Why keeping the filibuster intact doesn’t really promote bipartisanship

Bipartisanship is one matter — supermajority rule is another. In the public discourse centered on filibuster reform, the two are commonly conflated. But they are distinct phenomena. That’s what I think whenever I hear Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) express his opposition to eliminating the filibuster.

“The time has come to end these political games,” he wrote in April in The Washington Post, “and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation.”

The difficulty with his argument is that our current system doesn’t promote bipartisanship. Instead, it establishes a supermajority threshold where majority rule should suffice. And since a supermajority is an impossibly high bar, power is inadvertently centralized in the hands of a few.

At least that’s the de facto effect.

As things stand, a supermajority in the Senate — 60 of 100 senators — is required to pass legislation. That number is often unattainable, which means Congress can’t steward meaningful change or even pass basic, commonsense legislation. Change that would, for example, outlaw the effect of arbitrary factors — like the amount of melanin in your skin — from determining whether you have the right to vote. Or live freely, outside the confines of a penitentiary. Or live at all — and not perish at the hands of a police officer on your way home from the gas station.

What complicates matters is that the supermajority threshold doesn’t only stymie progress — it undermines it. That’s because bills aren’t the only ones languishing in the Senate, waiting for 60 “ayes” that never come.

Hope languishes, too. Americans have lost trust in the ability of the government to deliver. We see potholes sink deeper in our roadways and bridges creak and crumble from aging infrastructure. We see despair in the faces of Americans who struggle with opioid addiction, or the crush of student loan debt, or the fear that at any moment an active shooter might prowl through the hallways of their high school or office.

How can Congress deliver stability — both physical and financial — to the American people when the bar for passing legislation remains at an unattainable 60 votes?

Now, I appreciate the unique challenges Sen. Manchin faces, and how that explains his opposition to filibuster reform. As a Democrat, Sen. Manchin was elected in the state of West Virginia, where 69 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in 2020 — second only to Wyoming. That’s a difficult needle to thread. And yet, by opposing filibuster reform, Sen. Manchin enables a system where power is wrested from the hands of the many to the few.

For a moment, take off your red or blue hat and think in terms of numbers — only digits. Our nation has a population of approximately 330 million, and yet the gatekeeper to nearly all significant legislation is a single individual. These days, that man is Sen. Manchin, but as many readers will recall, not too long ago, that individual was Sen. Joe Lieberman. What hasn’t changed over the years is the number — power remains centralized in one. And the person at play isn’t the president, either, who was elected by the majority of Americans with a record 81 million votes. Rather, it’s a man who was voted in by the majority of West Virginians, a state

with a population of about 1.8 million. That means 0.5 percent of American voters are calling the shots for 330 million.

That fact alone should elicit bipartisan outrage.

Sen. Manchin argues that, “If we lose the filibuster, we’ve lost democracy as we know and we’ve lost the country being a reliable and stable power.” Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona argued something similar in The Washington Post last week.

That’s one way to characterize supermajority rule that gives centrists like them enormous power.

Here’s another: the future of our nation shouldn’t lie in the hands of so few. America wasn’t founded to empower a single man or woman. The colonists fled a king, remember? Bear in mind that the Constitution itself never once mentions the filibuster. That’s because this parliamentary procedure is a modern phenomenon, a concoction made up to actually suppress the vote of African Americans.

The idea that Americans of all stripes and political leanings should come together to create a more prosperous nation is an idea I fully support.

But the notion that a person — and not We, the People — should call the shots isn’t a matter of “bipartisanship.” In fact, to call it bipartisanship misses the point.

Congressman Hank Johnson represents the 4th District of Georgia and is a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, Transportation & Infrastructure Committee and the Oversight and Reform Committee. He is Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet.