It’s Not Just the Filibuster
The modern Senate evolved to cater to interests, just not those of democracy.
In January 2021, Democrats achieved what many consultants and political strategists thought an impossible feat. They denied Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) a fourth consecutive term as Senate Majority Leader by winning two former red seats in Baby blue Georgia, thanks to the multiracial coalition they had organized and energized.
Under McConnell’s firm grip, the Senate had become a graveyard for any kind of Democratic legislation searching to pass or hoping to be brought onto the floor for debate. With the election of a slim Democratic Senate majority, there was now hope this graveyard could bloom into fertile ground for bipartisan and partisan deals.
Armed with two majorities on Capitol Hill and the power of the presidency by their side, Democrats finally had the opportunity to enact their policy agenda, almost a decade in the making. They believed they had the upper hand until next year’s midterms, but with fifty-one votes and none to spare, concerns immediately started to arise. Fifty-one votes only get you so far in the Senate.
While House Democrats usually have an easier time drafting, negotiating, voting on, and passing significant legislation, the real concern lies in their upper chamber colleague’s ability to do the same. The House has proven time and time again to be an effective chamber. Since the start of this year, House Democrats have managed to pass hundreds of bills. Of these, landmark legislation such as the DC Admission Act, the Equality Act and the For the People Act. We’re still waiting on the Senate to do the same.
Holding onto a narrower majority than their House colleagues, Senate Democrats aren’t that lucky, or effective. Though Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) holds the official title of Senate Majority Leader and has the authority to decide which legislation is brought onto the floor, the typical fifty-fifty split along hard partisan lines fails to reach the sixty-vote threshold needed to avoid a filibuster. We seem to be living in an alternate reality where the Senate’s Grim Reaper, formally known as the current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, still finds himself wielding tremendous power, with fifty Democratic votes and a Democratic Vice President presiding over the Senate.
But it is very much our present-day reality.
Current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), reminiscing about the status of the Equality Act during the 116th Congress: “for years, leader Mitch McConnell buried the Equality Act, like he buried many other commonsense bipartisan House-passed bills. It was what we called his legislative graveyard.” Even with a 117th Congress tilting in the Democrats’ favor, Senate Republicans remain a major roadblock as they have indicated they would filibuster the bill over religious freedom concerns.
Although the filibuster seems to embody all that’s dysfunctional in the modern Senate, it’s only one facet of the body’s fundamentally flawed design.
The filibuster’s origin is, for the most part, accidental. In 1806, Vice President Aaron Burr deemed the previous question motion, the ability to end debate and proceed to a vote with a simple majority — only exercised once in the preceding four years — too redundant. Wasting no time, he virtually eliminated it the same year, before leaving office. An issue arose when the Senate found itself lacking any kind of alternative mechanism for terminating debates in the chamber.
Filibusters became possible at this point. During the first half of the Antebellum era, the filibuster remained a theoretical tool, never to be actually wielded, especially in a political environment where Northern senators desired to maintain Southern support over fears of secession. The first filibuster of its kind happened in 1837, when several Whig senators rallied in an effort to prevent allies of then President Andrew Jackson to expunge a resolution of censure against him.
Filibusters, as a way to prevent a vote from taking place, were allowed in both the Senate and the House of Representatives but remained seldom during this period. In most instances, the filibuster was strategically deployed to perpetuate the disenfranchisement of Black Southerners by stalling the passage of civil rights legislation. Subsequent revisions to House rules limited filibuster privileges in that chamber, but the Senate continued — and continues — to allow the use of this tactic.
Decades later in 1917, at President Woodrow Wilson’s urging, the Senate adopted a rule allowing cloture of a debate on a 76-3 roll call vote. Cloture was then successfully invoked two years later to end a filibuster on the Treaty of Versailles. The cloture motion originally required a supermajority or two-thirds of all senators voting and present to be considered filibuster-proof. For example, if only 70 senators voted on a cloture motion, only 47 would have to vote in favor to avoid a filibuster. When all hundred were present and voting, 67 votes were needed to cloture the debate.
The rest of the 20th Century warily beheld the filibuster’s evolution, from a backwater legislative tactic to a full-blown parliamentary ticking time bomb and one of white supremacy’s most effective tools in the Senate. In 1946, five Southern Democrats had decided to filibuster a bill that would have created a Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), for weeks. This committee would have helped managed workplace discrimination claims, but the author of the bill was forced to remove it after a failed cloture vote even though he had enough votes to pass it.
The Senate tried eleven times between 1927 and 1962 to invoke cloture but failed each time. Its use was particularly common among Southern Democratic senators. Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC) broke a record by filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes. He took his time to read laws from different states and recited George Washington’s farewell address in its entirety. One of the most notable filibusters of the 1960s occurred when Dixiecrats in the Senate attempted to block the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by filibustering for 75 hours.
During a 1949 Senate hearing concerning limitations on debates in the chamber, Senator Charles Russel (D-GA), testified and declared that he and his colleagues “had been put on notice that this change in the debate rules [was] solely designed to ram through this series of bills that is euphemistically called a civil rights program.” He later added, that “nobody ever mentions any other kind of legislation with these rules changes.”
