by David Balashinsky
Back in January, when the world was a very different place, Kyrsten Sinema delivered a speech on the Senate floor explaining her refusal to vote to eliminate the filibuster. Because two critical pieces of legislation, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, lack enough votes in the Senate to pass by the 60-vote threshold, eliminating the filibuster, which the Democrats could do on a simple majority vote, is the only way that these bills can pass in the senate and eventually become law.
Everything that need be said about Sinema on this topic already has been
said. In particular, I strongly recommend Michelle Goldberg's Opinion
piece in the Times, "Sinema and Manchin's Nihilistic Bipartisanship." Even more to the point, the Replace Sinema Project has issued its own rebuttal to the assorted errors, outright falsehoods and absurd rationalizations that comprise Sinema's stated objections to filibuster reform. Notwithstanding, I found it impossible to read a transcript of Sinema's speech without giving vent to my own reactions to it. First, though, some thoughts on the filibuster, itself.
There are as many good reasons to eliminate the filibuster as there are reasons why it is bad. My view is that the Senate filibuster, in its current form, is simply anti-democratic because it obstructs the will of the majority. (Of course, the composition of the senate is, itself, anti-democratic, but that's another matter.)
Supporters of the filibuster often try to defend it on the grounds that it prevents "the tyranny of the majority." It may be time to retire that argument. So long as the fundamental, constitutional rights of every person are guaranteed, majority rule by voting is not a form of tyranny but of fairness. It is the most reasonable solution for determining a course of action among more than two people. Majority rule is so inherently natural that most of us wouldn't even consider anything else. Who hasn't had the experience of having to make a collective decision about something - where to order take-out for the office party, or where to rent the airbnb for the family reunion - and deciding the question by putting it to a vote? When a simple majority - even by one vote - carries the day, no one ever says, "That's not fair! You need a margin of 20 percent to win!" Imagine a sport like baseball in which, at the end of nine innings and with a score of six to five, the team with six doesn't win. Rather, in order to prevent the "tyranny" of the victorious - that is, the better team or the one that had a better day, which would be very unsportsmanlike of it - one team would have to vanquish the other by a margin of at least 20% - say, six to four - in order to be declared the winner. Such a scheme doesn't prevent one form of tyranny - it simply creates another. It gives one side - in politics, the less popular side - proportionally greater power to determine an outcome and to establish public policy than the majority. That's an even more unjust form of tyranny: a tyranny of the minority, which is exactly what we now have in the Senate.
The 60-vote threshold to pass legislation simply negates the power of the majority. That doesn't foster compromise or civility. It does the opposite. It undermines the morale of the majority by proving that their votes don't matter. It undermines democracy itself by discouraging citizens from participating and voting - why bother? - rendering Americans embittered and cynical. Currently and in practice, it enables the Republican Party, which represents a minority of the electorate, to obstruct the will of the majority that wants to see their representatives do what it elected them to do (including passing the two voter-protection laws that have been stuck in the Senate). That's not my idea of democracy and I do not think that it was the founders' idea of democracy either, which is probably why the filibuster is nowhere to be found in the constitution. (Not that the constitution, as originally drafted, is so democratic either, but that's also another matter.)
In the real-world context of the Republican strategy to disenfranchise as many non-White and non-Republican voters as possible, the battle is not between Republicans and Democrats but between Republicans and Democracy. The Party of Trump has demonstrated time and again that it will stop at nothing to seize political power by any means, fair or foul, legal or illegal. Refusing to lift a finger to oppose the Trumpist agenda of ending democracy is not a repudiation of partisanship, as Sinema would have us believe, but a unilateral surrender to it. The ground-rules of democracy itself - how elections are held, who gets to vote and whose votes get counted - are being subverted in such a way as to entrench, likely for generations, minoritarian rule by the Republican Party in the United States at both the state and federal levels and in all three branches of government.
In this dark reality, it seems almost too good to be true that the Independents and Democrats in the Senate should have just enough votes to eke out a legislative victory that might very well be the last, best hope of preserving democracy in our nation. Well, it turns out that it is too good to be true, thanks in large part to Kyrsten Sinema. That is what makes her refusal to vote to do away with the filibuster so galling. She actually has the power, right now, to prevent what may ultimately prove to be an irrevocable Republican subversion of democracy but refuses to exercise it.
