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    John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Soul of America

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    Second only to how much the this country accomplished in two decades — no set of colonies had ever liberated itself, nor since Rome had anyone designed a republic that could endure — was how much the founders quarreled among themselves.There were petty feuds, lifelong feuds, intermittent feuds, inexplicable feuds, deadly feuds. Those who lived and worked closely together quarreled. Those who spent little time in the same room quarreled. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson fell out. Jefferson and John Adams fell out. So did Adams and Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine and George Washington, Washington and Jefferson. When John Adams sailed to France to negotiate a treaty of peace at the end of the war, Jefferson wondered with whom he would side. Adams hated both the French and the British. He also hated his colleagues, Franklin and John Jay.The language could be rich — and brutal. The most peevish, John Adams, naturally proved the most quotable. He found Franklin’s life “one continued insult to good manners and decency.” He called Hamilton “a bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” — three times, in three different letters, over 10 years. He deemed Washington “illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station.” Thomas Paine was to his mind “a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf.” There was ample reason Jefferson should compare John Adams — with whom he ultimately reconciled, a decade before their deaths — to “a poisonous weed.”The collisions tell us a great deal about the personalities at play; a straight-spined, word-spewing John Adams was never going to fare well with a supple, silent Thomas Jefferson. But the collisions also reveal deep-seated, warring strains in the national character.Nowhere was that more apparent than in the ill-starred friendship of John Hancock and Samuel Adams. The two spent the most hair-raising hours of their lives in each other’s company. They worked side by side over nearly three decades. But they did so intermittently, as for much of that time they were not on speaking terms.Colleagues in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Adams and Hancock colluded to undermine and oust a royal governor. Together they conspired to publish his private letters. Together they patrolled a Boston wharf over several critical evenings in December 1773, when they collaborated in plotting the destruction of East India Company tea. The two most wanted men in Massachusetts, they shared a Lexington bedroom on the night of April 18, 1775. Together they heard, from Paul Revere, of their imminent arrest. At dawn, as British soldiers and British colonists fired at each other for the first time, Hancock and Adams huddled together, several miles away, in a swamp. Which did not make of them natural companions.Having inherited one of New England’s greatest fortunes at a young age, Hancock was an early American plutocrat. He lived and entertained, reported one neighbor, “like a prince.” In modern terms Hancock was the billionaire philanthropist who never met a naming opportunity he could resist. He gave Boston a fire engine, a bandstand, streetlights, trees, a library, a church bell. (There were no media companies in those days.) He liked to be thanked and got his money’s worth; his name was everywhere bandied about. The common people, a minister noted, would support Hancock even if they knew nothing of his character. There was reason one Boston visitor called him “the king of the rabble.”Fifteen years Hancock’s senior, Adams was a principled, penniless political operator, an unwavering republican who trusted that once colonial tempers calmed, the clock would reset itself, and piety, education and virtue would among them save the American day.An expert reader of men, Adams had early on encouraged Hancock’s political ambitions. He guessed that the attention would please the young man, whose fortune would please the party. Adams remained on hand to soothe a petulant Hancock when wayward comments left him bruised. He coaxed him back to the fold when Hancock attempted to skulk off. He directed him to the spotlight, Hancock’s preferred address.It made for an uneasy pairing. One man was all preening and extravagance, the other all austerity and ideals. Hancock displayed in his mansion the magnificent John Singleton Copley portrait of Adams that today hangs