This era and the following decades saw the filibuster bloom into the custodian of Jim Crow policies. Upholding white supremacy, obstructing Civil Rights and serving as a tool for Southern reactionaries’ grievances were the filibuster’s primary functions.
Then came the ‘70s, which unveiled a “two-track system.” Prior to this new system, Senators were unable to have two or more pieces of legislation or nominations pending on the floor simultaneously.
Unveiled to deal with filibuster blockades, the new system accomplished the opposite of its stated goal. As the filibuster was slowly stripped of its ability to bring the Senate’s business to a complete halt, filibusters slowly became politically easier to justify and a more palatable way for the minority to be heard — but mostly obstruct — on civil rights issues and gradually on a whole spectrum of increasingly politicized issues ranging from healthcare to the national debt. As a result, the number of filibusters went through the roof eventually leading to the modern era in which an effective supermajority requirement exists to pass legislation. The minority is further emboldened by the fact that there is no practical requirement that they actually hold the floor or extend debate for a filibuster to stall legislation.
In 1975, the Senate revised its cloture rule. Now, only three-fifths of sworn Senators were needed to avoid a filibuster. By returning to an absolute number of sworn Senators — sixty — rather than a proportion of those present and voting, the change also made any filibuster easier to sustain on the floor by a small number of senators from the minority party without requiring the presence of their minority colleagues.
This further reduced the majority’s leverage to force an issue through extended debate. Moreover, this began to grant the most ideologically and reactionary driven members an unthinkable amount of power within their respective parties and in the upper chamber. Mix this with today’s hyperpolarized electorates and hyper-sorted parties, and you get a recipe for constant deadlock and a total inability to accomplish even the simplest of procedures or pass the most bipartisan of deals.
The filibuster — a never-intended-to-happen parliamentary anomaly, a Jim Crow relic and a reactionary wild card— has got to go. We can all agree on that. Abolishing the filibuster is a crucial and necessary step towards enacting key legislation the current Democratic majority was elected to pursue, and pass.
The For the People Act is a sweeping bill that would increase election security and protect voters’ rights. In the wake of numerous republican controlled state legislatures passing voter suppression measures one after the other, this bill has become a high-profile example of legislation that Senate Democrats were unable to pass in the six months since gaining the majority. This is largely due to Republican’s known tendencies to welcome Democratic legislation with filibuster attempts at every corner.
Nevertheless, shouting from the rooftops that you support abolishing the filibuster is a shallow statement if you’re not actively questioning the way the Senate operates, denouncing its dysfunctional design, acknowledging its history, and its responsibility for allowing a tactic like filibustering to go on for almost two centuries.
The filibuster, a wild anomaly — the absence of clear mechanisms to terminate debate,— was left free to roam the aisles of the upper chamber, free to grow, free to evolve, and free to be weaponized.
Efforts to abolish the filibuster would not be about restoring democracy to the Senate. It would rather be about incorporating it into the upper chamber. You cannot restore democracy to an institution that was never built to represent the people’s interests in the first place and that never evolved to do so.
The Senate’s institutional design is fundamentally undemocratic. In addition, the upper chamber is also particularly vulnerable to extrinsic forces.
In its early days, the United States of America weren’t just united yet. Although some form of government already existed, the US rather resembled a collection of sovereign states glued together rather than a whole country cut into neat states of various sizes. State power was the hot button issue. Each state had its own government, identity, and constitution and their political relationship to one another was weak.
With this context in mind, state leaders came up with the Articles of Confederation, the first attempt at organized government. Although this first attempt looked good on paper, fears of a centralized government overriding state powers and enabling the emergence of a ruling elite — reminder that it had only been mere days since the end of the Revolutionary War — eventually led to its downfall.
The Constitution — a second attempt — aimed to make that relationship stronger, but states were still the main players. You were a citizen of your state first, and of the union second. The Constitution’s framers understood that. Their chief concern — designing the Constitution from a very state-centered perspective — was that states needed a way to protect themselves from a potentially overzealous centralized government, something that the Articles of Confederation failed to account for. That’s when they figured out states could defend their varied interests, have a voice, and still hold on to some of their power through their representation in a body designed for them, the Senate.
Therefore, the Founding Fathers — Framers of the Constitution — founded the U.S Senate to specifically protect individual state’s rights and to safeguard minority opinion in a political system designed to give greater power to the federal government. They still instilled principles of majority rule to ensure that democracy in the chamber would carry on, but from its first breath, the Senate was purposefully never intended to give more representation to the American people; that was the job of the House of Representatives. To balance power between larger and smaller states of the early union, equal representation was key. To avoid undermining any state’s independence, it was agreed upon that their Senators would be elected by their respective state legislatures.
The only structural modification of the Framers’ original design of the body dates to 1913 — more than a century ago — when the Constitution’s Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, providing for direct popular election of Senators. This was a major target for progressive reformers who sought to remove control of government from the influence of special interests and corrupt state legislators. Since then, only practical reforms have been implemented such as the creation, modernization, specialization or dismantlement of committees, buildings, positions, floor, and debate rules.
