Kamala Harris lost the endorsement of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin last week. The former Democrat-turned-independent announced that he would not vote for the vice president because of her recent remarks urging the U.S. Senate to abolish the filibuster. “The filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy,” Manchin said. “It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together.”
Manchin is right to respect the filibuster. It is an essential feature of American democracy—a mechanism to protect the rights of minorities from the dangers of overbearing majorities. Even if Harris wins in November, the Senate should push back against any pressure that she might exert to end it.
Harris’s most recent statement about filibuster abolition came during an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio about codifying Roe v. Wade in federal law. She has also enthused about using her position as vice president to end the filibuster to accomplish Democratic Party goals: “I cannot wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights,” she said at the 2022 Democratic National Committee summer meeting. For as long as her party has held the White House, she has opposed the filibuster.
The term “filibuster” often becomes a kind of devil-word in progressive discourse. Progressives spread slanders about its relationship to white supremacy or argue that it is a means of establishing “minority rule.” Nothing could be further from the truth; the filibuster is a salutary process that arises from the nature of the Senate itself. By allowing a minority of senators, or even a single one, to hold debate open and thereby block legislation, the filibuster gives additional representation to the several states.
The Founders fully intended for the Senate to express and protect the interests of minorities among the states—not to serve as a rubber stamp for the ruling party. Progressives can dismiss this mechanism as “undemocratic,” but the Founders never held that our rights as citizens should be subject to the will of a majority. As Publius puts it in Federalist 51: “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.” Thus, the Framers designed a careful system of checks and balances, including the filibuster, that allows minorities to have a say in lawmaking. Upsetting these balances is tantamount to undoing the Founders’ notion of a free society.
Left-wing critics of these constitutional arrangements rarely address the far more democratic branch of our government: the House of Representatives. This is the body in which the majority will reigns supreme, and its own particular rules reflect this design. The House structures debate to limit minority dissent and empower the majority to pursue its agenda. Turning the Senate into another House of Representatives—which is what undermining its procedures and rules would do—would mean that whole sets of interests would have no say in policymaking and no ability to check incursions on their rights.
Publius made this distinction clear in Federalist 39. “The House of Representatives, like that of one branch at least of all the state legislatures, is elected immediately by the great body of the people [i.e., the majority],” he wrote, whereas “The Senate, like the present Congress . . . derives its appointment indirectly from the people [through the states].” By dividing the powers of government, and giving different branches different sources of legitimacy, the Constitution wisely ensures the fullest possible representation of the will and the interests of the people.
Beyond protecting everyone’s rights, the other major benefit of this kind of deliberative government is generating policy consensus. In Federalist 62, Publius argued that the Constitution “doubles the security to the people, by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy, where the ambition or corruption of one would otherwise be sufficient.” Bicameralism, and the unique nature of both congressional chambers, cools down debate and gives time for reason and the better angels of our nature to prevail. Minorities can meaningfully defend their rights, and policy is made stronger and more representative of the genuine popular will for having been subjected to rigorous debate.
Democratic Party leaders in years past acknowledged the importance of the filibuster in terms the Founders would recognize. In a speech on the Senate floor, for example, Illinois’ then-senator Barack Obama eloquently defended the filibuster as a tool to reduce partisanship and generate consensus. More recently, Illinois senator Dick Durbin said in a 2018 interview that abolishing the mechanism “would be the end of the Senate as it was originally devised and created going back to our Founding Fathers,” because it would undermine the “respect for the minority” the Senate exists to promote. Even Kamala Harris once defended the filibuster. In 2017, as a brand-new senator, she signed a bipartisan letter pleading with party leaders to oppose “any effort to curtail the existing rights and prerogatives of Senators to engage in full, robust, and extended debate”—presumably including the filibuster.
The Senate cannot afford to let the filibuster go. Congress has already seen so many of its rightful authorities sapped away by an imperial presidency, overzealous courts, and a post-constitutional administrative state. If it is to do the actual work of representing the American people, it needs to claw back these powers and jealously guard those it still possesses.
Since Joe Biden won the presidency, Republican senators, working closely with a handful of their moderate colleagues on the other side of the aisle, have protected the filibuster. This bloc, sadly diminished with the looming retirements of West Virginia’s Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, fully understands that it is in neither their interests nor those of their constituents to turn the Senate into another hyper-partisan tool of whichever party happens to control the White House or lower chamber of Congress. They have demonstrated the practical wisdom of the separation of powers and Publius’s maxim that “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”
Regardless of which ticket wins in November, senators should defend this vital tool of debate and deliberation. The fate of the Founders’ experiment in self-government rests in part on their doing so.
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