Mitch McConnell is making a terrific case for reforming the Senate

Mitch McConnell is making a terrific case for reforming the Senate

Opinion by Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 12:55 p.m. EDT

Given what’s happening in Congress, you may be growing more sympathetic than ever to the idea that we just should go ahead and abolish the Senate. While that won’t happen any time soon, real reform could happen, starting with eliminating the filibuster.

If it does, it will be because of what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his Republican colleagues are doing right now.

So while we will hopefully emerge from our current crisis without defaulting on the United States’ financial obligations, in the long run, McConnell may deserve our thanks. He’s making the most powerful case imaginable for why the Senate must be changed.

Just as they did when Barack Obama was president, Republicans are forcing the country into a crisis over the debt ceiling, a festering carbuncle on the body of U.S. fiscal policy that serves no practical purpose other than to allow the minority party to threaten economic calamity.

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McConnell claims that he and his colleagues would never allow the country to default on its debts. Yet they’re simultaneously filibustering a suspension of the debt ceiling.

McConnell says he wants to force Democrats to deal with the debt ceiling in their reconciliation bill, which can’t be filibustered. But the real reason he wants to do this is because the reconciliation push also involves Democrats’ complex reimagining of the United States’ social infrastructure, and McConnell wants to throw a wrench into that.

So in the meantime, McConnell is presiding over a GOP filibuster of the increase. And because of their unique combination of cynicism and cowardice, nearly all Republicans are going along.

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Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of the GOP leadership, tells the New York Times that “40 or 45″ Republicans would allow a clean vote on a debt ceiling suspension, provided they wouldn’t have to cast their ballots in public. Such a profile in courage.

Where will this end? One possibility is a change in the filibuster rules that would apply only to debt ceiling increases, something even the two Democratic filibuster holdouts, Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) might agree to if necessary to save the economy.

Now let’s consider where all this — not only the default crisis but the ridiculous machinations Democrats have to go through to pass a reconciliation bill, which is necessary because of the continued existence of the filibuster — will leave us, and how it might have been different.

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As they confronted a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, McConnell could have maneuvered Democrats into moderating their policy ambitions by working with them on any number of bills. Instead of watching while Democrats throw everything they can into a single huge reconciliation bill, Republicans could have drawn them into bipartisan negotiations on pre-K or family leave or actions to address climate change.

The result could have been exceedingly “moderate” bills, i.e. more than the zero Republicans want to do on any of those issues, but less than Democrats want. That would have produced some mild disgruntlement among the Democratic electorate, but no urgent momentum to change the way the system, and the Senate in particular, works.

Instead, McConnell put up a wall of opposition (other than on the one-off bipartisan infrastructure bill), which means relying on Democratic centrists to do the Republicans’ policy work for them by whittling down Democratic bills. Since those centrists are unusually shallow and cynical themselves, the short-term policy result may be only slightly to the left of what would have been crafted between Democrats and Republican moderates, so you could say that McConnell didn’t give up much by holding his caucus to complete opposition.

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But in the longer term, this strategy makes the elimination of the filibuster far more likely.

Because the idea of cooperation with Republicans is now so self-evidently ridiculous, a desire for Senate reform is on its way to becoming Democratic orthodoxy. No one running for the Senate in a Democratic primary will be able to avoid saying whether they favor eliminating the filibuster, and if they don’t at the very least favor reforming it, they’ll fear the wrath of their voters.

So imagine that Democrats were to net two or three Senate seats in the 2022 elections (an outcome that is certainly possible). At that point, the question would no longer be how to convince Manchin and Sinema to consider filibuster reform — a task now seen as hopeless — but whether the rest of the Democratic senators could be persuaded.

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Today those other senators are much more likely to say yes than they were just a year ago. The odds that Democrats eliminate the filibuster if they get those extra two votes have increased dramatically. And after this maddening period, few Democrats can avoid their party’s desire for procedural change.

It won’t happen before 2022. But if and when Democrats find the votes to overhaul the way the Senate works, we’ll have Mitch McConnell to thank for it.