Quick answer:
No.
Here’s a bit more on that from Adam Jentleson discussing his new book about the filibuster called “Kill Switch” on Fresh Air. He discusses the fact that it was never anticipated by the founders and was primarily used by Southern racists to block civil rights legislation. He picks up the story in more recent years here:
GROSS: Who is the innovator of making that supermajority routine, enabling the minority to block any legislation it wants to?
JENTLESON: More than any other single senator, Mitch McConnell is responsible for the overuse of the filibuster. This is simply a fact. It was – it came into frequent use. And I don’t want to downplay the role the Democrats played here. From the 1970s through the 1980s and into the 2000s, leaders of both parties began to use it more frequently. Senator Harry Reid, my former boss, used it under President George W. Bush a good deal.
But when Mitch McConnell became leader – the first minority leader in 2007, he began using the filibuster at a rate that had never been seen before in the Senate. And his key innovation was to use it not just with the intent of making it harder to pass individual bills but of deploying it as a weapon of mass obstruction against every single thing that moved in the Senate, which had the net effect of grinding the gears of the Senate to a halt and creating what appeared to any casual observer to be a completely gridlocked Washington.
GROSS: The Senate is now going to be split 50-50, with Kamala Harris as vice president having the ability to break the tie if there is a tie. So it’s not enough to pass the threshold of filibuster and cloture. So what does this narrow margin get the Democrats in the Senate?
JENTLESON: Well, a majority, even the slimmest majority possible, gives you a ton of power in the Senate. It puts you in control of all the committees. It doesn’t matter if your majority is one seat or even hinging on the vice presidency or if it’s 10 seats. You have control of all of the committees.
It also makes Chuck Schumer the majority leader and Mitch McConnell the minority leader, and that means that Schumer, not McConnell, can determine what bills come to the floor. That is a huge difference. We saw how important this is just last month with the fight over direct payment checks, where the bill that passed the House was denied a vote because Mitch McConnell simply refused to bring it up for a vote in the Senate. So even having the ability to determine what bills come to the floor can be very important in the Senate. It means that whether they pass or fail, all or most of President Biden’s major legislative agenda items will get a vote in the Senate.
GROSS: Are we about to see a strategic war between Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer?
JENTLESON: I think we are. And I think that what happens is going to have massive and very important ramifications not just for the Senate as an institution but for the everyday lives of American people. My personal view is the inevitable outcome of this war is going to be some kind of Senate reform that lowers the threshold from 60 votes to somewhere closer to a majority. I would prefer that it go all the way to a majority, but we’ll see what happens.
I think that the simple fact of the matter is that even if President Biden tries to secure bipartisan cooperation with Republicans, it’s simply not going to be forthcoming to the extent that he needs it to be. And that is going to force the question of whether Democrats simply want to give up on their agenda or reform the Senate so that they can pass bills on a majority basis.
The filibuster is a fundamentally undemocratic tactic that was used for decades to deny Black citizens their civil rights. Then McConnell came along and saw the opportunity to use the same tactic to ensure minority rule on everything. It is and outrage and it must be done away with. The Republicans are no longer operating with even the modest gentrue toward good faith.