It’s rare a federal lawmaker makes a complete about-face on an issue with major legislative consequences.
But for Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, the need to shift her position on one of the most crucial issues facing the Biden administration – reform of the filibuster rule – has become too strong to ignore.
She now believes that without reform, the filibuster – a rule by which the minority party in the Senate can block legislation – will do serious “damage” to American democracy, she told the Guardian.
Smith’s move is crucial. Behind the loud voices of the Senate Democratic caucus calling to either dramatically scale back or gut entirely a tool used to obstruct legislation, there’s a usually quieter set of senators, like Smith, who are finally speaking out. They’ve had enough, these senators say, and want to see a substantial change to the filibuster – either workarounds for certain legislative proposals like voting rights, or modifications so the threat of a filibuster doesn’t bring Congress to a standstill.
Senator Angus King of Maine, in a recent op-ed, laid out his shift on the filibuster. Similarly, Smith laid out her own rationale for coming around on some kind of major change on the filibuster. Smith, a former lieutenant governor of Minnesota who came to the Senate via an appointment from then governor Mark Dayton in 2018, initially saw value in it. That has changed.
In an interview with the Guardian, Smith argued that contrary to how the filibuster is portrayed by its advocates – as a tool to make the minority heard – it simply gives a minority of lawmakers outsized power.
“I often thought that it’s important that the minority view is heard in the Senate, and that there should be an opportunity for people to come together across lines of difference to get things done. But that wasn’t happening either,” Smith said.
“The filibuster wasn’t encouraging compromise. The filibuster was making it easy for any member of the Senate to say no. And the more I looked at that, the more I looked at the damage it was doing to our democracy.”
She added: “The more I realized this is so undemocratic, and [that] every other governing body I’ve ever worked with has fundamentally operated on the rule that the majority gets to decide, I came to the conclusion that the filibuster was contributing to a broken Senate.”
Smith’s comments come as Republican senators go in the opposite direction from Democrats on the filibuster.
Top Senate Republicans have argued that the Democrats’ move to change the legislative tool is simply a grab to snatch power from lawmakers in the minority. The former senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, a firebrand conservative Republican, recently wrote his own op-ed arguing that the importance of the filibuster for small states.
“The people who want to get rid of the filibuster are precisely the people the Founders wanted to protect us from!” DeMint wrote.
But even as support for doing something about the filibuster is growing, Democrats haven’t decided on exactly what yet.
Smith said: “Well, I think that decisions about what we need to do, and how we need to change the rules – if we need to change the rules – are decisions that need to happen in their own way. But it happens in a particular place and time. So I’ve come to the conclusion that I would vote to get rid of the filibuster hook, line and sinker.
“Others in my caucus haven’t come to that position. If we got to a point where somebody were to say, ‘We should get rid of the filibuster for this issue’, I would, of course, consider that. Of course I would.”
Whatever they decide, if Democrats do make a drastic change to the filibuster, they could come to rue it if Republicans regain power in the Senate in the 2022 midterms. Then, they would be the minority party facing the prospect of little input into legislation.
Asked about that prospect, Smith paused.
“Well,” Smith said. “I thought long and hard about that. And I thought about the issues that I care so much about that I’d be concerned that Republicans could overturn, like women’s reproductive choice, or issues that they could turn the clock back on, like labor, [or] people’s rights to organize.”
“But fundamentally, I believe that the core value in a democracy, in a republic … a majority of the people need to be able to decide, and we need to be able to make sure that that happens. If the Republicans were to take steps to roll back values and steps and rights Americans really cherish, then that is going to be a big problem for them.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
