My understanding is that the filibuster endures because it allows the Senate to refuse to pass things that they actually don't want to pass, but that their base wants. "Sorry, my hands are tied, nothing I can do."
It's is precisely because senators (in this case Rs but in other cases Ds) don't want to actually have to vote on abolishing immigration or raising tariffs. Many know it's bad policy and would hurt them if it were to pass, but politically it's helpful for them to be able to say they "would if they could".
This dovetails with Public choice theory and makes the most sense of all answers thus far. If the public demands a policy that will make things worse, the politician will gain votes by supporting the policy but then lose votes when the predictable bad thing happens. Thus, the smart strategy is to give lip service to the bad policy but not actually pass it. The filibuster is a great way of achieving this goal. Also, Senators can say “if you really want that policy to pass, you need to work to get us to 60 votes!” That keeps the base focused on a near-impossible goal. If 51 votes were enough to pass and one party had, say, 55 votes, the base might say “Senator Raspberry isn’t good enough! Let’s run Mr. Strawberry against him in the primary! Even if Mr. Strawberry loses in the general election, we’ll still have a majority.”
Sir, I would be careful about using Chat GPT for this sort of thing. It can be especially wrong in this sort of analysis. For example, I asked Chat GPT (well, CoPilot) to generate a list of American metro areas with a metro population over 1 Million and no month with an average daily low below freezing. It missed the San-Francisco-Bay-Area!
So, maybe, at least do some random sampling on these numbers.
Also, it's worth noting that the mean may be 10.3 years, but the mode is 4. The mean is brought up by a few really long outliers. Not sure if or how that's relevant, but it might be worth considering...
Strictly speaking, the rule isn't that legislation requires 60 votes to pass. The 60 votes is related to the vote for cloture, which will end debate and force a vote. The idea is that if people are opposed to the legislation, they will just continue debate without voting on it. Since the 1970s, there has been a two-track system, such that the filibustered legislation is most often just set aside while the Senate focuses on other things.
Another idea: The filibuster moves the pivotal vote from the 50th Senator to the 60th. That leads to more moderation, which improves the party's ability to hold power. In other words, the slow turnover is in part attributable to the availability of the filibuster.
Expanding on this idea: Suppose there are 55 senators from the majority party. They how committed they are to their party's agenda. In order to abolish the filibuster, the majority party needs at least one vote from the five least-committed senators (the "moderates"). Without the filibuster, each one of those five moderates would be pivotal less often. Thus, abolishing the filibuster requires moderate senators to accept a reduction in their own influence over the senate's agenda. Even if no senator cares about their party's ability to hold power, moderates still have an incentive to preserve the filibuster to preserve their own power.
I think the answer is fairly simple. Senators have 6-year terms, are slightly risk-averse, and especially care about not losing *in their own chamber*. As a result, the median Senator expects to be in the chamber minority at some point during his term and prefers the filibuster to reduce the chances of losing even if it also reduces the chances of winning. If I'm right, legislative chambers with shorter terms are less likely to have filibuster-like supermajoritarian rules.
My mental model is that in a representative democracy, representatives have different opinions than their voters. Consider the four types of policies, and solve for the equilibrium:
A. Voters like it, reps like it
This policy simply gets enacted. Boring.
B. Voters don't like it, reps don't like it
This policy doesn't get enacted. Boring.
C. Voters don't like it, reps do like it
This is the "secret congress" phenomenon. The bill passes quietly.
D. Voters do like it, reps don't like it
This is the challenging case. Reps don't want to pass the bill, but voters want reps to support it.
The filibuster solves perfectly for case D. The representatives can make lots of noise about how they support a policy, but not actually do it.
Why would you want a higher filibuster threshold when the already-demonstated outcome would just be more executive orders and further diminishment of Congress's power?
The better solution is a higher passing threshold (I would stop at 2/3, because there are always cranks and holdouts vying for outsize publicity and power) and elimination of the executive.
Look at Cabinet and other senior officers. The President appoints them and fires them, but the Senate has to approve them and both chambers can haul them in for grilling as if Congress were their boss.
I figure since Congress has to interview and approve them, make them do the hiring too. Just standard bills. Let anyone introduce a bill to hire someone else.
That leaves the military, in the form of commander-in-chief. Same thing: Congress hires military commanders. They already have to approve all commissioned officers, and I believe flag ranks (generals and admirals) get special attention. As we enlisted peasants used to say in the Navy, "it didn't take an act of Congress to make me honest" -- if Congress thinks the Mideast needs its own commander, hire one, and delineate exactly what actions he can take on his own without violating his employment contract.
There are several good recent papers (see eg Gibbs QJPS on reputational politics and the filibuster). A few things: 1) The filibuster has already been severely degraded by reconciliation and mandatory spending. These two allow for simple majority spending increases and tax cuts plus auto-pilot spending increases (exec gets to control to some extent). So there's a kind of release valve for simple majorities that is expressed through reconciliation (side note: I'd invite critics of the filibuster to notice how typically "bad" these simple majority bills are relative to bipartisan legislation). 2) One way to view this is as a policy insulation game. There are insulation benefits to keeping the filibuster intact, but whether or not the parties care depends on discount rates. At some point, getting your way today is more important than keeping the policy in place tomorrow. 3) The choice isn't binary. You can nuke the filibuster for single topics, and they do (e.g., debt limit, judges, etc.). 4) Nuking the filibuster comes down to the pivotal member. This person is typically the most moderate member of the party and highest proensity to engage with the other party. Killing the filibuster makes that member much less important.
I think Congress believes getting demoted from the #1 branch to #3 at best is a feature. Legislating is hard, it involves accountability, and most importantly it takes time away from their cable news and social media schedules
And it's so much more lucrative, votes-wise, to rant and rave about the President and the other politicians doing the wrong thing, instead of trying to solve the problems that elected them.
I've seen the theory stated that Senators like the filibuster because it makes each of them individually more important (by raising the demand for aye votes), enabling them to extract more concessions when they are marginal to the passage of something.
On this analysis, the filibuster is a principal-agent problem, bad for the voters but good for the Senators.
(It would still have to be a balancing act; raising the threshold to 100 votes would make each Senator infinitely important in this sense, but it would make them unimportant in a more significant sense by removing the possibility of passing anything.)
I think the single most influential factor is the principal-agent problem:
When given a choice between solving the problems they care most about, and *campaigning* on those problems, Republicans will almost always choose the latter.
Their Democratic counterparts are increasingly selected for wierdos who believe in their own causes enough to be willing to choose the former, BUT are also sane enough to recognize that any bold action carries a cost which could result in a catastrophically deep loss to the cynical GOP.
Politicians and bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) never want to solve the problems that created their jobs and keep them employed. It's no coincidence that global warming ramped up after the Cold War ended. It's no coincidence that the COVID lockdown panics showed up after the public had shown little interest in climate catastrophe. It's no coincidence that the AI scares began as COVID ran out of steam.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
Cynicism aside, it’s still important to understand the precise extent and character of the principal-agent problems at work here.
Because despite Mencken’s conspiratorial intonations, revolutionaries and reformers throughout history have been able to make gains in deleveraging humanity from its naturally paranoid, tribalistic state.
That last paragraph is hard to give any credence to. My experience and reading of history shows that every government "solution" is one-size-fits-nobody and that by the time the government fix is in place, markets have mostly solved the problem on their own and the problem has morphed into something different, but the same government non-fix is still applied, undoing the market fixes and restoring the old bad status quo.
Breaking up Standard Oil is a great example. Rockefeller got rich by making kerosene and other petroleum products cheaper, and his competitors went broke because they couldn't keep up. Standard Oil was losing share because it depended on Pennsylvania oil and ignored the cheaper oil coming out of Texas and Oklahoma.
Very few revolutions have made anybody better off except the revolutionaries who survived by stabbing everybody else in the back. The American revolution was one of the few to be a great success, but there's no telling how it differed from what gradual political change would have accomplished.
I also deny that humanity's natural state is paranoia and tribalism. Cooperation and competition is its natural state, and it is only political leaders who choose war.
A filibuster-less USA would become a true banana republic with EVERYTHING at stake every election. You want institutional inertial in your politics. Wild swings of policy at high frequency produce a very unsettled populace, and they WILL act to lower the impact of politics and restore a sense of normalcy and predictability to their (and our) lives.
The constitutional design of the USA has a volatile, close-to-the-people House (all members subject to election every 2 years) and a remote Senate (originally elected/appointed by state legislatures) only 1/3 of which is up for election every 2 years to serve 6-year terms (memories fade). The House was expected to express the more-or-less immediate "will of the people" (raw democracy) while the Senate was then to apply its more considered, conservative, and independent judgment, mostly absent the threat of electoral retaliation, thereby protecting the nation's institutions from the wild passions of the masses (republicanism).
I think they are just lazy. Abolish the fillerbuster means they'll have to work harder, be even more accountable to voters and will not only be more likely to anger interest groups but won't have anyone else to blame when their policies fail. While prestigous, campaigning for congress costs a lot of money and the salary is very low so they need to spend most of their time collecting campaign contributions. Only candidates like Romney or pelosi can afford to politic full time.
My preferred story is that senators are, depending how you look at it, either less ambitious, focused, or arrogant than one might presume. I don't know any senators personally but I know people who do, and by and large, the report is that they're serious people who take their obligations seriously. Dems love to hate on Mitch McConnell but one gets the sense that he really, really cares about the health of the Republic as he understands it. The nuclear option, and the stuff you propose subsequently, is a really radical change. They'd get more power, but the potential reputational harms, esp. in historical memory, are huge. No one wants to be remembered as Palpatine. So I think we can get to the behavior we observe with a straightforward story about risk-aversion and, crazy as this might sound, humility.
If senators evolve to look more like members of the house, it'll be a different story. I don't think MTG is constrained by legacy concerns the way John Thune is.
My understanding is that the filibuster endures because it allows the Senate to refuse to pass things that they actually don't want to pass, but that their base wants. "Sorry, my hands are tied, nothing I can do."
It makes individual senators a lot more important, especially are moderates.
It's is precisely because senators (in this case Rs but in other cases Ds) don't want to actually have to vote on abolishing immigration or raising tariffs. Many know it's bad policy and would hurt them if it were to pass, but politically it's helpful for them to be able to say they "would if they could".
This dovetails with Public choice theory and makes the most sense of all answers thus far. If the public demands a policy that will make things worse, the politician will gain votes by supporting the policy but then lose votes when the predictable bad thing happens. Thus, the smart strategy is to give lip service to the bad policy but not actually pass it. The filibuster is a great way of achieving this goal. Also, Senators can say “if you really want that policy to pass, you need to work to get us to 60 votes!” That keeps the base focused on a near-impossible goal. If 51 votes were enough to pass and one party had, say, 55 votes, the base might say “Senator Raspberry isn’t good enough! Let’s run Mr. Strawberry against him in the primary! Even if Mr. Strawberry loses in the general election, we’ll still have a majority.”
That doesn't explain the difference between House and Senate.
Sir, I would be careful about using Chat GPT for this sort of thing. It can be especially wrong in this sort of analysis. For example, I asked Chat GPT (well, CoPilot) to generate a list of American metro areas with a metro population over 1 Million and no month with an average daily low below freezing. It missed the San-Francisco-Bay-Area!
So, maybe, at least do some random sampling on these numbers.
Also, it's worth noting that the mean may be 10.3 years, but the mode is 4. The mean is brought up by a few really long outliers. Not sure if or how that's relevant, but it might be worth considering...
