When I arrived in the United States Senate in 2011, the Republican Leader would often paraphrase George Washington who referred to the Senate as the saucer beneath a cup of tea. Just like a saucer cools the tea, the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” was uniquely designed to cool the political passions of the time.
From the viewpoint of a limited government conservative, slowing down the passage of legislation that generally tends to grow government and reduce our freedom, the saucer analogy seemed very appealing. But now that I’ve served within this highly partisan and dysfunctional body for 15 years, I would say a better analogy is the Senate is more like the plaque clogging an artery leading to a heart attack.
There are two basic forms of debate in the Senate: speechmaking and the offering of legislation, motions and amendments for a vote. Senators love engaging in the former, but only the latter results in law. Once debate on a particular bill ends, passage requires only a simple majority, currently 51 votes. That has never changed. What has changed is the method for ending debate and “calling the question” or voting on final passage.
Prior to 1917, when Senate Rule 22 was passed establishing the cloture vote, there was no formal way of ending debate — a filibuster — in the Senate. Because unlimited debate was the tradition of the Senate, cloture was invoked only five times in the first approximately 50 years of its existence. That’s because the cloture vote was intended to end a debate that two-thirds (now three-fifths) of senators believed had gone on too long. For example, a cloture vote succeeded in ending debate on the Civil Rights Act but only after a 57-day filibuster — 57 days of debate. It was never intended to prevent all debate, however, that is exactly how it is now being used.
Rather than requiring a simple majority to get on a bill and start debate, now a supermajority of 60 votes is routinely required. This is a huge difference. Ideally, a bill addressing an important issue would be put on the floor and then further honed through a process of discussion and the adoption of amendments. Prior to 1917, as long as any Senator wanted to keep talking or offering motions and amendments (engaged in a filibuster), the question was not called.
Eventually, exhaustion set in and the Senate moved to vote on final passage — with a simple majority required for passage. This was how a deliberative body actually lived up to its name.
Now, instead of reserving the cloture vote for the very end of an extended filibuster as a last resort measure to end debate and vote on passage, the minority uses it at the very start of the process to prevent even getting on a bill, thereby blocking all debate. The resulting record of failure speaks for itself.
Total federal government debt is approaching $39 trillion. Since I entered Congress in 2011, we should have passed 180 appropriations bills prior to the start of the fiscal year they were funding. We have passed a whopping total of six on time. That’s a 96.7% failure rate. Because of that dysfunction, we have had five shutdowns, had to rely on 57 continuing resolutions to fund government on an interim basis, and increased or suspended the debt ceiling 12 times to allow the government to incur an additional $24 trillion in debt. We had a record 42-day shutdown at the start of this fiscal year, and now Democrats are holding TSA and other DHS employees hostage over their quest to defund ICE and CBP.
Both sides want to maintain the 60-vote cloture threshold to block each other’s legislative agenda when they are in the minority. But after Democrats fell only two votes short of ending the filibuster in 2022, the odds are extremely high that they will end it as soon as they regain the majority and it’s advantageous for them to do so. The Republican conference is divided between those of us who believe Democrats will end the filibuster and are therefore willing to beat them to the punch, and those who think we should risk waiting, hoping Democrats will preserve the filibuster. There are good faith arguments supporting both positions.
In light of the profound dysfunction described above, I’m not sure how things could get much worse by ending the filibuster. The status quo certainly isn’t working. I think it’s obvious things must change — we need a paradigm shift.
If the filibuster does end, we all might be surprised to find senators attempting to find common ground on more issues to help ensure bills pass with bipartisan support, thereby reducing the chance of being overturned when the other side regains power. At this point, I’m willing to make that change.
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Sen. Ron Johnson represents Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate and is serving his third term. He serves as Chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and is a member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Budget, Finance, and Aging committees.