Sinema, of course, is not the only nominal Democrat thwarting the will of the Democratic Party and of the American voters. The other one is the coal magnate and multi-millionaire Joe Manchin. Manchin is as responsible for the unilateral surrender to the Republicans as
Sinema is but I am focusing here on her partly because I had much higher
hopes for her but, also, because, as I have mentioned already, having read Sinema's speech, I simply cannot allow to go unchallenged the naive and specious arguments with which Sinema attempts to justify her refusal to vote to get rid of the filibuster. What follows, then, is a semi-annotated rebuttal to her speech, excerpts of which appear in italicized block quotations.
It is more likely today that we look at other Americans who have different views and see the “other,” or even see them as enemies – instead of as fellow countrymen and women who share our core values.
In this statement, as she does throughout her speech, Sinema treats the partisan estrangement between Republicans and Democrats as reciprocal and equal, as though the views of both are equidistant from the center. This is a false equivalence. For years, Republican strategists, politicians and right-wing hate mongers on Fox and other like-minded media platforms have been vilifying, demonizing and deliberately misrepresenting the views of Democrats and Independents in ways unlike anything that emanates from the center or the left. Republicans disparage Democrats as internal enemies of the United States and as a threat to our very way of life. In fact, the idea that our nation and our way of life are under attack is now the predominant theme of White-nationalist, Republican and Trumpist discourse. This has been building for years, as Ronald Brownstein explains:
Late in the 2016 presidential campaign . . . Michael Anton, a conservative scholar who later joined the Trump White House, described the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the "Flight 93 Election." . . . Anton insisted that a Democratic victory would change America so irrevocably that conservatives needed to think of themselves as the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11 - the ones who chose to bring down the plane to save the U.S. Capitol from al-Qaeda hijackers. Letting the Democrats win, in other words, would doom the country. . . .
For at least the past decade, GOP candidates and conservative-media personalities have routinely deployed rhetoric similar to the Flight 93 argument. Only about 40 hours before the [January 6] insurrection, at a campaign rally hosting an enthusiastic, virtually all-white audience in rural Georgia, President Trump insisted that if Democrats won the state's two Senate runoff elections . . . "America as you know it will be over, and it will never - I believe - be able to come back again."
And, of course, on January 6th, 2021, while inciting his mob before it assaulted the capitol in order to prevent the certification of Biden's electoral victory, Trump declaimed "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
In his speech accepting the Republican Party's nomination for him to run for president again in 2020, Trump declared "this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we will allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it."
As CNN reported last year, the day before leaving office, former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo tweeted, "Wokism, multiculturalism, all the -isms - they're not who America is. They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. . . ." In the same story, CNN notes that in remarks he delivered the previous July,
Pompeo fanned the flames of division stoked by Trump, warning that "the very core of what it means to be an American, indeed the American way of life itself, is under attack" amid nationwide protests for racial justice and against police brutality.
Writing in Vox, Zack Beauchamp drew essentially the same conclusions as Brownstein, namely, that "The Capitol Hill mob was the logical culmination of years of mainstream Republican politics."
The animating force of modern Republicanism is this: Democratic Party rule is an existential threat to America and is by definition illegitimate. . . .
Whether elite Republicans genuinely believe what they tell their base is beside the point. The fact is their delegitimizing rhetoric has been the fuel of the conservative movement for many, many years now.
Beauchamp noted that, on the morning of January 6th, 2021 Lauren Boebert, a Republican representative from Colorado, "tweeted that the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results amounted to a new American revolution. 'Today is 1776,' she wrote." Ten years earlier, Sharon Angle (a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate) had stated in an interview "that she believed that Americans might need to take up arms against the tyranny of Barack Obama and the Democratic congress."
Writing for the New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser pointed out that
In one alarming survey released this week, nearly thirty percent of Republicans endorsed the idea that the country is so far "off track" that "American patriots may have to resort to violence" against their political opponents.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat reported in the Washington Post that
In June, an anchor of One America News suggested that execution might be an apt punishment for the "tens of thousands" of "traitors" who, he claimed, stole the election from former president Donald Trump. A sitting member of congress, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Americans in May that they "have an obligation to use" the Second Amendment, which is not about recreation but "the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary."
. . .
This Republican culture of violence and threat builds on histories of racial persecution and on policing used as an instrument of terror against non-Whites. Habituation to such violence, reinforced by the presentation of non-Whites as an existential threat to the future of America (as in the "great replacement theory" that Tucker Carlson has referenced on Fox News) makes it easier for the public to accept violence around political events, like elections, as necessary to "save the country." Tellingly, the participants in the January coup attempt, which was billed as just this kind of patriotic act, included 57 local and state GOP officials. . . .
