One Obstacle among Many: The Filibuster and Majority Party Agendas

In today’s hyper-partisan environment, scholars and commentators contend that the filibuster poses a nearly insuperable obstacle to a Senate majority party’s agenda, limiting Congress’s output to non-controversial measures. Drawing on data about congressional majority party agenda priorities from 1985 to 2020 we identify when and how majority party legislative efforts fell short of success and take stock of the degree to which the filibuster was the primary culprit. Not surprisingly, our data confirm that the filibuster is a significant problem for majority party agendas. But an even more common cause of failure is the majority party’s inability to agree among themselves. Despite increased voting cohesion generally, parties in the polarized era still routinely struggle to bridge their own internal divides.

“A Free-Range Chicken that Can Run Wherever the Majority Wants It To”: Budget Reconciliation and the Contemporary U.S. Senate

Since its early uses in the early 1980s, the budget reconciliation process has played an important role in how the U.S. Congress legislates. Because the procedures protect certain legislation from a filibuster in the Senate, the reconciliation rules both shape, and are shaped by, the upper chamber in significant ways. After providing a brief overview of the process, I discuss first how partisanship in the Senate has affected the use of the reconciliation procedures. Next, I describe two sets of consequences of the contemporary reconciliation process, on negotiation and on policy design. I conclude with some observations about the relationship of reconciliation to the prospects for broader procedural change in the Senate.

Senate Republican Radicalism and the Need for Filibuster Reform

The case for reform of the filibuster practice in the Senate is much stronger now than a few decades ago. The emergence of conservative populism and radical Republican strategies in the Senate has created more serious consequences for the Senate’s traditional rules and practices. This essay draws a clear connection between conservative populism, the strategies of Senate Republicans, and legislative gridlock in the Senate. It concludes with a review of the arguments of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema against reform and argues that they fail to account for how conservative populism has so thoroughly changed their institution.

The Distortions and Realities of the Senate’s Constitutional Purpose: Setting the Record Straight on “Senate Exceptionalism”

Drawing on part of the argument from my recent book, The Senate: From White Supremacy to Government Gridlock (University of Virginia Press, 2021), I critique what I call “Senate exceptionalism:” the notion that the Senate is the framers’ particularly special or remarkable creation. I do so by contrasting the historical and constitutional distortions that support this institutional conceit with the realities of the founding and American political development. After reviewing the parallels between the ideas and tenets of American and Senate exceptionalism, I introduce four arguments from the book that undermine the basis of the Senate’s exceptionalism and in particular draw critical attention to the constitutional mythology surrounding and supporting the filibuster in the form of Senate Rule XXII and its three-fifths supermajority threshold for ending debate on many matters before the Senate.

The Legacy of Rush Limbaugh Will Always Be Tied to Donald Trump

This article explores Rush Limbaugh’s efforts to tribalize American politics through his racially divisive, falsehood-ridden portrayal of President Obama. By playing and preying on white anxiety, the host laid the groundwork for the election of a president who essentially adopted his view of the Obama presidency. Limbaugh’s rhetoric about Obama serves as a case study whereby the most influential part of the conservative media during those years represents the whole. “How did we get here?” is the essential question right now in American politics. How did we go from a society that relatively easily elected Barack Obama twice to one that, popular vote loss aside, elected Donald Trump, and came within a small popular vote shift in three states from doing so again in 2020? Analyzing how Limbaugh ginned up white racial anxiety about a Black president helps us understand the rise of Trump, who began his White House campaign by serving as the nation’s birther-in-chief and who, in his reaction to the white nationalist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, to name just one example, demonstrated his reliance on white identity politics. As Jamelle Bouie wrote: “You can draw a direct line to the rise of Trump from the racial hysteria of talk radio—where Rush Limbaugh, a Trump booster, warned that Obama would turn the world upside down.”

Tribes and Proto-Tribes: The Deep Roots of Political Differences

People belong to political tribes that support particular positions on a variety of substantive policy topics; however, when the topics that divide a polity involve identity, in-groups, out-groups, core institutions, homogeneity, diversity, security from outsiders, and immigration, tribalism will be especially ferocious and debilitating. I refer to tribes based on these core matters as proto-tribes because the issues involved connect to our species’ evolutionary past. Due to longstanding individual predispositions, people manifest deep policy preferences either 1) to protect their society’s insider populations and institutions by being relentlessly vigilant against the intrusions of human outsiders, especially immigrants or 2) to enrich their society by embracing diverse outsiders and by being vigilant against the untoward power of insider institutions. Whenever societal conflict centers on proto-tribes—as was the case in the 1860s and 1960s and is the case today—rather than tribes that emphasize positions on issues such as taxes, regulations, transgender rights, and preferred governmental structure, the political system will be endangered.