Although the Senate had operated in the shadow of the larger and livelier House of Representatives during its earliest years, by the 1820s it came to dominate the House and the presidency. The Antebellum period saw the Senate morph into an agent of compromise that helped avoid civil conflict for four decades. However, this was not without a cost. The pillar of Southern states’ economies, plantation-based agriculture built on the whipped backs of slaves, had to stay if northern senators wanted to find common ground with southerners.
As decades went by, the Senate started to offer a forum better suited to lively debates but also increasingly violent outbursts. In the face of growing national tensions associated with federal authority versus states’ rights, and the extension of slavery into the nation’s territories, the Senate served as a workshop for fashioning major compromise agreements, that is, until it couldn’t anymore. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Confederacy seceded in 1860. A brutal Civil War was now brewing on the horizon.
The post-war Reconstruction era that later unwinded set new foundations that would drastically change the composition of the Senate and its role, for the century to come. The 1860s and the 1870s witnessed the slow unraveling of the senatorial “old guard” and the emergence of a senatorial “new guard.” Two of the eleven African Americans who have ever served in the U.S Senate were elected during this period.
Reconstruction proponents — such as the newly formed Republican Party — wanted to right the wrongs of the past, that is, to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy, but also to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the eleven former seceded states. Radical Republicans were particularly committed to emancipation and racial justice. This wing of the party was convinced that equal rights for the former slaves had to accompany the South’s readmission to the Union.
Charles Sumner (R-MA), Benjamin Wade (R-OH) and Zachariah Chandler (R-MI), became Lincoln’s and Johnson’s fiercest opposition in the Senate. The Radicals countered Lincoln’s “Ten Percent Plan” in 1864 with the Wade-Davis Bill, which required a majority of the electorate to take the loyalty oath and excluded far more former Confederates from participation in the restored governments than what Lincoln’s plan had intended.
Thanks to their efforts, they successfully pressured then President Abraham Lincoln — who initially wanted to embark on a “lenient” Reconstruction program — to abolish slavery in 1865. They later turned on President Andrew Johnson to establish their own Joint Committee on Reconstruction, ensuring congressional rather than presidential control and oversight of Reconstruction efforts. This helped them pass a number of measures for the protection of Southern Blacks over Johnson’s veto.
After numerous Radical wins, Johnson later attempted to break their power by uniting all moderates and by going on an aggressive speaking tour during the 1866 congressional elections. But this strategy backfired. The Radicals won a resounding victory, thanks in part to Northern voters’ repudiation of Johnson’s policies. The Radical Republicans’ most important measures were contained in the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868, which placed the Southern states under military government and required universal male suffrage.
By 1870, all the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and a majority were controlled by the Republican Party. In every state, Black voters formed the overwhelming majority of Southern Republican voters. As the Republican Party was perceived as a means of keeping Confederates from regaining power in the South, a symbiotic relationship developed between Southern Blacks and Republicans. In exchange for electoral support, Republicans would work to expand their civil rights. This enabled the emergence of a Southern Black political class. More than six hundred African Americans were elected to state legislatures and hundreds more in local offices across the South.
Reconstruction governments sought to offer generous financial aid to railroads and other enterprises in the hope of creating a “New South”, whose economic expansion would benefit Blacks and whites alike.
Unfortunately, progress for African Americans in the South did not happen smoothly and failed to last.
The advent of African Americans in positions of political power coupled with an economic program spawning corruption and rising taxes, alienating a vast swath of white voters in the process, began to arouse bitter hostility from Reconstruction’s opponents. White Southerners turned increasingly violent. White supremacist organizations that committed terrorist acts, such as the Ku Klux Klan, began targeting local Republican leaders for beatings or assassination.
By the end of the 1870s, zeal for continued military occupation of the South waned in the North, as northern Republicans became more conservative and retreated from both the racial egalitarianism and the broad expansion of federal power resulting from the Civil War. Reflecting the shifting political mood, a series of Supreme Court decisions — beginning with the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873 — , severely limited the scope of Reconstruction laws and constitutional amendments.
By 1876, Republican dominance over the region had dramatically eroded. Only Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina remained under their control. The denouement of that year’s presidential showdown between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden hinged on disputed results from these same states. Negotiations between Southern political leaders and representatives of Hayes presidential campaign produced a bargain: on the condition that the Democrats would not block his certification, Hayes would recognize Democratic control of the remaining Southern states. As Hayes’s inauguration dawned on the nation, federal troops headed back to their barracks.
Although this signified the end of Reconstruction, the legacy of this period was not lost, as new national laws and constitutional amendments permanently altered the federal system.
Furthermore, this era saw the Senate’s evolution, from a striving compromise-making, deal-fashioning and tension-soothing institution to a concrete elite club of powerful committee chairmen. This century ended with the Senate effectively controlled by “The Senate Four”: Nelson Aldrich (R-RI), William B. Allison (R-IA), Orville Platt of (R-CT), and John Spooner of (R-WI). A few long-serving senators who capitalized on their seniority to control the Senate’s legislative agenda.
