Wordle while the world ends: How filibuster-friendly Democrats could help undo democracy

Squandering precious hours on word games, to paraphrase a great humorist, is nothing to be ashamed of — and nothing to be particularly proud of, either. Unfortunately, the otherwise harmless word-based time sink of the moment, Wordle, allows players to post their personal results on social media amid the usual reports of human calamity, provoking further discourse about the value of publicizing said results. It’s like not only forcing friends and strangers to look at your completed crosswords but also encouraging them to discuss whether you should continue to do so while the country crumbles.

A sense of similarly willful triviality pervades the debate over the filibuster now consuming the seat of our national government even as it threatens to implode, like a superannuated star, into something unrecognizable. At issue is whether a majority of a legislative body with 100 members is in fact 51, as the immutable laws of mathematics dictate, or some other number suggested by the U.S. Senate’s hopelessly convoluted, frequently altered and fundamentally incomprehensible rules.

By engaging in this debate during what might be the last months of American democracy, our representatives may as well be playing Wordle at the end of the world.

Opinion

As if to underscore the politically apocalyptic stakes in the most genteel way possible, Senate Democrats invited two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, to talk to them over lunch Tuesday about their book, “How Democracies Die.” One answer to the question implied by the title turns out to be that such demises are abetted by elected elites who are co-opted or cowed by authoritarians. Sound familiar?

Biden goes nuclear

Just in case the book club approach didn’t work, the nation’s most powerful Democrat and Senate alumnus, Joe Biden, suddenly shed his too-long-held senatorial centrism the same day, imploring the Senate’s Democratic majority to put the filibuster out of its misery. He argued that they must do so to protect voting rights over the objections of the chamber’s Republicans, whose party is engaged in a nationwide crackdown on ballot access and election integrity.

Biden is an old man who was first elected to the Senate at the age of 29. He is so instinctively enamored of the chamber’s hoary traditions and impulses that at one point during the 2020 campaign, he boasted of making common cause with segregationists. That gave then-California Sen. Kamala Harris her opening to wipe a debate stage with him in the most unsenatorial manner possible.

By the time he traveled to Atlanta on Tuesday to make that speech alongside now-Vice President Harris, Biden had at long last come to see it her way. “The threat to our democracy is so great that we must find a way to pass these voting rights bills,” he said. And if they don’t pass because, for all kinds of tiresome reasons, it takes 60 votes to get most legislation through the Senate, “we have no option but to change the Senate rules, including getting rid of the filibuster.”

The president was effectively attempting to persuade his former colleagues to change the Senate’s bylaws to preserve the system of laws in which the Senate exists. He went on to accurately frame the choice as being between the pluralistic democratization of the civil rights movement and the resurgent antidemocratic authoritarianism that can be traced to the Confederacy and its Southern segregationist successors, who happen to have avidly availed themselves of the filibuster.

“Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?” Biden demanded. “Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Given that he is a creature of the Senate, it’s remarkable that Biden ever reached this conclusion. Given that he is a creature of American democracy, it’s remarkable that it took this long.

Kyrsten Sinema, critical tool

Even if the Senate were ruled by simple majorities, its 50 Republicans would enjoy disproportionate power in that they represent 43 million fewer Americans than its 50 Democrats. The filibuster accords even more unearned leverage to this right- and white-skewing minority to block legislation that would protect the more racially diverse and liberal voters arrayed against it.

And yet it’s not clear that the polite persuasion of Ivy Leaguers or the raw power of the presidency will have its desired effect on the conservative or clueless Democrats still devoted to what West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the party’s most prominent holdout, recently called a 232-year tradition.

Contrary to Manchin, the filibuster as we know it isn’t even old enough to be a millennial, let alone constitutional. While the tradition of unlimited debate dates to the Senate’s early days, it wasn’t used to grind the chamber to a halt often enough to formalize a filibuster-ending procedure until the 20th century. The 60-vote threshold to do so, meanwhile, is newer to the annals of the Senate than Biden himself.

Nor has that rule stood inviolate for its less than 50 years of existence. A simple Senate majority has passed more than 25 major bills since 1980 using an end-run known as the reconciliation process. Most executive and judicial nominations became a matter of 51 votes less than a decade ago, followed by Supreme Court nominations less than five years ago.

In a typically absurd floor speech Thursday, Manchin’s wacky Western counterpart, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, nevertheless called the filibuster “a critical tool that we need to safeguard our democracy from threats in the years to come.” But the tool at hand is Sinema herself: Nothing would prevent a future Republican majority from undoing the rule for any reason.

Republicans, in fact, were the first to threaten to use a loophole in the Senate rules to undo the filibuster and nickname the tactic the “nuclear option” — a coinage that is particularly comical now that the alternative might be a democratic meltdown far more destructive than any parliamentary procedure. Former President Donald Trump called for going nuclear on the filibuster during the most recent Republican majority, in 2017, and the party has since lost whatever will it retained to resist him.

Sinema and Manchin are the public face of Democratic filibuster apologists, but more Wordlers are barely hiding behind them. California’s own Dianne Feinstein spent the past year embroiled in an argument with her staff and herself over the procedure.

Some of the potential reforms Democrats are considering, moreover, are incredibly mild and likely insufficient: allowing a majority vote to debate but not pass bills, for example, or requiring an old-fashioned “talking filibuster.” The latter would force the minority party, rather than merely threatening a filibuster, to literally prolong the debate by holding the floor with speeches.

That’s right: more words.