Outdated filibuster rules allow a small minority of the US population to hold the rest of the country hostage
As everyone from President Joe Biden to the conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin to liberal groups now push to reform the Senate’s rules, the defense of the filibuster goes something like this: by design, our nation is a republic, not a direct democracy, and therefore we must create institutional obstacles to empower a minority of Americans to prevent the whims of the majority from being too hastily enshrined in legislation. By this logic, we must keep the Senate’s cloture rule, which requires 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to end a filibuster and move a bill to a vote.
Those who make this case seem to love sounding like erudite constitutional scholars steeped in the grandeur of American history, and they purport to be pluralists worrying about minority rights.