Seniority meant access, privilege, and power, and it was gaining popularity among members of the chamber who were seeking more than just service to the nation. Serving more than one or two terms dramatically increased your chances to sit on powerful committees, to serve in positions of leadership and to build long lasting political alliances and relationships. Those who knew how the Senate operated, the right people to talk to and the right committees to sit on, virtually governed the Senate.
The ability to capitalize on seniority is — yet — another facet of the Senate’s dysfunctional and undemocratic design.
By the turn of the 20th Century, white control over Southern state governments was gradually restored through Democratic control of the region. Such terrorist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of the White Camelia were particularly successful in frightening African Americans away from the polls which rendered the remaining Republican presence powerless, or dead.
Animosity, contempt and hate toward the Republican Party was baked in Southern identity for generations to come. Democrats had now absolute control over Southern local, statewide, and regional politics and election administration.
During most of the first half of the 20th Century, heavily regulated — and disturbingly unfree — racially separate civic spheres had been put in place. The disenfranchisement of Black voters, the rigid system of racial segregation, the relegation of African Americans to low-wage agricultural and domestic employment, and the legal and extralegal violence unleashed on those who dared to challenge the racial hierarchy, had layered to form the new Southern order.
This enabled for the democratization of one-party authoritarian enclaves in the American Deep South, under the “Democratic” banner. The Southern Democratic Party — a national united front and a local conglomerate of factions — was born.
The South’s number one “domestic” priority was to uphold white supremacy.
Then Sen. Richard Russell (D-GA), a self-avowed white-supremacist, as well as a leading practitioner, defender, and innovator of the filibuster, from the 1930s to the 1960s, once swore that “any southern white man worth a pinch of salt would give his all to maintain white supremacy.”
In the words of Ezra Klein, author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Why We’re Polarized, “the Southern Democratic Party, an institution of its own, became the ideal vehicle through which this region of the country could negotiate the tension lingering between its top domestic priority and its forced membership in the broader liberal democracy called the United States. In other words, the Southern Democratic Party was an organization that ruled autocratically in the South and protected its autonomy — from the centralized state — by entering into a governing coalition with the national Democratic Party.”
The Dixiecrats gave national Democrats the votes they needed to squash Republican opposition in Congress and also provided them the precious electoral support needed to secure the electoral college during most presidential contests. In exchange, national Democrats turned a blind eye to the Dixiecrats’ enforcement of segregation, one-party autocratic rule and state-sponsored violence at home.
Thanks to this new conditional autonomy — both from the federal government and the national Democratic Party — the Southern Democratic Party was metamorphosing into one of the most powerful political entity in American politics and into the center of gravity of Democratic politics. From the late 1890s to the early 1950s, the southern share of the Democratic House caucus never dipped below 40 percent. Democrats occupied — at times — 90 to 95 percent of all southern elected offices there.
Seniority wasn’t easy to attain for members of Congress, as most usually lasted — from 1887 and 1947 — between one and three terms in the House and between one and two terms in the Senate.
Not for Dixiecrats. The authoritarian structure of the political apparatus they were operating at home meant that the crushing majority of southern Democrats were virtually never exposed to anything resembling political pressure or opposition.
This effectively ensured Dixiecrats amassed seniority in unfathomable numbers compared to members of Congress from other regions of the country.
Humans are socially, culturally, and psychologically wired to value, respect and reward knowledge, experience, and input from elders, or — in the political sphere — from senior elected officials. The Senate — like other institutions — is a human organization.
The Senate’s way of rewarding seniority is through higher rank committee chairmanships and leadership positions within each of the political parties’ caucuses. In other words, the Senate grants senators — who succeed in capitalizing on their seniority — the majority of strategic positions necessary to oversee the drafting, reviewing and passage of legislation and nominations. This leads the Senate to surrender its governance to the agenda of a minority of powerful and influential senators.
By 1933, southern Democrats — the main winners of the 1932 elections — chaired a mind boggling twenty-nine out of forty-seven House committees, including virtually all the most influential panels: Ways and Means, Judiciary, Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Banking and Currency, Appropriations, and Agriculture. They also held two of the top three positions in House leadership.
Southern influence also spread to the upper chamber. Dixiecrats now helmed thirteen of the thirty-three Senate committees, including some of the most influential panels: Agriculture and Forestry (Ellison D. Smith of South Carolina), Appropriations (Carter Glass of Virginia), Banking and Currency (Duncan U. Fletcher of Florida), Commerce (Hubert D. Stephens of Mississippi), Finance (Pat Harrison of Mississippi), Military Affairs (Morris Sheppard of Texas), and Naval Affairs (Park Trammell of Florida).
In addition, Walter F. George of Georgia wielded the chairman’s gavel on the Privileges and Elections Committee, through which any voting rights bill would have to pass. Setting the chamber’s agenda was Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, who served in that capacity until his death in 1937.
