Mitch McConnell’s ‘nuclear winter.’ In defense of filibuster, a master class in hypocrisy.
You have to hand it to Kentucky’s own Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for his constant ability to combine audacity and hypocrisy in equal measure. He is the master of the old adage, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
If Senate Democrats get rid of the filibuster that he used to block legislation in unprecedented measure when he became Majority Leader, then there will be nothing but “nuclear winter,” “scorched earth,” and a “100 car pileup,” as he predicted in various recent interviews. Apparently, it will be even worse than when McConnell brought Senate business to a screeching halt in 2019 when some 400 House bills were stalled on his desk.
Apparently the only time it’s ok to get rid of the filibuster is when ... that’s right, Mitch McConnell does it, as he did in 2017 to confirm U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But Mitch being Mitch, he went a step further on Tuesday, proclaiming in front of television cameras that the filibuster has “no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians.”
Historians then proceeded to dispute the hell out of it on Twitter, including Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse who has a nearly full-time second gig disputing GOP inaccuracies. He went ahead and made a quick list of the ways the filibuster had been used between 1874 and 1964 to defeat various civil rights legislation, from attempts to outlaw lynching to voting rights.
It was a very McConnellian move. No one aside from historians knows more about Senate history and procedure than McConnell, so his gaslighting reached new heights.
The filibuster — which requires 60 votes to end discussion and allow voting — allows minority control over legislative decisions when there is a very thin margin between parties in the Senate. It’s not required for budgetary issues, like tax cuts or the recent American Rescue Plan; it is required for big sweeping legislation like ending segregation. The filibuster, which most people know from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or from segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond’s record-breaking 24-hour talkfest in 1957 to block civil rights legislation, no longer even requires mammoth speeches. All a Senator has to do is send an email saying they object to a bill. That email then changes the bill from having to pass with a simple majority to a supermajority of 60 votes.
In January, Adam Jentleson, the author of “Kill Switch: The Rise Of The Modern Senate And The Crippling Of American Democracy,” gave a good example on Fresh Air of how the filibuster worked after the massacre of young children at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., worked on a bipartisan effort to increase background checks for buying guns. It was a fairly moderate proposal, but one that seemed well on its way to passage. Then another Senator objected and it died. And now we’re facing another debate after yet another mass shooting, this time in Boulder.
“So this is an example not just of how the filibuster blocks common-sense legislation from passing the Senate, but also the way in which it’s become totally disconnected from the idea of debate, the idea that senators should be out on the floor discussing thoughtful approaches to legislation out in public,” Jentleson said.
There’s something ironic about the fact that filibuster-enforced minority rule in the Senate could also be used to defeat major new voting rights legislation that recently passed the House. That legislation would codify many of the most successful innovations we saw in 2020, including early and mail-in voting. So minority rule by filibuster in the Senate could be used to ensure minority rule by Republicans in national elections, if a federal voting rights package can’t be passed to overrule hundreds of attempts in state legislatures to roll back voting rights all over the country.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson said in The Atlantic, “it’s clear that McConnell’s opposition to Democrats’ current proposals has nothing to do with promoting compromise or protecting the Senate’s norms ... Faced with the prospect of having his best weapon taken away, McConnell has, in effect, admitted that his only real strategy is to hamstring the institution he supposedly venerates and then blame his opponents for the disarray.”
The minority leader’s pearl-clutching over the filibuster is McConnellian strategy at its best and it may very well work, particularly the opponent-blaming part. That Democrats like Joe Manchin are waffling about getting rid of or reforming the filibuster shows why McConnell generally wins in these types of situations: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me another 500 times ...
This story was originally published March 24, 2021 at 10:25 AM.