in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, a portrait Hancock most likely commissioned. But at various junctures he also attempted to distance himself from his mentor. Crown officials compared Adams’s recruiting of Hancock with the devil’s seduction of Eve. Every time the younger man attempted to liberate himself, Adams would — like a squid — “discharge his muddy liquid,” disorienting Hancock all over again.Early in the 1770s, Hancock finally succumbed to the blandishments of the royal governor, who reminded him of the toll Adams and his radical politics were taking on Hancock’s private affairs. He bought off Hancock with a corps of ceremonial cadets; Hancock threw himself into ordering musical instruments and uniforms, outfitting his men in scarlet coats and beaver hats. He swore off all connection with Adams, whom he hoped never to see again. He then started a campaign to oust Adams from the Massachusetts House, proposing an inquiry into his finances. (They were a morass.) Hancock managed to detach nearly a third of Boston voters from Adams, who was forced to run about town, defending himself against comments he had never made.Ultimately friends reconciled the two, though the relationship limped along from slight to recrimination and back again. One man was all steadfast starch, the other “flattered by ideas of his own consequence,” as a contemporary put it. At the same time, there were no illusions about who was directing whom. As one Crown officer saw it, Hancock was “a poor contemptible fool, led about by Adams.”The two arrived together at the second Continental Congress but would fall out spectacularly on that larger stage. Adams was particularly disgusted by Hancock’s attempt to arrange for a formal farewell ceremony before a Philadelphia departure; it was the kind of ostentation that Adams abhorred in a nascent republic. Hancock traveled north with a troop of light horse and liveried servants that left the country people gaping in awe. Adams quietly made the same trip several weeks later. Tavern keepers along the way complained: Hancock and his enormous retinue had neglected to settle their bills.Back in Boston, Hancock lost no time in maligning Adams. He nursed a rumor that Adams had participated in the Conway Cabal, a shadowy plot against General Washington. Adams could only stutter in disbelief. He did his best to ignore the slight, but it stung. To any and all he insisted that though Hancock considered him his enemy, he considered Hancock a friend.The two disagreed violently about Shays’ Rebellion in 1786, when western Massachusetts farmers rose up in armed revolt against new taxes. Adams saw the ringleaders as a threat to a legitimately elected government. He believed they should hang. As governor, Hancock pardoned them.Though the two reconciled briefly before Hancock’s death, their ghosts continued to fight it out in the press, precisely as their spirits do today.We have landed at the very intersection where the founders parted ways, tax cuts leading in one direction, Medicare and Social Security in the other. With mere days to go before the midterms, we appear to be agreed that, once again, it’s the economy, stupid. But beyond inflation and unemployment looms a far more ominous concern. Can democracy survive a stampede of billionaires? Can a capitalist country remain a country of equals?Some two centuries later, those questions may haunt us more than any other issue that divided the founders, who — for all their differences — could never have envisioned so much wealth so firmly concentrated in so few hands. To the 18th- century merchant elite, the demands of the people endangered the nation’s prosperity. Wall Street makes the same case today when it argues in favor of trickle-down economics. To Adams’s mind, the greater danger came from the elite calling the shots. Privilege, he believed, should step aside, to make room for opportunity and industry.His vote was for progress and prosperity across the board, for what matured into the American dream. He could not have imagined that torrents of money might one day spill noiselessly into elections, any more than he could have imagined that — appropriate though it might be — he was to live on as a beer, John Hancock as an insurance company.Stacy Schiff, recipient of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography, is the author, most recently, of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” from which this essay is adapted.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republicans Think There Is a ‘Takeover’ Happening. They Have Some Reading to Do.

