A prominent political dilemma for Republicans is whether to abolish the Senate filibuster rule. Do so, and legislation will no longer require 60 votes for passage — only a simple majority. Doing so would also abandon a deliberative tradition in force since the mid-1800s. However, there presently is an overhang of another vital concern, an implication so consequential that the “existential” descriptor really does apply.
Read more Farewell to the Euro Debt Club
The Republican reluctance to kill the filibuster rests on the party’s usual diffidence, and also false hope. The Senate Democrats, along with the party hierarchy that runs them, have already declared that they will deep-six the filibuster as soon as they regain power in the upper house. But the Repubs seem to believe quixotically that, if only they refrain from eliminating the filibuster, the future Dems may be inspired to do likewise. How quaint and naïve.
The world has recently re-learned the tough lesson that when fanatical totalitarians tell you they will do something, believe them, whether the zealots are named Khomeini or Hitler. Likewise with the totalitarian zealots we know as American liberal Democrats, presently concerning abolition of the Senate filibuster. So the filibuster rule very likely has a short life expectancy anyway.
Why is this contingency such a big deal? Here is what happens absent the Senate filibuster, if and when the Democrats take over Congress along with the presidency.
(1) The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico become states, providing the Dems with four more Democrat senators and a nearly insurmountable Senate majority.
(2) The Dems pack the Supreme Court by adding either four or six ultra-liberal Democrat members, thereby giving the Democrat party, already controlled by its far-left wing, effective political control over all three branches of government.
(3) The U.S. border is reopened to a flood of illegal aliens.
(3a) All illegal aliens in the United States are given amnesty, adding tens of millions of net Democrat voters, making it impossible for a Republican to win a national election ever again. (This latter scenario is the Democrats’ own announced “replacement” strategy.)
Presto. In a few simple steps ¾ the modern equivalent of the Enabling Act of 1930s Germany ¾ the Democrats achieve their long held dream of establishing a permanent, one-party leftist/socialist state. Ponder, if you dare, the nature of every leftist dictatorship the world has seen over the last century. If you don’t think today’s Dems would be just as bad, you haven’t noticed how ruthless they can be even with limited power. Pleasant dreams, comrades.
Why should Republicans hand the Dems such open-field running room? As Senate majority leader John Thune has recently said, “The Democrats may intend to steal the car, but we don’t have to give them the keys.” Translated: Don’t provide future Dems with the no-filibuster advantage. Yet there is one decisive reason to eliminate the filibuster now, in advance of the next Democrat government: to inoculate against future Democrat-imposed national doom through present-day reform, such as the following.
Read more Rahm Emanuel has disgraced himself
If Senate Republicans torpedo the filibuster rule, they may be able to pass the SAVE Act, instituting election reforms including voter ID. That would make vote fraud and election theft much more difficult for the Dems, or anyone. No mass vote fraud now, as the Dems and their media allies claim? Get real. How do you think the Democrats became notorious for stealing elections over the decades? They even fix their own primaries! If you hadn’t heard of Chicago Democrats, dead voters in Chicago, or Chicago 1960, most Americans have. (See Richman et al., Electoral Studies, 2014, for a scientific estimate of the magnitude of illegal voting by non-citizens in the U.S.) At the least, with SAVE Act reforms in place, the Dems cannot take absolute power unless they earn it electorally.
Thus, killing the Senate filibuster, ultimately, is the last feasible defense to forestall Democrats. Although future filibuster elimination would indeed be the Dems’ route to permanent, total power, the SAVE Act would make illicit Dem ascension less likely. (Voting integrity can be an obstacle to future election chicanery, in other words.)
This issue can be viewed as a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma from game theory. The Republican plight: (a) Kill the filibuster and (+) they are able to pass some valuable law, such as SAVE, but then (-) the Dems will eventually use the precedent to enact everything their side has always wanted to do to destroy the country! Conversely, (b) don’t kill the filibuster and (-) lose the SAVE Act benefits, but (+) this Repub restraint could inhibit the Dems from nixing the filibuster in the future. The inherent strategic flaw in applying this approach to present circumstances should be obvious, but apparently is not to some Senate Republicans, to wit:
The Dems will kill the filibuster when they get the chance, no matter what the Senate Repubs do now. (So it is not a true game because, although the Republicans have been playing, the Democrats are not.) At that point, Repubs will ask themselves, “What good did it do us not to eliminate the filibuster? If we had done so, the resulting reforms might even have prevented the Dems’ takeover.” Therefore, the rational choice is for Senate Republicans to nuke the filibuster now, to enact vote reform law that may even succeed in stifling the Democrats from taking absolute power to America’s detriment.
If no SAVE Act because the filibuster remains for now, the country is defenseless against a Democrat takeover. How long before the absolute-ruling Dems would cancel the Constitution, dynamite Mount Rushmore, defund the police, change the country’s name (to USSA perhaps), and legislate that all female athletic teams must include at least one trans member, whether an athlete or not?
Ironically, killing the filibuster appears to be the only path to the SAVE Act, and any Republican action that lowers the probability of grim Democrat autocracy from 100 percent to even 90 percent is the preferred strategy. Otherwise, the Dems definitely will give themselves carte blanche to do all those terrible things they have always wanted to do to you.
Get it, Senate Repubs? Get it, John Thune? Will someone please wake up the majority leader before it is too late?
The author is a longtime registered Democrat and longtime registered Republican, intermittently and serially, not simultaneously, which should dispatch any misimpression of partisanship. His academic research specialization for the past half-century has been social/political power and conflict.
Read more A spoonful of sugar helps the poison go down
Image via Pxhere.