The leverage this gave Dixiecrats over Congress was near absolute. It’s not just that most significant bills were — at least — partly under the jurisdiction of one or several of these committees. It’s that every single senator had intersecting interests that ran through these influential committees.
If you were a liberal senator who did not care about race, but was deeply passionate about health care, free market, or infrastructure reforms, you had no choice but to work with the Southern chairman of the Ways and Means House committee or the Southern chairman of the Commerce or the Banking and Currency Senate committees. The issue arises here. If this particular liberal senator had helped passage of key civil rights amendments or legislation in any way, he’d had already infuriated the southern chair.
His bill? Dead, before it even had a chance to be reviewed by any committee panel.
Presidents weren’t sheltered from the Dixiecrat’s wrath either. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, confronted with anti-lynching legislation in the late 1930s — which he failed to support — revealed that he feared the resentment southern committee chairs would harbor against him and his legislative agenda. Roosevelt went on to say that “they would block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing.”
The upper chamber was now held hostage. Any senator who intended for the passage of his or her (but unfortunately mostly “his” at the time) bills knew not to stand in the way of a Dixiecrat.
Both the Dixiecrat’s use of the filibuster as an opaque parliamentary tactic aimed at quashing civil rights legislation coupled with their practice of capitalizing on seniority status to gate keep strategic positions of power as a means to veto legislative threats to their political and cultural legitimacy in the South, inflated the minority protections embedded within the Senate’s original framework into tools of minority dominance.
The institution itself — built on a shaky equilibrium between majority rule and minority rights since its inception— seemed unsettlingly vulnerable to a variety of external dynamics.
As the late 1940s hit, new trends were set in motion. Cracks in existing coalitions began to spread out while upcoming tectonic realignments were slowly plotting to turn American politics, including the Senate, on its head.
The South’s iron-fist rule over the Democratic Party was set in stone for the foreseeable future. This was until the national Democratic Party — Dixiecrats once considered a political ally—rebranded itself.
In his New York Times bestseller Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein explains that “the story of how the Democratic Party came to embrace civil rights is complex. It includes the idealism of politicians in the likes of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey as well as the hard math of electoral politics that — particularly in the North — began to include non-white voters. It reflects the logical endpoint of economic progressivism, as attention to the poor demanded attention to what was keeping so many non-white Americans poor, and it reflected strategic decisions the Republican Party had made along the way.”
As soon as then President Harry Truman's military desegregation orders went into effect, it became clear that the Democratic Party had just inherited the fight for civil rights. Its southern compact was now in jeopardy.
On Wednesday November 3rd, 1948, Truman knew he had won re-election, but not without a cost. For the first time in decades, a Democratic presidential candidate had persevered despite not carrying the entirety of the South. Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrat-turned-independent candidate who ran to exert pressure on Truman on behalf of his southern colleagues in the Senate, instead won the Southern states that Truman could not.
The credit Republicans should have received and quite frankly deserved, for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was essentially negated as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee — Barry Goldwater — happened to be one of only a handful of conservative Republicans to vote against the bill.
While Lyndon Johnson’s presidential strategy proved quite successful in no less than forty-five states, Barry Goldwater’s failed presidential campaign — running on a platform of states’ rights and overt racial grievances — paradoxically but unsurprisingly triumphed where no Republican had in almost a century.
This election marked the beginning of a radically new era, both as Goldwater showed the once unheard-for-a-Republican ability to capture the imagination of the old Confederacy, coupled with the passage of the polarizing Civil Rights Act of 1964 under a Democrat’s watch. White Southerners, electrified by the conservative movement’s vision, small government platform and drive to annihilate the federal government’s efforts to establish the foundations of a more egalitarian society, fueled Goldwater’s success in this region.
Both of these wins signaled the slow but inexorable weakening of the Democratic hammerlock on the region and the debut of what would later be coined and popularized by Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips as the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy.”
The Democratic Party’s support for civil rights and the Republican Party’s decision to unite behind a standard bearer who opposed the measure, cleared the way for Southern conservatives to embrace the GOP and dictate its political priorities. As Southerners took hold of the Republican Party, the push to the right was on. Members of the dying Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party found new life as the new conservative crusaders of the Republican Party.
Ensuing congressional and presidential elections subsequently revealed that previously clustered cracks in the Democratic and Republican coalitions had bursts into faults. The electorate was now experiencing a period of unprecedented realignment that would rapidly set the two parties on a race to rebrand and sort themselves — based on race, gender, and ideology — to cater to their increasingly polarized bases. These trends would eventually push fragile American political institutions, particularly the Senate, to be sorted as well.
The rise of the conservative movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had both contributed to the radicalization of the Republican Party and enabled the Democratic Party to fully pursue — unrestrained by Southern conservatives — a more liberal and inclusive platform and court a more diverse coalition of voters. The sorting was in full swing.
As it dawned on them that the Goldwater’s playbook had failed to produce consistently successful outcomes past the South, Republicans needed a new strategy that would both speak to the wider electorate and embolden white Southerners to flock to the polls.