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      Much of what’s in the Constitution is vague, imprecise or downright unclear. But some parts are very straightforward.For example, Article 1, Section 4 states that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.”Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia — quoting a previous ruling — argued in 2013 in his opinion for the court in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, “The power of Congress over the ‘Times, Places and Manner’ of congressional elections ‘is paramount, and may be exercised at any time, and to any extent which it deems expedient; and so far as it is exercised, and no farther, the regulations effected supersede those of the State which are inconsistent therewith.’”The legal scholar Pamela S. Karlan put it this way in a 2006 report on the Voting Rights Act: “The Supreme Court’s recent decisions under the elections clause have confirmed the longstanding interpretation of the clause as a grant of essentially plenary authority.” In other words, Congress has absolute, unbending power to regulate federal elections as it sees fit.For this reason among many, it has been strange to see Republican politicians — including some self-described “constitutional conservatives” — denounce the Democrats’ proposed new voting rights legislation as an illegitimate “federal takeover” of federal elections.In an op-ed for The Washington Post, former Vice President Mike Pence denounced the bills and the effort to pass them as a “federal power grab over our state elections” that would “offend the Founders’ intention that states conduct elections just as much as what some of our most ardent supporters would have had me do one year ago.”On Twitter, the governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, called the bill — which would allow for same-day voter registration, establish Election Day as a national holiday and expand mail-in voting — “an unconstitutional federal takeover of our elections” that would “make it easier to cheat.”Not to be outdone, Mitch McConnell slammed the bill as a “sweeping, partisan, federal takeover of our nation’s elections.”“We will not be letting Washington Democrats abuse their razor-thin majorities in both chambers to overrule state and local governments and appoint themselves a national Board of Elections on steroids,” the Senate Republican leader declared.Although Reeves is the only lawmaker in this group to have called the Democratic election bill “unconstitutional,” the clear implication of the Republican argument is that any federal regulation of state elections is constitutionally suspect. We already know that this is wrong — again, the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate state elections for federal office — but it’s worth emphasizing just how wrong it is.In addition to the Supreme Court, which has affirmed — again and again — the power of Congress to set “the Times, Places and Manner” of federal elections, there are the framers of the Constitution themselves, who were clear on the broad scope of the clause in question.Alexander Hamilton defends it in Federalist 59 as a necessary bulwark against the interests of individual states, which may undermine the federal union. “Nothing can be more evident than that an exclusive power of regulating elections for the national government, in the hands of the State legislatures, would leave the existence of the Union entirely at their mercy,” Hamilton writes.“If the State legislatures were to be invested with an exclusive power of regulating these elections,” he continues, “every period of making them would be a delicate crisis in the national situation, which might issue in a dissolution of the Union.”“Every government,” he says with emphasis, “ought to contain in itself the means of its own preservation.”Similarly, as the historian Pauline Maier recounted in “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788,” James Madison saw the Election Clause as a measure that would “allow Congress to use its power over elections against state electoral rules that were ‘subversive of the rights of the People to a free & equal representation in Congress agreeably to the Constitution.’”The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870, expanded and reaffirmed the power of Congress to regulate federal elections, stating, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”Both the Enforcement Act of 1870, which established criminal penalties for interfering with the right to vote, and the Enforcement Act of 1871, which created a system of federal oversight for congressional elections, were passed under the authority granted by the Elections Clause and the 15th Amendment. The proposed Federal Elections Bill of 1890, which would have allowed voters to request direct federal supervision of congressional elections, was also written pursuant with the government’s expressly detailed power under the Constitution.It is one thing to say that a new election bill is unnecessary and that it attempts to solve a problem that does not exist. In large part because of the efforts of voting rights activists trying to overcome the obstacles in question, voter suppression laws do not appear to have a substantial impact on rates of voting, and overall voter turnout has increased significantly since the Supreme Court undermined the Voting Rights Act in 2013.But there is no question, historically or constitutionally, that Congress has the authority to regulate federal elections and impose its rules over those adopted by the states. Nor does this have to be bipartisan. Nothing in Congress does.The 1960s were one of the few times in American history when support for voting rights — or at least the voting rights of Black Americans — did not fall