Tag: The Federalist Papers

Founding Fathers Rejected the Filibuster

By Chase Wheaton

The legislative filibuster in the Senate is probably one of the least understood aspects of our government, especially in a historical context, but is simultaneously the most significant obstacle to tangible governance and progress that currently exists in our legislative branch. And now that Senate Democrats are being forced to pass President Biden’s American Rescue Plan through budget reconciliation so that Republicans don’t use the filibuster to stonewall COVID relief for millions of Americans during a national crisis, it’s time we have a better understanding of the thing that’s been responsible for so much gridlock in Washington over the last 50 years.

In the original iteration of the Senate, there was no such thing as a legislative filibuster, and for good reason. On its surface, the legislative filibuster might sound like a tool to allow for sufficient debate before legislation is voted on, or even as a tool to prevent a majority party from simply ramming their agenda through Congress. Upon closer inspection, however, you’d see that the legislative filibuster creates a Congress that our founders explicitly wanted to avoid when they formed our government. The existence of this filibuster essentially means that, while passing most legislation only requires a simple majority of 51 votes, ending the debate on legislation to actually vote on it requires a super-majority of 60 votes. The way our Senate currently operates, you need more votes to end debate about a piece of legislation than you do to actually pass it. The result? A seemingly endless stalemate that hurts the working-class American voter more than anyone else. 

This form of legislation is precisely what James Madison, one of the principle authors of the Constitution, warned against in The Federalist Papers, when he said that if super-majority voting requirements became routine in our legislative body, “the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.” Sadly, this is exactly how the filibuster has been used more and more frequently since its inception in the early 1800s. It has allowed legislators representing a minority percentage of the country to halt legislation from being passed by the majority party, and for no other reason than because they care more about power and their own party than they do about progress and our democratic institution. And while this procedural component of the Senate may feel like an unavoidable truth of legislating to some, the wonderful truth of the matter is that it doesn’t have to be.

One of the fundamental rules of both legislative bodies of Congress is that each gets to determine its own rules and operating procedures at the start of each term. This means that, if Senate Democrats so chose, they could end the legislative filibuster and open the doors to sweeping change and progress for our country, arguably at a time in our history where it’s needed now more than ever. Now is the time for bold and progressive legislation and governance, and to fulfill the campaign promises that Biden and the rest of the Democratic party made to the American people last year, and there’s no way to do that with the filibuster in place. Even if Republicans were to retake control of the Senate in two years and use the absence of the filibuster to their own legislative advantage, at least we’d know that Senate Democrats did absolutely everything in their power to help and serve the American people during this time of widespread tragedy and devastation, rather than simply roll over and accept an otherwise avoidable fate.

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The Lessons of Electoral Reform: Becoming President Should be Hard

By Nic Woods

It seems the Electoral College has no friends these days. 

Whether on the left (miffed as popular vote winners have not always become president) or the right (who seem to have forgotten that this system allows them to punch well above their weight, power-wise) everyone seems to want to dump the Electoral College into the garbage and set it on fire, including members of the Electoral College themselves.

Not so fast.

The Electoral College is misunderstood, mostly because we still put so much weight on what the framers of the U.S. Constitution originally intended, but not enough weight on what those framers would not have possibly understood.

Whatever the framers intended, it may not necessarily extend to, say, electric vehicles, as even Ben Franklin had not so much as envisioned horseless carriages or enough available electricity to juice up an electric vehicle, much less a fleet of them. 

They may have been brilliant men for their time, but their imaginations were limited to what they knew, so they created systems that could be changed to reflect a future they could not envision.

Americans tend to conveniently forget that.

The Constitution can be, and has been, changed. It is difficult, but not impossible. The parts of the Constitution that address the Electoral College has been changed a couple times – once with the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, and one other time since, as any book with the actual Constitution in it strikes out part of that amendment.

The first step here is to admit that the Electoral College, as envisioned and even as amended, may still be outdated. Much of the assumptions embedded into it no longer hold true – that suffrage is limited to white male landowners, there are no political parties, that the redistricting process is not gamed by one party or the other to benefit it, that only the best men run for office, and they must rely on regional publishers to promote them, as self-promotion is too gauche.

Despite all that, the Electoral College has only failed to reflect the popular vote four times in our history – 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 – a pretty good track record for an outdated concept.

Valid arguments say there is no reason to throw it out completely, but there are plenty reasons to drag it into the 21st Century and make changes that reflect near-universal suffrage and gerrymandering, as well as offset greater partisanship, a national but hyper partisan media landscape, misinformation and disinformation. 

While the Electoral College needs to be reformed, most of us do not understand enough about it to know where to start. The next step could point toward raising the bar to become president just a bit higher. 

Any Electoral College reform should encourage a candidate to work for every vote, whether it is from an urbanite, suburbanite, or exurbanite, from a swing state or a state that solidly votes for one party or another. This would require states to eliminate gerrymandering. To date, 32 states already have “faithless elector” laws (15 of them with the teeth to punish) that prevent their electors from going off-script. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared these faithless elector laws constitutional, they should be easy to spread to the remaining 18 states.

Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, advocated for a “vigorous” executive. One way to figure out how vigorous a future president will be is to support a system that will make him work to earn his office.

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Sources:
“Meet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves” — The New York Times, July 6, 2020
“Supreme Court Rules State ‘Faithless Elector’ Laws Constitutional” — NPR, July 6, 2020
The U.S. Constitution Explained – Clause by Clause – for Every American Today, Annotated by Ray Raphael
The Constitution of the United States of America
The Federalist Papers No. 68
Heather Cox Richardson’s History & Politics Chat, July 7, 2020
“Beau of the Fifth Column” Let’s Talk about the electoral college, power and Jules Verne