Only last month, the Republican National Committee officially labeled the attempted coup against our government on January 6, 2021 as "legitimate political discourse."
Clearly, it's long past time to acknowledge that, while the majority of Americans who identify as Republicans may, indeed, be "fellow countrymen and women," they do not, in fact, "share our core values," as Sinema insists on giving them credit for doing. Our core values include respect for free and fair elections. They include respecting the results of free and fair elections. They include respect for the peaceful transfer of power from one presidential administration to the next. Our core values also include honesty, decency, integrity, fairness, equality, belief in facts and belief in science: the diametric opposite, in other words, of everything that Trump and his cult of followers represent. So, no, the majority of Americans do not share core values with Trump's base and the Republican Party in its current incarnation.
It’s more common today to demonize someone who thinks differently than us, rather than to seek to understand their views.Ah, but we do understand the views of Republicans, only too well. Sixty-eight percent of them believe the 2020 election was stolen. Forty percent of them believe that "political violence is justifiable and could be necessary" in the near future.
Our country’s divisions have now fueled efforts in several states that will make it more difficult for Americans to vote and undermine faith that all Americans should have in our elections and our democracy. These state laws have no place in a nation whose government is formed by free, fair, and open elections.
That is precisely why the filibuster needs to be eliminated: so that the two voting-reform bills that are stuck in the Senate can be passed on a simple majority vote. These bills would prevent or undo the damage to our democracy that these anti-democratic state laws would otherwise do, potentially, for the foreseeable future. Sinema, herself, acknowledges that "These state laws have no place" in our nation. Yet her response to these coordinated assaults on our democratic system of government is simply to surrender and to declare her surrender before the entire Senate.
Threats to American democracy are real.
Yes, they are, and they require real responses, not hand-wringing speeches justifying doing nothing to oppose these threats to American democracy.
Our politics reflect and exacerbate these divisions. . . .
That is absolutely true. And one of the most powerfully destructive ways that our politics exacerbates these divisions is through the mechanism of extreme partisan gerrymandering. When a congressional district is drawn in such a way that a candidate can completely ignore the views of the minority within that district, the only real competition she or he is likely to face is during the primaries from ever more extreme fringes of her or his own party. That is exactly how political gerrymandering promotes extremism and, inevitably, the very divisions that Sinema claims to want to repair. Political gerrymandering is one of the structural flaws in our electoral system, so toxic to our politics and to our society, that the Freedom to Vote Act would remedy. If Sinema really wants to bridge political divisions and restore bipartisanship to our politics, she should be doing everything in her power to ensure passage of the Freedom to Vote Act - not forestalling any possibility of its passage by blocking filibuster reform.
These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease [which, according to Sinema, is our nation's political polarization, or "division"] – but they do not fully address the disease itself.
That is both a misreading and a misstatement of the crisis of democracy in America today. The disease is not "division": the fact that people disagree politically or on specific policies. Rather, the disease is that one major political party is, at this moment, rewriting election law so as to give an insurmountable structural advantage to Republican Party candidates while disenfranchising millions of Americans. That's the disease.
It's not difficult to understand why the Republican Party no longer believes in democracy. Its strategists and leaders grasp only too well that the Republican Party represents the views and interests of a minority of citizens in this country; it knows that changes in demographics as well as the ongoing, broad liberalization of our society's views of race, gender, equality and abortion rights make the Republican Party appealing to an ever-shrinking share of the electorate; and it knows that, for all these reasons, the only way Republicans can win elections in much of the country - and in the electoral college - is by preventing the "free, fair and open elections" that Sinema claims to support but which, by her refusal to do away with the filibuster, she has, in fact, chosen to allow the Republicans to prevent.
"Division," in and of itself, is neither dysfunctional nor pathological. Republicans have every right to disagree with Democrats and they have every right to try to convince voters that their vision for America is one Americans ought to support at the ballot box. That's how democracy is supposed to work. Indeed, disagreement can even be healthy for a democracy. But when one party no longer is willing to abide by the foundational ground rules of democracy, that is when democracy itself can be understood to be "diseased."
[E]liminating the 60-vote threshold will simply guarantee that we lose a critical tool that we need to safeguard our democracy from threats in the years to come.
What Sinema doesn't seem to grasp is that eliminating the Senate filibuster is virtually the only tool that we have left to safeguard our democracy right now. Sure, it would be nice if things had not gotten to this point. But here we are. We can either recognize that our democracy is on the precipice and prevent its irrevocable descent into the abyss, or we can do what Sinema has chosen to do: nothing.
