Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who is challenging Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to be the next Senate majority leader, said Friday he wants to abolish the filibuster and ruled out a potential presidential run in 2028.
Van Hollen, speaking to reporters at the What’s Next conference in Denver, argued that legislation should pass the Senate with simple-majority votes and that the filibuster, which requires senators to muster 60 votes to pass most legislation, is “undemocratic.”
“My personal opinion is that we need democracy in the United States Senate and that means allowing ultimately a majority of senators to answer the call of the American people, so that means 51 votes,” Van Hollen said.
“My personal view has been all along that the filibuster is an antidemocratic — small ‘d’ — provision. It’s not in our Constitution. It was put in there by senators to enhance their power over the power of the people,” he added.
The filibuster is the only thing that kept Republicans from doing even more crazy shit then they already did. The senate is undemocratic in that an outsized minority of voters have an outsized impact on the majority. Every state gets two senators despite WY having half a million people and CA having like 40 million. In the senate they are equal.
The filibuster is the primary reason Republicans have any shot at all at national power.
Republicans thrive on voter apathy. They want voters to believe that both sides are the same, and that the government is incapable of doing anything useful.
What happens again and again is, Democrats will do the impossible. They’ll rally public support and anger and win great power on the promise of improving people’s lives. And then they manage to deliver jack shit because of the filibuster. Then they lose the next election because they never got anything done.
Yes, Republicans will be able to do more damage without the filibuster. But here’s the key - the filibuster didn’t prevent them from doing any of the horrific shit they have in the second Trump term. This is because Republicans don’t actually want to pass much legislation. The things they most want, tax and spending cuts, can be passed with a simple majority. They do everything else with the power of the presidency alone. You can gut a government program with a simple majority vote - just defund it. But establishing a new program requires 60 votes. The filibuster is inherently biased towards Republican policy priorities.
It’s also the Democrats’ excuse for never doing anything. On the net the filibuster like other causes of institutional gridlock is a tool for maintaining the status quo and that helps corporate stooges and fascists. In addition, since it prevents Congress from doing things it essentially forces it to abdicate power to the executive and judicial branches, directly weakening democracy.
Agreed. Its presence actually further enables the Ratchet Effect and reduces individual accountability from voters. Force them to debate and vote on the bill.
In Australia we use proportional representation to elect Senators within each state, and assign each state a number of senators based on their population. The lower house is voted for in seats, like US counties, by preferential voting.
This keeps the Senate as an effective house of review that has a different makeup than the lower house, but does not disenfranchise those in well-populated states.
If they remove the filibuster, then we need to uncap the House come 2028 elections. That makes the move not as polarizing since the House becomes much more representative. Additionally, maybe pass measures like Ranked Robin voting at the Federal level so that federal elections use a better version of Ranked Choice voting.
I just can’t picture how to make the senate work when the numbers are so skewed. Don’t have a solution but it’s such a glaring issue.
The Senate remains an issue until we have a constitutional convention - so we need to keep investing and pouring care in to each state in the union hoping we turn hearts.
The Senate should be uncapped as well based on population. The House is more geared towards the country’s short-term interests and the Senate our long-term interests, but it needs to be representative of the population as well.
We are one nation after all!