When the Democrats locked up 60 votes in the Senate through two surprises (Al Franken’s outlawyering of Norm Coleman and Arlen Specter turning his coat), we were spared a piece of political theater that seemed inevitable with Barack Obama’s election: the rediscovery of the evils of the filibuster.
A year ago I noted how the New York Times’s opinion of the filibuster was, shall we say, highly correlated with who was doing the filibustering. In March 2009 the NYT had reversed itself yet again on the probity of the filibuster, but the issue went to the backburner when Specter switched parties, giving Democrats 60 votes. (Or rather, the prospect of 60 votes once Franken was seated.)
With Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, the putative evil of the filibuster is front and center once again. Paul Krugman inveighs thusly:
The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.
Don’t hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism.
It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis.
It seems Krugman was not paying attention. Republican obstructionism was a central message in the Massachusetts race. More precisely, it was a central message from Scott Brown. Brown promised that if he were elected, he would put the brakes on the Democratic agenda, especially the health care bill. And he won.
With Republicans more trusted than Democrats on nearly every issue, and with 75% angry about the government’s policies, the public today is pro-obstruction.
(Via Volokh.)
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