along strictly partisan lines. For a part of the 19th century, Republicans took the lead as the party of expanding the vote. Today, it is the Democratic Party that hopes to secure the right to vote against a political movement whose clear ability to win votes in fair elections has not tempered its suspicion of easy and unrestricted access to the ballot.There are times when the federal government needs to take election rules out of the hands of the states. Looking at the restrictions and power grabs passed by state Republican lawmakers in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat, I’d say now is one of those times. It may not happen anytime soon — the voting rights legislation in question went down in defeat this week — but it should remain a priority. The right to vote is fundamental, and any attempt to curtail it should be fought as fiercely and as aggressively as we know how.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Democrats Could Have Made Republicans Squirm

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionKey TakeawaysTrump’s RoleGeorgia InvestigationExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Democrats Could Have Made Republicans SquirmG.O.P. lawmakers were unlikely to convict Trump. But a different approach to impeachment would have been more difficult for them to ignore.Mr. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George W. Bush, is a professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”Feb. 13, 2021, 9:13 p.m. ETRepresentative Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, with colleagues after the Senate vote.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesProbably nothing could have moved enough Republican senators to vote to convict former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.But the way the House chose to frame the article of impeachment made the prospect less likely. If the purpose of the proceeding was to produce a conviction and disqualification from future office, as opposed to mere political theater, the House should have crafted a broader and less legalistic set of charges.The sole article of impeachment was for “incitement of insurrection.” It focused on the afternoon of Jan. 6, when then-President Trump addressed an initially peaceful crowd of supporters and egged them on to go to the Capitol and to “fight like hell” against the recognition of an Electoral College victory for his opponent Joe Biden.Presumably, the drafters of the House impeachment resolution chose to frame their charge as incitement because this is an actual crime. The first impeachment of Mr. Trump was criticized (wrongly, in my view) for failing to allege a crime. But it is not necessary for an impeachment to be based on criminal conduct. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist No. 65, impeachment proceedings “can never be tied down by such strict rules” as “in the delineation of the offense by the prosecutors” in criminal trials. Rather, he said, the target of impeachment proceedings is “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”By charging Mr. Trump with incitement, the House unnecessarily shouldered the burden of proving the elements of that crime. This is not to say that senators may vote to convict only if those elements are proved, but that the terms of the impeachment article invited the defense to respond in the same legalistic terms presented by the House impeachment managers. They tried to broaden the focus during the trial, though not successfully.One element of the crime of incitement is the intent to induce imminent violence. The evidence shows that Mr. Trump was reckless and that violence was a foreseeable consequence of his incendiary speech, but a senator might reasonably conclude that it falls short of proving that he wanted his followers to assault members of Congress or to vandalize the Capitol.Moreover, the terms of the impeachment article opened the door for Mr. Trump’s defense team to play videos in which various Democrats said things that can be construed to encourage violence — a comparison that should be irrelevant but certainly muddied the waters.The House should have crafted its impeachment resolution to avoid a legalistic focus on the former president’s intent. This could have been done by broadening the impeachment article. The charges should have encompassed Mr. Trump’s use of the mob and other tactics to intimidate government officials to void the election results, and his dereliction of duty by failing to try to end the violence in the hours after he returned to the White House from the demonstration at the Ellipse.Whether or not Mr. Trump wanted his followers to commit acts of violence, he certainly wanted them to intimidate Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. That was the whole point of their “walk,” as Mr. Trump put it, to the Capitol. The mob was not sent to persuade with reasoning or evidence.Moreover, Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 were of a piece with attempts — nonviolent but no less wrongful — to intimidate other officials, such as Georgia’s secretary of state, to use their powers to thwart the election results. The Trump campaign had every opportunity to substantiate its claims of massive fraud in court and failed miserably to do so.By focusing the impeachment resolution on the charge of incitement of insurrection, the House made it easier for Mr. Trump’s supporters in the Senate to dismiss these acts of intimidation as irrelevant to the accusation on which they were voting.It should not be necessary to point out that the use of the presidential office to keep power after losing an election is the gravest possible offense against our democratic constitutional order — one that the authors of the Constitution specifically