Why Democrats can't break the filibuster

Matt Yglesias mentioned Tom Udall's hope that the Senate will adopt new rules that reform the filibuster and ease some of the obstruction at the start of the 112th Congress. I did an interview with Udall on this plan here. I don't think it'll work.

Matt hints at my qualms in his post: "it’s quite easy to imagine the Senate exercising Udall’s 'constitutional option' amidst the hope and enthusiasm associated with the beginning of the Obama administration. ... Now 18 months later, Washington is older and wiser on these matters. But will it really be politically feasible to adopt a more sensible ruleset with a less-popular President Obama and a diminished majority in the Senate?"

You can't return from an election in which the public decisively voted for the Republicans and then say that in the interests of democratic governance, you're taking away the tools Senate Republicans use to exert control over legislation. The difficulty with procedural reform is that it's both hard to do and it's never quite the right time. When you've got enough power to do it, you're probably trying to pass actual legislation that you can show to voters. When that power ebbs, procedural issues seem more urgent, but you don't have the power to pursue them.

A better option -- and my favored option -- is for Democrats to join with Republicans to set rules that will go into place six or eight years from now. That should hopefully erase the question of who will benefit in the next Congress, and allow everyone to think like a member of both a potential minority and potential majority. It's like setting rules from behind Rawls's veil of ignorance.

Another option is to lay the groundwork in advance. Republicans did a lot of filibustering during the 2006 to 2008 period, and because George W. Bush was in office, Democrats weren't doing a lot of legislating. But Democrats didn't use the quiet period strategically. There was no effort, for instance, to force Republicans to actually stand up and filibuster popular initiatives so that Democrats could create a public argument against the filibuster that would've justified action in 2008.

Instead, they waited for procedural obstruction to stall their agenda and destroy their poll numbers and then decided it was an important issue worth addressing. That doesn't get you anywhere.