without a public option, and recent a GOP “offer” of a two-thirds cut in relief, massive evictions, and states and cities left adrift on a pandemic sea. We can’t be timid and maintain hope.

Hope could give us a totally transformed nation without a filibuster. All we have to learn to do is (as Paul Krugman puts it) not let the GOP Lucy pull the football away again. We can fix this nation quickly and for good, if only we can entice Senators Manchin and Sinema, with carrots and sticks, to do what must be done.

With a succinct and incisive history, Blow’s colleague Jamelle Bouie has skewered the myth of the filibuster as an “improvement” in democracy. It’s not. It’s not any part of our Constitution. It’s not even our Founders’ afterthought. It’s a blunt instrument of obstruction and minority rule, spawned by a series of historical accidents and nurtured by political schemers like Mitch. Its “beneficence” and ability to foster compromise are pernicious myths, just like Old South’s “contented” slaves and “genteel” culture.

Three structural evils hobble our democracy: our permanently malapportioned Senate, the Electoral College, and the filibuster. The filibuster is the only one we can change by a simple majority vote in the Senate, without a constitutional amendment or a national compact. It’s time we did so and joined most of the world’s democracies, plus the ancient Greeks and Romans, in enjoying majority rule.

Right after pandemic relief, killing the filibuster should be Job One, in a sustained full-court press. We will have suffered decades of deliberate suppression of Black voters (with “surgical precision”), a badly botched pandemic response, an epidemic of police killings of Black citizens, a full-term delay in rebuilding our infrastructure, the Garland stiff-arm, the Barrett cram-down, two acquittals of a guilty and treasonous president, the Big Lie of a stolen election, and the Capitol Insurrection that it caused. After all that, neither Mitch nor any lackey of the Demagogue will have valid reason to complain about losing one sneaky tool of minority rule.

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