Filibuster about to be defanged?

This post is a follow-up on the Republican obstructionism I discussed in yesterday's post.

Heather Cox Richardson explains the background of the filibuster at the first part of this talk, History & Politics Chat: March 16, 2021:

Digby Parton has been one of the best observers and analysts of Republican obstructionism since she started blogging in the early 2000s She looks at the latest developments related to the Senate filibuster in McConnell's filibuster threats are already backfiring: Biden signals support for major Senate reform Salon 03/17/2021

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went into full snapping-turtle mode and growled out the bluff Digby discusses in that post. Mitch McConnell warns or 'scorched earth' over filibuster Reuters 03/16/2021:

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey talks about his (fairly recent) opposition to the filibuster in this interview, Sen. Markey Says 'Filibuster Has to Go,' Rules are Being 'Perverted' by GOP The Mehdi Hasan Show 05/18/2021.

I was pleasantly surprised to see President Biden come out explicitly for going back to the "talking filibuster," which as Richardson explains requires Senators to hold the floor by having someone speaking continually, the classic way the filibuster was used in most of the 20th century. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) has a report on the Filibuster and "cloture" rule by which the Senate can end debate and forced a vote on the measure at hand, Filibusters and Cloture in the Senate 04/07/2017.

This Reuters article (Susan Cornwell, What is the U.S. Senate filibuster and why is everyone talking about it? 03/17/2021) explains an important aspect of the current conflict over the filibuster. The current filibuster rule allows a Senator to hold up a bill without having to have someone continually talk on the Senate floor.

In 1975, the Senate reduced the requirement for limiting debate to three-fifths of the Senate - currently 60 senators.

In that decade, the Senate leadership began agreeing to allow measures that were facing a filibuster to be put aside while the chamber acted on other bills.

The move was intended to prevent opposition to a single bill bringing all work in the Senate to halt, but it also meant that the filibuster changed from an energy-draining maneuver involving lengthy speeches to a mere objection, or threat to object.

Over time the number of filibusters skyrocketed. There is no sure-fire way of counting how many bills are filibustered in a year because of the nebulous nature of the threats. But a count of votes to try to overcome a filibuster, the nearest reliable proxy, shows 298 such votes in the 2019-2020 legislative session. That’s up from 168 such votes in the previous two years. In 1969-1970 there were six.

Putting filibustered bills aside “made filibustering actually more successful, and even less costly, which was not intended. And it might have, paradoxically, made things worse,” said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University who co-wrote a book on the filibuster. [my emphasis]

Under the current rules, one Senator can "filibuster" by raising an objection to a bill being voted on - it's called putting a "hold" on a bill - and it requires a (filibuster-ending) cloture to end it. In practice, that creates a de facto supermajority requirement of 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate.

The filibuster has been already been abolished altogether for consideration of judicial nominations. And the "reconciliation" procedure that was used to pass the COVID relief bill recently is also a way around the filibuster, though it is restricted to matters that have a significant budget impact.

Returning to the "talking filibuster" concept would definitely be a big improvement over the current situation. However, the filibuster was often used successfully in the 20th century to block civil rights legislation like federal anti-lynching laws. The Senate is already by its composition with two Senators for each state, so that Utah with its 253 thousand inhabitants has the same Senate representation as California with its 40 million. That would be reason enough to abolish the filibuster altogether, which can be done by majority vote in the Senate.

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, explained how the Republicans changed the function of the filibuster qualitativly and for the worse after Obama became President in 2009:

[A]ttempts at filibuster and formal responses to them-meaning actual cloture motions to shut off debate-remained relatively rare, even during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. The number of cloture motions did increase after that, mostly because a handful of individual conservative senators, especially Democrat James Allen of Alabama and Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina, seeing the role of Southern conservatives as a bloc decline, began to use more creative ways to gain leverage. This included finding ways to extend debate after a filibuster was invoked by offering hundreds of amendments and insisting on a vote on each. Still, even with Allen remaining active until his death in 1978, the average number of cloture motions filed in a given month was less than two; it increased to around three a month in the 1980s, jumped a bit in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, and then leveled off in the early Bush years. But starting in 2006, this number spiked dramatically and even more with the election of Barack Obama. In the 110th Congress, 2007-2008, and in the 111th Congress, the number of cloture motions filed when the Senate was in session was on the order of two a week! [my emphasis]

(For philosophy fans, that could be used as an example of Hegel's notion of quantity turning into quality.)

As Digby observes in her post, "let's not kid ourselves. Those norms [of government institutions including the Senate] had always only been as strong as the people who were charged with upholding them and those agreements were unraveling long before Trump entered politics."

Mann and Ornstein give a quick overview of how the radicalization of the Republican Party continued until Trump became President in How the Republicans Broke Congress New York Times 12/02/2017.

And the radicalization continues, even after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. As they famously put it in their 2012 book:

[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country's most pressing challenges. [my emphasis]