Why is it that the politicians keep referring to America as a “democracy”? How many times have we heard that former President Donald Trump is “threat to democracy”? By democracy they mean “majority rules.”
Well, yes, we are a democracy. We vote our politicians in and out of office.
But more exactly we are a republic. This is basic civics: Our forefathers set up myriad checks and balances to protect against majority rule and to safeguard the right of the minority. We have three branches of government. We have two houses of Congress. We have a presidential veto to repel bad laws. We have a Supreme Court to strike down laws that violate the right of our citizens.
We have 50 states that make their own laws. These are all safeguards against tyranny.
In short, we don’t have mob rule in America. Sorry, 51 percent cannot impose their iron-fisted rule on the other 49 percent — thank God.
Now we have Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats in Congress promising to end the filibuster in the Senate if they take power. This would allow a Democratic (or Republican) majority to steamroll through legislation with just 51 votes, not 60. It would be mob rule that endangers the rights of the minority. It would also make it easier for Congress to pass laws. We should want to make it harder given how many bad and invasive laws we live under today.
For the record, Republicans have tried this gambit when they have had majorities in the Senate. I made a lot of enemies when I came out against the Republicans for attempting to take this nuclear option several years ago. Even for appointments to the Supreme Court, it should take 60 votes, not 51 given the enormous powers to conferred to these robed judges.
One of the most brilliant defenses of the filibuster came from Sen. Mike Lee. He argued when Biden was elected president that retaining the 60-vote rule in the Senate should be sacrosanct.
He noted that “leftists tend to see the Senate’s 60-vote cloture threshold not as a prudent protection of minority rights, but as an anti-democratic obstacle to progress. Indeed, former President Barack Obama — a prolific filibusterer himself during his Senate career — falsely derided the filibuster rule as a ‘Jim Crow relic.’”
But Lee warned: “The true purpose of nuking the filibuster is not to ‘finally get things done’ or to ‘break through the gridlock’ or any other hackish trope parroted by the political press. Rather, it is to allow a Senate majority to pass partisan bills that aren’t politically compelling enough to attract bipartisan support.”
Lee warned Democrats that if they “nuke the filibuster” they are being shortsighted. Republicans would use these same new rules to pass a “border wall,” education “reforms embracing school choice,” more gun rights, defunding of woke programs and so on.
Lee then noted that even though he would personally support most of these bills, abandoning the filibuster is not the way to achieve these legislative victories.
I would like to commend two Senate Democrats who put the republic above party and saved the filibuster in the last few years. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona were the only two Senate Democrats who heroically saved the filibuster two years ago.
That is the good news. The bad news is that both will be gone from the Senate next year.
The Democrats may sweep in November or the election may tilt the other way with a wave for Republicans winning the political troika: the White House, the Senate and the House. Who in the Senate will take a principled position as Lee, Manchin and Sinema have to prevent mob rule in Washington?
The filibuster is not in the Constitution. But as far back as the first years of our nation, George Washington called the Senate the chamber of Congress that would “cool” legislation coming from the House of Representatives. The Senate is supposed to be the most deliberative body ever invented. That can be frustrating for those who want dramatic change.
But bad laws passed in the heat of the moment are much, much worse than no laws at all.
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a cofounder of Unleash Prosperity. He is also an economic advisor to the Trump campaign. His new book, “The Trump Economic Miracle,” coauthored with Arthur Laffer, will be released later this month.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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