contemplated and sought to prevent. The violence of Jan. 6 was bad, but even if no one at the Capitol had been hurt that day, Mr. Trump’s attempts to mobilize a mob to impede the democratic process was still a high crime or misdemeanor.To make matters worse, Mr. Trump did nothing to stop the violence even when he was aware it was occurring. He did not deploy forces to the Capitol to put down the riot and protect members of Congress. He sent two messages to the rioters, but his appeals for peaceable behavior were tepid, and intermixed with words of support and affection for the rioters.Perhaps most egregious was his tweet that “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” at a time when rioters were threatening to hang the vice president. We now know that a senator informed Mr. Trump of the danger to Mr. Pence — but Mr. Trump did not retract his tweet or lift a finger to protect Mr. Pence.This dereliction of his constitutional duty was wholly apart from any incitement and was an impeachable offense in itself. But it was not charged in the article of impeachment.It would be foolish to think that the vote on impeachment would come out differently if the charge had been differently framed. But if House was going to impeach, it should have framed the case to make it as difficult as possible for the Senate to acquit.It is far from clear that Mr. Trump incited the violence of Jan. 6 in a technical legal sense, but it is abundantly clear that he sought to intimidate members of Congress and other officials to block Mr. Biden’s election, and that he failed in his duty to do what he could to end the violence once it started. Those would be ample grounds for conviction, quite apart from whether Mr. Trump committed the crime of incitement.Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George W. Bush, is a professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      I’m Not Actually Interested in Mitch McConnell’s Hypocrisy

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyI’m Not Actually Interested in Mitch McConnell’s HypocrisyTo make his case for the filibuster, he has essentially rewritten the history of the Senate.Opinion ColumnistJan. 29, 2021Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesOn Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, now the Senate minority leader, spoke in defense of the legislative filibuster.“When it comes to lawmaking, the framers’ vision and our history are clear. The Senate exists to require deliberation and cooperation,” McConnell declared. “James Madison said the Senate’s job was to provide a ‘complicated check’ against ‘improper acts of legislation.’ We ensure that laws earn enough buy-in to receive the lasting consent of the governed. We stop bad ideas, improve good ideas and keep laws from swinging wildly with every election.”He went on: “More than any other feature, it is the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to end debate on legislation that achieves this.”It’s hard to take any of this seriously. None of McConnell’s stated concern for the “lasting consent of the governed” was on display when Senate Republicans, under his leadership, tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act by majority vote. Nor was there any interest in “deliberation and cooperation” when Republicans wanted a new round of corporate and upper-income tax cuts.If anything, the filibuster stymies that deliberation and cooperation by destroying the will to legislate at all. It makes bipartisanship less likely by erasing any incentive to build novel coalitions for particular issues. If, under the filibuster, there’s no difference between 51 votes for immigration reform and 56 votes (or even 59), then what’s the point of even trying? Why reach out to the other side if there’s almost no way you’ll reach the threshold to take action? And on the other side, why tinker with legislation if you know it’s not going to pass? When there’s no reason to do otherwise, why not act as a rigid, unyielding partisan?It’s obvious that McConnell’s commitment to the filibuster is instrumental. The filibuster on executive branch nominations of appointees and federal judges was sacred — he condemned the Democrats’ use of the “nuclear option” to get rid of it in 2013 — until President Trump needed Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and then it was bye-bye to the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees that McConnell’s predecessor as Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, had left intact. If the reconciliation process didn’t exist, and Republicans needed 60 votes for upper-income tax cuts, there’s almost no doubt McConnell would have killed the legislative filibuster in 2017, for the sake of his party’s signature priority.I’m not actually that interested in McConnell’s hypocrisy. I’m interested in his history. To make his case for the indispensable importance of the legislative filibuster, McConnell has essentially rewritten the history of the Senate. He has to create a new narrative to serve his current interests.The truth is that the filibuster was an accident; an extra-constitutional innovation that lay dormant for a generation after its unintentional creation during the Jefferson administration. For most of the Senate’s history after the Civil War, filibusters were rare, deployed as the Southern weapon of choice against civil rights legislation, and an occasional tool of partisan obstruction.Far from necessary, the filibuster is extraneous. Everything it is said to encourage — debate, deliberation, consensus building — is already accomplished by the structure of the chamber itself, insofar as it happens at all.In the form it takes today, the filibuster doesn’t make the Senate work the way the framers intended. Instead, it makes