Conservatives should embrace filibuster reform. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Conservatives should embrace filibuster reform

Matthew Yglesias

12 - 15 minutes

I did a quick take on the debt ceiling deal over the weekend, but I think it’s worth revisiting exactly what’s so vexing and sort of perplexing about this outcome:

    It’s absolutely a solid win for conservatives that meaningfully reduces federal spending while leaving the door open to future GOP tax cutting and also giving military spending a somewhat privileged place in the firmament.

    It’s absolutely a solid piece of political bargaining by Joe Biden, who after appearing to have boxed himself into a corner, managed to get out while agreeing to what is essentially a normal appropriations deal with a GOP-held House.

    Given that, we’re left with the question of why Republicans put us through all this when there is a well-established and less potentially catastrophic process already in place for bargaining over appropriations.

Some of the answers to that question will have to come from those who are better-versed in reporting on the intra-caucus dynamics in the GOP. The Freedom Caucus, in particular, believes (apparently sincerely) that recent events — starting with Kevin McCarthy’s difficulty securing the votes to be installed as Speaker and playing through the debt ceiling crisis — represent a kind of step-change in their clout inside the Republican party. This doesn’t really seem true to me, objectively speaking, but factional politics is always a bit weird — and to an extent, perception is reality. Either way, inside dirt on House Republicans is not my metier.

What I do think is worth more consideration, though, is a topic that to the best of my knowledge isn’t on Republicans’ minds right now: the filibuster and its role in driving the party toward debt ceiling antics that ultimately do not succeed.

Republicans eventually settled for something they could have achieved through the normal appropriations process, but they started out asking for a lot more. Last fall, that was changes to Social Security and Medicare. This spring, it became — among other things — the REINS Act, a massive energy permitting overhaul, and structural changes to Medicaid. Why try to do this through debt ceiling hostage-taking? Well, because they’re trying to coerce Democrats into voting for Republican bills. But why do that? Why are Republicans asking themselves “how can we force our opponents to vote for stuff they disagree with?” rather than “how can we win elections so we can do our stuff?”

It all goes back to the filibuster.

There’s a bit of conventional wisdom that conservatives should love the filibuster because they can accomplish everything they want with 51 votes — judicial confirmations and tax cuts via budget reconciliation. We saw this spring that this isn’t true. Republicans don’t just want to do tax cuts and judicial confirmations. Their caucus includes a certain number of nutjobs and numbskulls and opportunists. But it also includes people who have ideas for substantive change in American public policy, and they are frustrated by a political system in which even if they win big, a rump minority of Democratic Party senators will be able to block their efforts at legislative change.

One of my most cringey and earnest beliefs is that even though electoral politics in the American system is inherently zero-sum — for John Fetterman to win, Dr. Oz must lose — policymaking is not like that. People come to the table with different sets of values and priorities and empirical beliefs and they form coalitions to try to advance those ideas. Smart policy changes can be win-win, and bad changes can be lose-lose.

And that’s what I find so frustrating about the state of the filibuster reform conversation.

This dialogue — one that I played a role in starting — began in 2009-2010 when Democrats held large majorities in Congress. Given the math at the time, the short-term implication of filibuster reform was clearly that Barack Obama would sign more progressive bills. Reform didn’t happen, but the push branded the cause as progressive. When Donald Trump became president and the GOP held a trifecta in 2017-2018, he started tweeting sporadically about the need for filibuster reform. I wish Democrats would have tried to engage with him a bit on finding a way to make a real bipartisan push, but this never became a serious thing. Filibuster reform re-emerged as a talking point in 2021, again as a purely progressive effort. I tried a couple of times to pitch this as an idea Joe Manchin should take seriously, but he didn’t agree.

So now, in 2023, I want to say that conservatives should look at embracing filibuster reform.

But how can reform be good for the left and for the right and for the center? Simple — this is a good idea, and because it is good, it would help advance multiple objectives simultaneously. People are unfortunately too locked into questions like “what is the immediate short-term implication of filibuster reform?” And the circumstances are always such that, as with the current Congress, it seems like it wouldn’t make a difference so nobody talks about it, or it would have some very predictable impact on short-term legislation so everyone views it through a narrow partisan or ideological lens.

My dream is to get people to take a more structural view. The filibuster makes it harder to pass legislation, and that’s good if you believe the status quo is close to perfect and any change is likely to be bad. But I don’t believe that, and I don’t think progressives or conservatives do either. I occasionally hear conservatives talk as if they believe this. But what we saw in the debt ceiling fight — and time and again before that — is that they don’t really. The American Republic has been around for almost 250 years, and there are lots of laws on the books. Left and right both favor policy change, and we would have healthier politics with more a spirit of “if you win you get a chance to do some policy change” and less a spirit of “to achieve policy change, we need to come up with crazy threats to blow up the world economy unless we can get our way.”

