Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has previously criticized the Senate filibuster rule, reiterated in a recent interview that she would favor changing it to allow a majority to codify Roe v. Wade. This response enraged Senator Joe Manchin.
“Shame on her,” replied the retiring West Virginia former Democrat. “She knows the filibuster is the holy grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”
I have seen some strained and ahistorical defenses of the filibuster, but the holy grail of democracy is a new level.
To begin with, political scientists might argue about whether and to what extent the filibuster is compatible with democracy, but there’s no serious definition of the term that would define it as an essential feature of democracy. The most basic definition of democracy is a system that enables elected majorities to control policy changes. Democracies protect rights for minorities (freedom of speech, etc.), but they do not typically allow political minorities to prevent policy change.
If a supermajority requirement to pass legislation were a crucial feature of democratic governments, all 50 state governments, not to mention virtually every foreign government we typically think of as democratic, would be nondemocratic. None of these governments decided to include a filibuster in their design. Indeed, the Founders also chose not to include a supermajority requirement in their legislative design. It evolved in the 19th century as a Senate rules tradition, first requiring unanimity, then a two-thirds supermajority, and later a 60 percent supermajority.
During the first nearly two centuries of its use, the filibuster was employed as a rare weapon to signal extreme displeasure (per tradition, most frequently by white Southerners to block civil-rights laws). It only became a routine supermajority requirement in the 1990s. Before then, large contested legislation usually passed on a majority basis.
Some senators have convinced themselves that the modern version of the filibuster was decreed by the Founders and etched into the foundations of the Republic. The best cinematic depiction of this kind of pompous, unquestioning belief in a totally irrational form of government is, ironically, also titled “the Holy Grail”:
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