By the 1968 presidential election, understanding the risks of such an overt campaign against civil rights, Nixon’s team instead coded their racial appeals. Nixon’s unrelentless “law and order” rhetoric, was best understood as a dog whistle, signaling his support for an end to feminist and anti-racist protests, marches, and boycotts, while his “war on drugs” played on racialized fears about crime in white suburbia. The Republican presidential nominee also adopted a stance of “benign neglect” on civil rights enforcement, a message that his advocates, such as Democrat-turned-Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, bluntly conveyed to Southern whites on his behalf. As Thurmond put it, “If Nixon becomes president, he has promised that he won’t enforce either the Civil Rights or the Voting Rights Acts. Stick with him.”
Subsequently, Jimmy Carter recaptured the region for Democrats. While white Southerners were attracted to the GOP’s new racially coded message, Carter had an immovable quality about him; he was authentically one of them. To overcome this identity-based appeal that Carter mastered in 1976, Republicans needed to move past overt or discrete white grievance politics.
They had to resurrect old threats — and manufacture news ones.
Adam Jentleson mentions in his book Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, that in 1955, William F. Buckley famously described the conservative movement as the one that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” A movement imbuing itself with the righteous cause of stalling progress for even the slightest deviation from the status quo would cause irreparable damage to the intellectual fabric of the American mind and to the cultural, social, economic, and political fabric of American society.
By the 1980s, the conservative movement was solidifying its grip on the GOP. During his presidential bid, Ronald Reagan expanded Nixon’s racial code to “colorblind” appeals for economic justice. He encouraged Americans to move past race, but also invoked the image of the “welfare queen,” overtly describing a black woman profiting from precious (white) taxpayers’ money. In doing so, he portrayed racial minorities as undeserving “takers,” while erasing the institutional racism at the heart of economic inequity. The message to Southern white voters was crystal clear: African Americans (them) were to blame for their own standing in society and government programs aimed at alleviating racial inequities would assuredly disadvantage hard-working white Americans (like us.)
Emboldened by its recent wins, the GOP also took the bait on another emerging wedge issue: feminism. Albeit both Republicans and Democrats had long supported the Equal Rights Amendment, bipartisanship couldn’t shield the ERA from a growing and all-consuming backlash on the right driven by Phyllis Schlafly’s organization, STOP ERA. Schlafly misleadingly and ominously insisted that the ERA would force women to put their newborns in government-run day care, serve on the front lines of combat, embrace lesbianism and enter the workplace. Where Phillis Shlafly saw a moral reckoning for America, the GOP saw a golden opportunity to — yet again — polarize and sort the electorate on another set of previously unpoliticized issues.
This portrayal resonated — on a quasi-spiritual and psychological level — with female voters trying to live up to the ideals of “Southern white womanhood.” According to Schlafly, the ERA would destroy Southern white women’s way of life. This threat (however dubious it may have been) then triggered them to organize. Not because of policy but because Democrats were promoting a lifestyle and values that threatened their most basic sense of self, identity. Republicans were vowing to eliminate that threat.
Partisanship wasn’t about political allegiance anymore. Americans began to experience politics through identity rather than policy.
A “pro-family” counter-rally in protest of the National Women’s Conference gathered more than twenty-thousand women. As the Republican establishment took notice, it felt inevitably pushed to reimagine the party’s agenda to ensure and secure the support of this crucial block of female voters. After 40 years of unbroken support for the ERA, the GOP dropped it from its platform. Republicans also began championing traditional gender roles and family values while politicizing abortion and gay rights (both of which anti-feminists associated with feminism) and redirecting their anti-big-government rhetoric toward the ERA’s federal enforcement clauses.
But the Republicans’ total takeover of the region wasn’t complete yet. In both 1992 and 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton captured five Southern states by capitalizing, as Carter had, on his insider status as both a Southerner and a Southern Baptist.
The GOP recognized that it needed a new appeal, one that portrayed Democrats as a threat to the brand of Christian values Republicans had been championing for two decades. This time the party worked to reframe its positions on a host of domestic issues, ranging from health care, immigration, gay rights, abortion, to foreign policy into matters of religious belief.
By making the full spectrum of political debates about fundamental values, Republicans forged an unbreakable bond with Southern white evangelical voters, who went from social conservatives to die-hard Republicans by the 2000s.
By allowing the conservative movement to hijack the party, Republicans forged their platform, brand, philosophy, and values in complete opposition to the other side.
In the mind of a conservative, if Democrats are for something, you are fundamentally against that something.
Whether that something manifests itself through voting-rights legislation that would make it easier for you to vote, or healthcare reform that would make it easier for you or your children to access medication and cheaper visits to the doctor.
This sorting of the electorate, parties, issues — and subsequently states and institutions, has polarized America. In a zero-sum game and in a fixed and sorted two party structure, such as the American political system, polarization and high-stakes issues hinging on identities and beliefs increasingly foster negative partisanship.