the Senate a nearly insurmountable obstacle to most legislative business. And that, in turn, has made Congress inert and dysfunctional to the point of disrupting the constitutional balance of power. Legislation that deserves a debate never reaches the floor; coalitions that could form never get off the ground.In quoting Madison, McConnell frames the filibuster as part of our constitutional inheritance. It is not. The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. The Senate, like the House of Representatives, was meant to run on majority rule.Remember, the framers had direct experience with supermajority government. Under the Articles of Confederation, each state had equal representation and it took a two-thirds vote of the states for Congress to exercise its enumerated powers. Without the consent of nine states (out of 13), Congress could not enter treaties, appropriate funds or borrow money. And the bar to amendment, unanimity, was even higher. The articles were such a disaster that, rather than try to amend them, a group of influential elites decided to scrap them altogether.For a taste of this frustration, read Alexander Hamilton in Federalist no. 22, which contains a fierce condemnation of supermajority rule as it was under the articles:The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching toward it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.Hamilton is especially angry with the effect of the supermajority requirement on governance.In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.Delegates to the constitutional convention considered and rejected supermajority requirements for navigation acts (concerning ships and shipping), regulation of interstate commerce and the raising of armies. Majorities would have the final say everywhere except for treaties, amendments and conviction in an impeachment trial.To make the Senate slow-moving and deliberative, the framers would not raise barriers to action so much as they would insulate the body from short-term democratic accountability. That meant indirect election by state legislatures, staggered terms of six years and a small membership of two senators per state. And at ratification, that is where the Senate stood: a self-consciously aristocratic body meant to check the House of Representatives and oversee the executive branch, confirming its appointments and ratifying its foreign agreements.The filibuster doesn’t enter the picture until years later, as an accident of parliamentary bookkeeping. In 1806, on the advice of Vice President Aaron Burr (who thought it redundant), the Senate dropped the “previous question” — a motion to end debate and bring an item up for immediate vote — from its rules. Without a motion to call the previous question, however, an individual senator could, in theory, hold the floor indefinitely.It took 31 years for someone to actually do it. The first known filibuster took place in 1837, when several Whig senators tried unsuccessfully to block a Democratic bill to reverse an 1834 censure of President Andrew Jackson and expunge it from the congressional record. Even then, the filibuster was not widely used until the second half of the 19th century, as the parties, and thus the Senate, grew more polarized along party lines.The filibuster as we understand it developed in the 20th century. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called on Senate Democrats to reform the filibuster as a war measure after Republicans successfully filibustered a bill to arm merchant ships. Democrats obliged and created a “cloture” rule to end debate with a two-thirds vote of the chamber. In 1975, the Senate reduced that threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths, or 60 votes in a 100-member body.Throughout this time, filibusters were uncommon. It was perfectly possible for the Senate to debate, deliberate and come to consensus without the supermajority requirement McConnell and the Republican caucus have imposed on virtually all legislation since 2009.The point of comparison for the Senate as McConnell has shaped it is the middle of the 20th century, when a conservative coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats made the chamber a graveyard of liberal legislation and social reform. Consensus didn’t matter. Power did. And it wasn’t until liberals wrested power from this coalition — in the House as well as the Senate — that they could take the initiative and begin work on an otherwise popular agenda.There is no question the Senate is supposed to be slow, even sluggish. But it’s not supposed to be an endless bottleneck. The framers wanted stability in government, not stagnation. What we have now, with the filibuster intact, is a Senate that can barely move.This isn’t just a problem for President Biden and the Democratic Party; it’s a problem for the entire constitutional order. Our system is built around Congress; Congress makes laws, Congress holds the purse strings, Congress hands out mandates, Congress checks the president and makes sure the judiciary stays in its lane.When Congress doesn’t act, other actors take up the slack. The story of our democracy these last 10 years is, in part, the story of how a listless, sclerotic Senate broke Congress and pushed the other branches to govern in its stead, with the president and the courts making as much policy as they can without congressional input, with all the capriciousness, whiplash and uncertainty that can come from that.If you don’t like presidents governing through executive order, then you should want an active, energetic Congress that embraces its constitutional mandate to rule over the whole country and direct its government. If you want that, you should oppose the filibuster.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More