Filibuster isn’t pretty, but it’s still needed | Bill Cotterell

Early in “A Man for All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More asks an acolyte if he’d override all the laws of England in order to defeat Satan, and the young man says of course he would.

“And when the last law was down and the devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide — the laws all being flat?” More responds. “Do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

The voting-rights quandary confronting President Biden in the Senate is not as challenging as the moral imperative that led Thomas More to defy Henry VIII 500 years ago — nobody will lose his head — but the lesson of the great British drama should be considered as Democrats try to abolish the Senate filibuster.

If that’s the only way to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, it’s too high a price to pay for momentary political gain.

Yes, the filibuster is anti-democratic in requiring 60 votes for the Senate to proceed with big bills. Yes, 19 states have enacted new voting restrictions that Democrats consider unduly restrictive. Yes, the talkathon tactic dates back to 1853, the run-up to the Civil War, and it’s often been the tool of choice for segregationist senators when they run out of real reasons to oppose legislation.

And yes, the 50 Republicans now in the Senate solidly support the filibuster, just like they’ve checkmated the White House on budget and infrastructure initiatives.

Biden, who supported the rule through his decades in Washington, proposed one good way of countering the filibuster — making members actually show up and talk.

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Currently, they can just signal their intent to tie up the Senate indefinitely and a bill is shelved. Well, all right then, they should go back to the bad old days when men like Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina talked for more than 24 hours against a civil rights bill that passed in 1957.

Messing with the filibuster is just a bad idea, no matter what

But Biden also backs a bad idea in the current confrontation.

Recently, he joined Senate Democrats in backing a “carve out” that would waive the three-fifths threshold for voting-rights bills. That would be like removing just one panel from the Hoover Dam and expecting it to still work.

The filibuster, for all its faults, serves a useful purpose in slowing things down. Let the brash young House members send impetuous ideas over to the upper chamber. They just represent districts, the local interests of parts of states, while the learned elders of the upper chamber represent entire states.

Yeah, that’s not real fair either, as 578,759 people in Wyoming have the same number of senators — two — as 40 million Californians. But that’s for another day.

No matter how virtuous the purpose, it ought to be difficult to change the law. You don’t just sweep the rules aside when you see a chance to get at the devil. Having to get 60 votes means having to compromise.

Everyone is blaming two senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, for preventing their party from changing the filibuster rule by a straight partisan vote. There are some less prominent Democrats who also favor the voting bills but aren’t on board with ditching the 60-vote rule.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris probably didn’t help their cause by going to Georgia last week and comparing their opponents to Jefferson Davis and Bull Connor. Oh, yeah, want to persuade somebody? Call ‘em hideous racists — a president polling in the 30s can’t go wrong with that.

And history is not on their side. When the civil rights laws of the mid-1960s passed, Lyndon Johnson pointed to raw, ugly discrimination, even violence, that southern governors, lawmakers and sheriffs tacitly advocated.

Somehow, making election day a holiday and forbidding states to regulate mailed balloting does not evoke memories of 1965.

Voters are more worried about inflation, crime and COVID policy

.There’s one other little detail that Thomas More might point out.

The Democrats are about to get clobbered next fall. Absent the filibuster, which helps the minority force compromise in the Senate, what will they hide behind next year when the Republicans run roughshod over everything Biden proposes?

Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Biden forced to back a bad idea in forcing the Senate’s hand