Our mandate . . . [i]t seems evident to me [is] work together and get stuff done for America.
In a two-party system, that approach only works when both parties agree to abide by it. Unfortunately, ever since the Obama administration, the Republican Party has stuck tenaciously to a policy of rigid and relentless obstructionism. The Republican leader of the senators in Sinema's own legislative body, Mitch McConnell, said it himself back in 2010: "our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office." He reaffirmed the Republican policy of refusing "to work together and get stuff done for America" once Biden was in office, declaring that "one hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration." In 2020, McConnell boasted about killing close to 400 separate pieces of legislation that had passed the House of Representatives, many with bipartisan support. Clearly, working "together to get stuff done" is diametrically opposite the Republican Party leadership's political strategy. (And when some Republicans have demonstrated bipartisanship - not as an end in itself but simply because they were voting in the best interests of their own constituents - they have received death threats, apparently, from Republican voters.)
We must commit to a long-term approach as serious as the problems we seek to solve – one that prioritizes listening and understanding. One that embraces making progress on shared priorities, and finding common ground on issues where we hold differing and diverse views.
How does one find common ground with people who believe that the Democratic Party represents a global cabal of pedophiles? How does one find common ground with people who believe that Obama is not a native-born American and a Christian but a foreign-born crypto-Muslim who is hostile to our nation's interests? How does one find common ground with people who believe that Sandy Hook and Covid19 are hoaxes created by nefarious forces, including our own government, for the purpose of depriving Americans of their civil liberties? How does one find common ground with people who claim, against all evidence, that Biden didn't win the election? How does one find common ground with members of a political party that, collectively, refuses to repudiate Trump and refuses to repudiate Trump's lies and his attempts to destroy our constitutional system of government? How does one find common ground with people who consider the insurrectionists who attempted the overthrow of our constitutional order on January 6th "patriots" and who regard those now charged for their participation in that shocking assault on our nation as "political prisoners"? More to the point, should we attempt to find common ground with such people? Isn't it more the case that reaching out a hand to them, searching for common ground and trying to "understand" them merely validates them and confers upon them a political and a moral legitimacy that they do not deserve?
So I find this question answers itself:
Can two Americans of sharp intellect and good faith reach different conclusions to the same question?
Yes. Yes, of course they can.
Except that Donald Trump has neither a sharp intellect nor is he acting in good faith - quite the reverse. So, indeed, that question does answer itself because the Republican Party is not what it was in the 1960s. It is now the Party of Trump. And if its spiritual and de facto leader is not acting in good faith, the party that supports, legitimizes and empowers Trump cannot - must not - be assumed to be acting in good faith, either.
Some have given up on the goal of easing our divisions and uniting Americans. I have not.
That's
commendable. But there's a principle in emergency medicine that
applies to our political crisis: First, stabilize the patient. The
long-term objective of restoring civility and bipartisanship to our
politics and our government is laudable. But a long-term strategy of
recovery and reclamation is not an appropriate response in an
emergency. That is the critical difference here. Sinema does not seem to
recognize that we are in uncharted territory: a break-the-glass moment
in our nation's history in which Republican subversion of the ground rules of our democracy, unless prevented by
passage of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights
Advancement Act, will be entrenched likely for decades, possibly for
generations. That can only be prevented by first eliminating the Senate filibuster so that these two voter-protection bills can pass by the simple majorities that already support them.
Nothing less than democracy, itself, is at stake now. History will record that Sinema had the power to save democracy in the United States before it let out its last gasp and she refused to do so.
Update - 9 December 2022: Sinema has now announced her intention to leave the Democratic Party. In her statement explaining this decision, she refers to "the edges" of the Democratic and Republican parties and cites "the loudest, most extreme voices" within those parties as though both sides are equally to blame for the vitriol, partisanship and outright assaults on our democracy that are making our system of self-government dysfunctional. This is just one more example of Sinema's attempting to distract from and to justify her betrayal of those who helped put her in office by creating a false equivalence between the Republican and Democratic parties. To be clear, it was not a mob of Democratic Party supporters that invaded the capitol and attempted to stage a violent coup preventing the legitimate transfer of power from one presidential administration to the next. And it was not Biden but Trump - the de facto head of the Republican Party - who, only this week called for the suspension of the United States constitution.
Update - 11 Deceber 2022: Additionally, because Sinema is now no longer a Democrat, the Primary Sinema Project has now changed its name to the Replace Sinema Project. I have edited this column to reflect that name change.
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