McConnell’s filibuster is ‘fundamentally flawed system’ that hurts government

Senator Mitch McConnell, in a recent Op-Ed in the Herald-Leader, made the argument that the country is “strengthened” by Senate norms like the filibuster.

For starters, we should stop pretending that the filibuster was an intentional effort by the founding fathers to create moderation or stability in the legislature; it just was not. The Constitution does not mention the filibuster at any point, and it was an unintentional creation within the Senate. It emerged through an oversight during an attempt to clean up Senate rules, and its first use wasn’t until 1837, during the 25th Congress. The filibuster wasn’t created with a purpose; it was an accident that has been co-opted by senators at various points since its creation to block critical legislation that would have helped many Americans.

Senator McConnell is correct that the filibuster has been used on a variety of issues other than civil rights legislation, but that fact does not erase the impact that the filibuster had on delaying or watering down some of the nation’s key civil rights laws, and it is intentionally ignorant to the fact that it has been used far more recently than the 1960s to block civil rights legislation. Just this year, Senator Lindsey Graham said that he intended to talk until he fell over to block the Equality Act, which would grant protections against discrimination for members of the LGBTQ community. It’s almost fitting that Graham would issue this threat, given that his predecessor, Strom Thurmond, is the one who weaponized the filibuster in the 1950s and 1960s against civil rights legislation; history really does repeat itself. Additionally, McConnell overlooked the countless issues that were never raised because it was known that they would never have a chance of surviving a filibuster; because of this, the true policy cost of the filibuster may never be fully known.

Senator McConnell threatened to undo any Democratic legislation passed without a filibuster as soon as his party regains power, but this threat is especially laughable considering that the last time the Republican party had a trifecta, they tried to do this and almost succeeded. When Senator McConnell’s majority attempted a repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017 using the budget reconciliation process to try and skirt around the 60-vote threshold, they were attempting to repeal a significant piece of legislation that passed in 2010 with 60 votes in the Senate. Where was your cry for stability then, Senator? McConnell respects the filibuster about as little as he claims Democrats do; it is just in his best interest for him to support it now.

At the end of the day, the filibuster is a tool that has become useful only for stabilizing a broken status quo, and the Democratic majority must do away with it. As Senator McConnell warned, they should be prepared to face the consequences the next time they lose power, but hopefully before that happens, they can make meaningful progress toward fixing the fundamentally flawed system that McConnell seems happy to keep in place.

Aidan O’Brien is a UK political science student.