Over time, competing forces will come into play. More obstructions by Republicans on a variety of issues can cause frustration, leading Democrats who opposed ending the obstruction to at least support the weakening. But as the midterm elections approach, some senators may be less willing to start a fight that reeks of partisanship.
“As you get closer to the intermediate tests, people get more nervous about anything that could be considered controversial,” said Ornstein.
A brief history
First introduced in preparation for the Civil War by John Calhoun, a strongly pro-slavery senator from South Carolina, obstruction was widely used during the Jim Crow era by segregationists who sought to prevent widely popular civil rights laws from being implemented. , put on. National surveys from 1930 to 1950 showed that the majority of Americans supported anti-lynching legislation, the abolition of electoral taxes and other laws – but senators from the segregated South Dixiecrat used the obstruction to prevent the legislation.
After the civil rights movement, resistance against obstruction led to the reforms of 1975; for the next few years, it remained the dominant domain for conservative southern senators like James Allen and Jesse Helms, who were “considered outlaws, almost outcasts among their colleagues,” said Jentleson, calling them “absolutely the Ted Cruzes of his days”.
“If the Republican leaders at the time could have done what they wanted, they would have made these guys stop and expel them from the party,” he said. “But it turns out that they were the progenitors of the direction that his party was taking.”
In his book, Jentleson writes that it may not be a coincidence that the GOP was inclined to use obstruction after the rise of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president. McConnell, who declared in 2010 that his main objective was to ensure that Obama was “a single-term president”, began using the 60-vote limit to prevent the passage of almost all legislation.
“Before McConnell, no leader had tried to deploy him against almost everything that came before the Senate,” said Jentleson. “It turned out that Republicans were able to easily evade guilt – and that voters held the ruling party responsible for failing to do anything and, in particular, blamed Obama for failing to deliver on his promise to break the impasse in Washington.”