When President Biden expressed support for a modest change in obstruction this week, supporters of the reform saw it as a major tipping point. Your reason for celebration? The president was recognizing that the fate of his agenda is tied to Senate procedures, which makes it difficult to keep campaign promises. And a blocked agenda can have consequences for the party.
“It will be Armageddon,” Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley told CBS News when asked if Democrats will suffer mid-term if they don’t approve obstruction reforms. “Our base will be so discouraged, so angry, so dissatisfied. They will stay home. And I understand why they will stay home if we fail with them.”
Merkley has long pushed for changes in obstruction and introduced “spoken obstruction”, which would require senators to actually hold the word to prevent legislation, rather than the current practice of contacting them by phone. In an interview with ABC News, Biden said he supported this type of reform, which reminded him of how the upper house worked in his early days as a senator. Now, he said, “It’s getting to the point where, you know, democracy is having a hard time functioning.”
Support for significant changes in obstruction is still a long way off, with some Democratic senators like Joe Manchin maintaining opposition to changing the 60-vote limit for legislation, even when they seem open to adjustments.
But advocates note that Republicans have not yet obstructed legislation, such as the COVID relief bill, which was broadcast on the party lines through a reconciliation process this requires only the support of the majority. As soon as the opposition starts in earnest, agenda items like voting rights, climate, immigration and other Democratic priorities, calls from the party base to change upper house rules will only get louder.
“At the moment it is an abstract issue, nothing has been obstructed yet. It will get real quickly,” said Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for Fix Our Senate, which launched a six-figure advertising campaign this week urging lawmakers to remove the obstruction.
Democratic candidates “did not run with ‘we will do these things for you if McConnell allows us’,” said Zupnick, a former Senate aide. “If Democrats show voters and people why they elected Democrats, they will have the best chance of holding the majority … But if they don’t do these things, people will wonder why they put Democrats in charge if they don’t. didn’t deliver. “
Merkley said his party’s voters are getting frustrated when they see Republicans change the rules of obstruction to confirm the nominees to the Supreme Court by a simple majority – the court is the top item on the Republican Party’s agenda – while Democrats are reluctant to change the rules according to your priorities.
“Our base is saying ‘what a bunch of idiots you are,'” said Merkley. “You campaigned on that and are going to allow Republicans to have a simple majority path while just saying, ‘well, I’m sorry, but we can’t do anything because McConnell is blocking us?’ They expect us to have the same courage to do the things that Republicans did to make their agenda. “
Senator Dick Durbin, a member of the leadership, has been pushing for an obstruction reform this week. “If it weren’t for reconciliation, we would have little to show for this session other than the nominations,” he said.
Obstruction is not imposed by the Constitution, and the rules on the prevention of legislation have been revised over time. But it did not become a common tool of obstruction until the end of the 20th century. And in the last decade, “there have been as many clotting movements in the past 10 years (959) as during the 60-year period from 1947 to 2006 (960),” according to the Brennan Center.
In 2013, the then Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, changed the obstruction to allow for judicial and executive nominations with the support of a simple majority after Republicans blocked President Obama’s nominees. Then, when Republicans gained control of the Senate, McConnell changed the rules to approve Supreme Court justices by a simple majority, paving the way for the confirmation of three nominees under the Trump administration.
Changes in obstruction are “usually connected to a specific political moment,” says Molly Reynolds, senior research fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. “It’s a long war of attrition … where the two sides are sometimes a majority, sometimes a minority and are frustrated by the obstruction that they were willing to make a change in the way the Senate works.”
Activists believe that the specific political moment to push for an obstruction reform this time is on the right to vote, with a comprehensive proposal being passed by the House and facing probable death in the Senate. The issue was central to the Senate campaigns in Georgia, which gave the Democrats a majority.
One of those senators, Rafael Warnock, used his inaugural address this week to spread that message. “It is a contradiction to say that we must protect minority rights in the Senate while we refuse to protect minority rights in society,” he said. “Colleagues, no Senate rule should nullify the integrity of democracy and we must find a way to approve voting rights, whether we get rid of the obstruction or not.”
Former President Obama endorsed the removal of the obstruction to protect voting rights, noting that it has traditionally been used to block civil rights legislation.
But Mr. Biden did not go that far. And there are limits to how much the speaking obstruction he endorsed could really alleviate the obstruction, if 60 votes were still needed to move on to the bill after the debate. There is also a question as to whether such a suspension would have any effect on other legislation that the Senate is considering.
Currently, the “no-show” obstruction allows the Senate to move on to other items while paralyzing the obstructed bill. The procedural move could be changed to force senators who want to block a measure to stay on the ground and talk about it for hours and days. Doing so could make them a little more selective about the accounts they would obstruct. And talking about obstructions can also cost the majority, if they stop acting on all other items, including priorities that most want to move – like other bills or appointments – while the obstruction is in progress.
What would that mean, besides slowing down the already famous slow-acting Senate? If lawmakers had the stomach for it, real obstruction reform could give senators more time to talk to each other and reach an agreement.
“When we look at these reforms, the devil is in the details,” says Zupnick. “It has to be the case that these reforms really do lead to the ability to pass bills. There has to be a time when that comes to a conclusion.”
Manchin, who expressed openness to a talking obstructionist, said this week that keeping the 60-vote limit in place is a priority for him and said he was opposed to making exceptions to certain legislative acts, such as a voting rights bill. His presence in the Senate is a reminder that even if Democrats had the vote to change the rules of obstruction, which they do not, it is not clear whether some of the more moderate Democrats would support all major pieces of legislation in any way.
“We always have to ask ourselves if there are really 50 votes in the Senate? The rules are not magic, they cannot force a deal where there is no deal, ”says Reynolds.
The West Virginia senator pointed to the other part of Biden’s comments in which he said he did not think the obstruction should be removed, and took advantage of those comments to show “how important it is to maintain the obstruction while protecting the rights of the minority.” reforms, he added: “Everyone has different ideas and there is a good conversation to be had.”
Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Senator Reid who recently published a book on Senate rule reform called Kill Switch, says that a 60-vote speaking obstruction in place could ease the obstruction on smaller projects, but that Republicans they would probably strive to be present to block expensive items.
Jentleson says reforms for the obstruction are likely to take a while, but that Biden’s comments this week were significant in moving the needle.
“It is not everything we want, but it is very encouraging,” he said. “Not only the endorsement of a talking obstructionist, but also his reflection of the use of the obstructionist since his time in the Senate, which shows that he is thinking very seriously about it.”
“It’s March 2021 and you have President Biden and Joe Manchin endorsing the concept of reform. Even in very mild terms, that’s just light years ahead of where I thought we would be right now,” he said. “This is the Senate’s equivalent to a very rapid change.”