People have been asking me a lot lately about the immigration aspects of “One Billion Americans” in light of the ongoing backlash against asylum-seekers at the southern border.

A lot of people saw Trump as the apotheosis of anti-immigrant politics and hoped that his defeat would lead to a waning of those sentiments. The truth is more like the opposite. Trump’s presence in office generated thermostatic backlash against nativism that induced a lot of liberals to exaggerate their own welcoming attitudes toward a chaotic influx. I try to be a little more thoughtful than the thermostatic mass public, and I think if you pop open the book, you’ll find that I try really hard to not endorse open borders or a devil-may-care attitude toward chaos. To quote myself, “the high-level conservative contentions that entry to the United States should be controlled by law and that permission to live here should be dictated more by national interest and less by happenstance make perfect sense.”

What is true is that part of what follows from my own arguments about immigration is that illegal migration and border chaos aren’t really as bad as conservatives claim. They see immigration as bad in general and the asylum problem as a particularly bad form of a bad thing. That’s wrong; immigration is broadly beneficial and what we’re seeing now is an unusually bad form of a good thing.

Still, not only is “have lots of people show up and make semi-spurious asylum claims that take a long time to adjudicate which means in many cases they get to hang around the country for a while and maybe get a work permit and if not probably find some under-the-table work” an unpopular situation, it’s a very bad policy on the merits. So bad, in fact, that nobody would design it deliberately — and of course it was not the product of a deliberate design. Why don’t we replace the unsatisfactory status quo with something much better that would feature much stricter rules on asylum but a larger overall quantity of immigration via a well-organized, non-chaotic legal process? After all, countries like Australia and Canada do very well with immigration rules that are very strict but also allow a lot of immigration.

Well, the problem is that while it’s easy for a handful of writers or wonks or whomever else to draw up a win-win solution, it’s hard to actually do things in Congress. Mutual distrust gets in the way. So does partisan opportunism. So does a fundamental problem with win-win bargains — precisely because they are win-win, they generate a surplus that could be distributed in different ways, and everyone wants the maximally favorable bargain which means everyone needs to be willing to walk away from bargains that are superior to the status quo. In a sense, this all just goes to show that policy ideas are somewhat overrated, and what’s really in short supply is political work to generate the circumstances for compromise.

But this is also, I think, a clear example of a situation where the need to do things via bipartisan compromise is itself undesirable. You could imagine a world where instead of an immigration bargain, you have a GOP-led crackdown followed by a Democratic administration that expands legal immigration. If you look at foreign countries with fewer veto points in their political system, they don’t just see-saw back and forth. Similarly, if you look at budget reconciliation bills, it’s actually very unusual for a GOP Congress to literally reverse what the prior Democratic Congress did or vice versa. Directionally, Republicans cut taxes and Democrats raise them. But it’s more like an elaborate twirling dance than a simple ping-pong. And I think that kind of dance is mostly productive, with each coalition trying to attack the other side’s weak points while advancing its own strongest ideas.

One of the signature quips of the Trump era was Steve Bannon’s promise of a daily struggle for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

That in turn set the stage for a lot of wrangling about the existence of an alleged “deep state,” some late-in-the-game Trump efforts to gut the civil service, and a hazy sense on the right that if there are big problems with economic regulation in the United States, the solution is to wreck everything. But if you stop and think about it for five minutes, this is a crazy approach. There is a lot of international variation in public policy, but every country has some kind of regulatory apparatus. And even if Democrats and Republicans disagree about what the rules for air pollution and water pollution should be, I think that in their hearts, even most Republicans acknowledge that it would, in fact, be bad to allow unlimited dumping of toxic chemicals into drinking water. Tucker Carlson even got interested in the issue of excessive PFAS pollution via his interest in declining testosterone levels.

Well, guess who’s moving to limit PFAS pollution? Why, it’s the Environmental Protection Agency — the administrative state — because that’s the way the world works.

You need to have regulatory agencies, and ideally you’d like them to do their jobs well. People can disagree about what “doing the job well” should mean, but if there’s a problem, trying to smash them up and have them be ineffectual is a terribly ineffective alternative to actually solving the problems. I’ve written many times that I think the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is being unduly stringent in how it oversees nuclear power, neglecting the benefits (to human health, among other things) of creating abundant energy. At the same time, we clearly need a nuclear safety regulator. And having an understaffed, underfunded, or incompetent nuclear safety regulator could be the worst of all worlds. What nuclear policy needs is a better regulatory framework, not “deconstruction.”

If you think there are significant problems in American governance, which conservatives surely do, then you need to try to solve them. That means trying to pass laws, and that means trying to create a legislative system that is conducive to laws being passed. Obviously if you do that, more liberal laws will pass, too. But odds are that progressives’ top priorities aren’t the exact opposite of conservatives’ priorities. And if everyone got the chance to get their way when it’s their turn to govern, everyone might end up happier.