Kyrsten Sinema is a worse problem than Joe Manchin. This is because she is incoherent. Here’s Greg Sargent:
If and when Republicans refuse to allow any debate of the Democrats’ voting rights legislation on Tuesday, there will be a hidden silver lining: It will finally force the Senate to engage in the grand argument over the filibuster that many of its denizens have ducked for so long.
As one of the last Democratic holdouts against filibuster reform, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) is making big news with an op-ed in The Post laying out her rationale. Some of its central pronouncements have already been debunked: Despite her claims otherwise, the filibuster does not facilitate moderation or bipartisan cooperation.
But there’s an even more fundamental flaw in Sinema’s argument: Defending democracy and the filibuster simultaneously, in the terms that Sinema herself employs, is simply incoherent to its core.
Sinema’s own treatment of these questions inadvertently serves to reveal that a choice must inevitably be made between the two — and that Sinema is choosing the filibuster over defending democracy.
The core of Sinema’s argument is that “we will lose much more than we gain” from ending the filibuster. Sinema opposes doing this even for the narrow purpose of passing the sweeping voting rights reforms that already passed the House:
“To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to pass the For the People Act (voting-rights legislation I support and have co-sponsored), I would ask: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see that legislation rescinded a few years from now and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law or restrictions on voting by mail in federal elections, over the objections of the minority?”
That truly is frightful. Imagine a world in which legislative majorities could pass voting restrictions over the objections of minorities!
Oh, wait, we already live in that world. In state after state after state, voting restrictions of all kinds are being passed into law by Republican-controlled legislative majorities, over the objections of minorities. Crucially, this is happening almost exclusively on partisan lines.
I’ve concluded that Sinema simply doesn’t know what she’d talking about. Jonathan Chait agrees:
Earlier this month, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, speaking to reporters, laid out a thoroughly ahistorical defense of the filibuster. To be fair to Sinema, her initial error, crediting the filibuster to the Founders (who in fact rejected it, only for it to emerge by mistake decades later) is a common one, and she was speaking extemporaneously.
Today, Sinema has a second shot to explain her thinking in a Washington Post op-ed. But her revised filibuster rationale, despite having the benefit of premeditated thought and editing, still relies on utterly false grounds.
Sinema’s central argument is captured in the headline “We have more to lose than gain by ending the filibuster.” She warns that a majority-rule Senate would allow Republicans to easily roll back any Democratic policy gains:
And, sometimes, the filibuster, as it’s been used in previous Congresses, is needed to protect against attacks on women’s health, clean air and water, or aid to children and families in need …
To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to expand health-care access or retirement benefits: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to later see that legislation replaced by legislation dividing Medicaid into block grants, slashing earned Social Security and Medicare benefits, or defunding women’s reproductive health services?
To those who want to eliminate the legislative filibuster to empower federal agencies to better protect the environment or strengthen education: Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see federal agencies and programs shrunk, starved of resources, or abolished a few years from now?
Almost every specific example she cites here as a possible or actual grounds of defense by the filibuster cannot be protected by the filibuster.
The reason is that the Senate has work-arounds for the filibuster. One is for confirmation of judges or executive-branch appointments. The other is for bills that change taxes and spending. The latter, called budget reconciliation, can be passed with 51 votes.
Almost every program Sinema cites above is a spending program that can be defunded through budget reconciliation: women’s health, aid to children and families in need, health care, Medicaid, Medicare, women’s reproductive services, funding for federal agencies to protect the environment and education. Several of them have been targeted in budget reconciliation bills.
Budget reconciliation rules do exempt Social Security (an exemption that is itself yet another of the Senate’s arcane, idiosyncratic distinctions that serve no logical purpose — why should Social Security alone have a protection that, say, Medicare and Medicaid don’t?). Likewise, regulations (such as clean air and water) can’t be repealed through budget reconciliation, though their enforcement can be defunded, or simply curtailed through administrative neglect, neither of which is subject to filibustering.
Given that Republicans could roll back any of the vast array of federal programs cherished by Democrats with a majority in both chambers and the presidency, why didn’t they do it either of the last two times they enjoyed full control of government?
The answer points to the essential fallacy of Sinema’s reasoning. Nearly all those programs are popular — so popular that even Republican voters would blanch at attacks on them. Republicans suffered grievous political damage when they attempted to defund Obamacare. (That episode points to yet another asymmetry of the filibuster — a law that required 60 votes to enact could have been destroyed with a mere 51.)
She’s not the only one I’ve heard say this. Claire McCaskill said on MSNBC the other day that the Democrats had stopped all kinds of “bad things” during the Trump years with the filibuster.
But that’s silly. If Mitch McConnell had really wanted to pass any of those things it’s not only the case that he could have used those work-arounds (which he did with the tax cuts) he would have certainly eliminated the filibuster to do it. He even defied Trump’s constant exhortations to get rid of it, not because he cares about the “institution” but because he didn’t want his crazies to have the opportunity to pass a bunch of crazy stuff that would be horribly unpopular.
He is about maintaining power, period, and if he thought that eliminating the filibuster would help him you can be sure he would have done it. In fact, he did, by eliminating the filibuster for judges, his Holy Grail.
The Republican agenda is to stay in power by any means necessary so they can roll back as much of the safety net as possible and deliver for their rich donors. That is it. The rest is all culture war kabuki. They believe that by packing the courts, rigging the electoral system in their favor and blocking the Democratic agenda is their best bet to achieve that goal. If it ends up in civil war, they’re fine with that too.
Sinema is a fool. A dim, fool who thinks she’s going to be the Maverick McCain of her era. Not true. She is going to be the Jesse Helms of her era and there were no big state funerals or Navy fly-overs for that guy.