Adam Jentleson, author of Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, perceives it this way: It is one thing for the electorate to be sorted into teams, but it’s another story when these teams become more motivated to organize and vote more by a desire to see the other side lose, suffer or struggle than by wanting to see their own side win. Negative partisanship can be neatly summed up in the popular conservative rallying cry “own the libs.”
The GOP is fundamentally fueled by negative partisanship which in turn prompts Democrats to become equally driven by it.
Moreover, Adam Jentleson states that “in a polarized Senate, senators who used to range freely across partisan and ideological lines now toe the party line.” He also adds that “Senators generally follow their states, and while states used to swing back and forth between the parties, most now stay stuck in one column or the other,” so do their senators. “Today, the overwhelming number of Democratic senators come from blue states, while Republican senators come from red states. This creates less pressure to work across the aisle, and more pressure to stick with the party. A Republican senator who comes from a red state, for example, has little to gain politically from working with a Democratic president whom the voters of that state oppose.”
Neither polarization, nor negative partisanship — theoretically — should advantage one party or the other, but the combination of these forces with the rules of the modern Senate create a fantastic structural advantage for conservatives.
What was once an ideological movement standing athwart history yelling “Stop” is now a party. Expectations for both parties are just not the same. The Democratic base expects their elected members to deliver change whereas the Republican base demands that their elected representatives obstruct change.
The convenient way for conservatives to enact their agenda is by virtually doing nothing. As the conservative party, Republicans in the Senate — having no incentive to legislate or debate — can reap far greater benefits by obstructing and delaying the democratic process, rather than enabling it by working with Democrats. The GOP’s base doesn’t want progress, it wants political crusaders ready to defend their white and conservative-centric interests.
To be sure, there are laws conservatives want to pass. But Republicans today struggle to pass major legislation because it is difficult to cobble together even a bare majority of votes among senators who are far more united by what they want to stop than what they want to pass.
I always say that bipartisanship is of no political or electoral interest for Republicans. As conservatives it is their sworn duty to obstruct — then govern.
The modern Senate creates a structural conservative bias because its rules have evolved to make it incredibly easy to stop legislation.
Under any circumstances, assembling even a simple majority of votes to pass a bill is difficult — let alone the sixty votes needed to pass a bill through the modern Senate. With polarization pushing senators to their corners and negative partisanship rewarding them for making the other side fail, it is virtually impossible. By contrast, finding forty-one votes to block bills is relatively easy.
Adam states that “this asymmetry goes beyond the level of checks and balances the Framers intended, since they designed the Senate as a majority-rule institution, and it creates an imbalance that tilts the system dramatically toward conservatives.”
In a polarized era instilled with negative partisanship — and when these broad trends combine with the way Senate rules have evolved, — Republicans find themselves virtually immune to major electoral setbacks and are guaranteed to maintain a grip on the forty-one Senate seats they need to block most major legislation. In 2020, Senate Republicans can assemble forty-one Senate seats using only states Trump carried in 2016 by an average margin of 24 points. 36 Senators from these deep red states — such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK)— are the least likely to be vulnerable to political pressure that pushes them toward cooperation. Since their agenda is predominantly focused on stopping legislation and rolling back regulations, and since their voters reward them for any setback they inflict on Democrats, they are the most likely to reap political rewards through obstruction. In Adam’s words: “it is in these Republican senators’ interests to focus more on ‘owning the libs’ than working across the aisle.”
During Obama’s presidency, it had been suggested that Republicans were especially motivated to obstruct him because he was Black. While racism played a key part, the obstruction experiment they carried out was still unprecedented.
Under President Obama, Republicans obstructed his judicial and executive nominees with unparalleled frequency.
Half of all filibusters against nominees in the history of the United States were waged by Senate Republicans against Obama’s.
There was nothing unusual about Obama’s nominees. As presidential nominees tend to be, they were generally highly qualified professionals in the ideological mainstream of their party with clean ethical records. But Republicans’ opposition to Obama’s nominees often had little to do with qualifications. In 2013, Obama nominated one of their own as defense secretary: Republican senator Chuck Hagel, a widely respected voice on military affairs and recipient of two Purple Hearts. Without hesitating, Republicans filibustered him.
Republicans used the filibuster against Obama’s nominees to cripple laws and government agencies that they opposed.
For conservatives, it was impossible to argue with the results. Obstruction just worked. Today, there is no reason for the new generation of eager obstructionists who rose to prominence through this system, such as Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AK), and Josh Hawley (R-MO), to think that the results will be any less advantageous for them against the next Democratic administration.
Unprecedented though it was, Republican senators’ obstruction of Obama was a rational response to political incentives. Incentives provided by a specific coalition of voters. The same voters who deemed their need to storm the Capitol on January 6th, imperative.
The Republicans’ key edge in the Senate comes from the Sunbelt states, which are not small; Georgia and North Carolina are bigger than New Jersey and Virginia. Sunbelt states are also growing fast. In 2019, the South was the fastest-growing region in the country, while the Northeast’s population fell. Driven by the Sunbelt, Republicans’ strength in the Senate does not represent a small-state bias, but rather a regional trend that has nothing to do with the fundamental structure of the Senate.
The dysfunction in the modern Senate does not lie in its built-in bias toward small states. Instead, it lies in the way its rules have evolved to give certain groups of people — as opposed to states — more power.
The minority of voters putting Republican senators in office are not representative of a rapidly diversifying America. They are predominantly white, southern and conservatives serving wealthy interests. They are at odds with the general direction of the country, and they spend year after year watching their status and power erode. In a country on track to be majority-minority by 2044, the voters who put white Republican senators in office are overwhelmingly white themselves. One factor in the discrepancy between the large nonwhite populations in Southern states and their predominantly white, conservative representation in the Senate is that states represented by Senate Republicans tend to rank high on measures of voter suppression.
Senate Republicans represent plutocratic interests, and many of them are plutocrats themselves. Recent studies have shown that politicians of both parties are more responsive to the concerns of the rich than to those of poor or middle-class Americans, but Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to represent the interests of the wealthy. Their voters are wealthier, too. A 2017 study by the Public Religion Research Institute conducted for The Atlantic found that “being in fair or poor financial shape actually predicted support for Hillary Clinton among white working-class Americans, rather than support for Donald Trump,” in an election that saw the tightest correlation in history between the votes for presidential and Senate candidates.
As previously said: “what was once an ideological movement standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop’ is now a party.” In his book, The Great Alignment, Abramowitz states that “the ideological alignment of conservatives with the Republican Party that we today take for granted was driven predominantly by racism.” During the realignment period, Abramowitz found that “the increase in Republican identification among white voters was heavily concentrated among racial and economic conservatives — those whites most likely to be disturbed by the growing liberalism of the Democratic national party and by the growing visibility and influence of African Americans and other nonwhites within the party.”
Jointly, all of these trends have brought together a far-right, reactionary minority of the electorate and put it in control over one of the two major parties in the United States. According to a 2019 New York Times analysis of data collected by the Manifesto Project, a group that tracks party-policy positions around the globe, the modern Republican Party is more extreme than Britain’s Independence Party and France’s National Rally party, both of which are far-right populist parties that verge on neofascism.
If one party or the other is being led and pushed by a white conservative super minority, then the balance of democracy is undeniably threatened. When one party finds itself taking orders from a systematically and institutionally overrepresented ethnic minority, you get a party whose platform and convictions will, over time, switch from pro-governance to pro-obstruction and anti-democracy.
The Republican Party — a party that has centered its platform and its goals in an attempt to breed racial animosity and hate of other marginalized groups — has become an anti-democracy organization.
In the Republican party’s current configuration, it’s not in their best interests to speak to the issues that most Americans care about or to sustain a multi-racial coalition. It’s not in their constituents’ interests, and therefore not in theirs either, to entertain the idea of a more inclusive democracy or to fully participate in the current democratic process.
When democracy can’t function, Republicans are happy. They will do anything to stay happy, and in power. Even if it means tearing down democracy in the process.
Because of the way the modern Senate has evolved, combined with the trends of polarization and negative partisanship that have shaped America, this right-wing faction is able to wield power far out of proportion to its numbers. The modern Senate gives it the power to exercise a veto over policies backed by most of the population and makes it likely that it will have the power to do so in perpetuity. Minoritarian rule has truly become a defining feature of the modern Senate.
As America’s transformation into a multiracial democracy accelerates, we can expect more flagrant, widespread, and organized attempts to undermine and butcher democratic norms to accelerate in response.
There is no reason to expect the body to become less toxic, chaotic, and undemocratic as the next decade unfolds. In May 2021, Mitch McConnell spoke to reporters and reiterated its commitment to being a “hundred percent focused on stopping President Joe Biden’s administration.”
His Senate colleagues stand ready behind him.
On Tuesday August 24th, at 7:22 pm, POLITICO reported that House Democrats, in a coalesced attempt to deliver on their promise to enact crucial voting-rights legislation, voted to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act by a 219-212 vote along straight party line. Foreseeably, as Democrats can’t get this measure passed through the reconciliation process, Republican senators are already salivating at the prospect of filibustering this bill that a number of GOP members of the lower, and most importantly, of the upper house of Congress, are already describing as a “federal takeover” or a “partisan power grab.”
The Senate Minority Leader frames the hypothetical passage of this bill as a conservative nightmare, insisting that the Democrat’s endgame is to federalize elections.
Make no mistake, as this far-right minority rule labors to dismantle the current Senate Democratic majority of every shred of democratically earned power, the last attempt at heading off laws restricting voting access that a number of states passed in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and in anticipation of the upcoming midterms, may very likely die in the Senate.
When you come to think about it, the modern Senate isn’t really a graveyard. I find it more reminiscent of a radioactive wasteland. It’s toxic, dangerously predictable, and the life that has succeeded to evolve in this environment is always on the lookout for its next meal. If a Democratic legislation happens to wander off there, there’s not a huge probability it will survive given how fast the high levels of radiation would immediately work to tear down its blue DNA or how fast the red elephants would rip it apart.