Strictly speaking, the rule isn't that legislation requires 60 votes to pass. The 60 votes is related to the vote for cloture, which will end debate and force a vote. The idea is that if people are opposed to the legislation, they will just continue debate without voting on it. Since the 1970s, there has been a two-track system, such that the filibustered legislation is most often just set aside while the Senate focuses on other things.
Another idea: The filibuster moves the pivotal vote from the 50th Senator to the 60th. That leads to more moderation, which improves the party's ability to hold power. In other words, the slow turnover is in part attributable to the availability of the filibuster.
Expanding on this idea: Suppose there are 55 senators from the majority party. They how committed they are to their party's agenda. In order to abolish the filibuster, the majority party needs at least one vote from the five least-committed senators (the "moderates"). Without the filibuster, each one of those five moderates would be pivotal less often. Thus, abolishing the filibuster requires moderate senators to accept a reduction in their own influence over the senate's agenda. Even if no senator cares about their party's ability to hold power, moderates still have an incentive to preserve the filibuster to preserve their own power.
I think the answer is fairly simple. Senators have 6-year terms, are slightly risk-averse, and especially care about not losing *in their own chamber*. As a result, the median Senator expects to be in the chamber minority at some point during his term and prefers the filibuster to reduce the chances of losing even if it also reduces the chances of winning. If I'm right, legislative chambers with shorter terms are less likely to have filibuster-like supermajoritarian rules.
My mental model is that in a representative democracy, representatives have different opinions than their voters. Consider the four types of policies, and solve for the equilibrium:
A. Voters like it, reps like it
This policy simply gets enacted. Boring.
B. Voters don't like it, reps don't like it
This policy doesn't get enacted. Boring.
C. Voters don't like it, reps do like it
This is the "secret congress" phenomenon. The bill passes quietly.
D. Voters do like it, reps don't like it
This is the challenging case. Reps don't want to pass the bill, but voters want reps to support it.
The filibuster solves perfectly for case D. The representatives can make lots of noise about how they support a policy, but not actually do it.
Why would you want a higher filibuster threshold when the already-demonstated outcome would just be more executive orders and further diminishment of Congress's power?
The better solution is a higher passing threshold (I would stop at 2/3, because there are always cranks and holdouts vying for outsize publicity and power) and elimination of the executive.
Look at Cabinet and other senior officers. The President appoints them and fires them, but the Senate has to approve them and both chambers can haul them in for grilling as if Congress were their boss.
I figure since Congress has to interview and approve them, make them do the hiring too. Just standard bills. Let anyone introduce a bill to hire someone else.
That leaves the military, in the form of commander-in-chief. Same thing: Congress hires military commanders. They already have to approve all commissioned officers, and I believe flag ranks (generals and admirals) get special attention. As we enlisted peasants used to say in the Navy, "it didn't take an act of Congress to make me honest" -- if Congress thinks the Mideast needs its own commander, hire one, and delineate exactly what actions he can take on his own without violating his employment contract.
There are several good recent papers (see eg Gibbs QJPS on reputational politics and the filibuster). A few things: 1) The filibuster has already been severely degraded by reconciliation and mandatory spending. These two allow for simple majority spending increases and tax cuts plus auto-pilot spending increases (exec gets to control to some extent). So there's a kind of release valve for simple majorities that is expressed through reconciliation (side note: I'd invite critics of the filibuster to notice how typically "bad" these simple majority bills are relative to bipartisan legislation). 2) One way to view this is as a policy insulation game. There are insulation benefits to keeping the filibuster intact, but whether or not the parties care depends on discount rates. At some point, getting your way today is more important than keeping the policy in place tomorrow. 3) The choice isn't binary. You can nuke the filibuster for single topics, and they do (e.g., debt limit, judges, etc.). 4) Nuking the filibuster comes down to the pivotal member. This person is typically the most moderate member of the party and highest proensity to engage with the other party. Killing the filibuster makes that member much less important.
I think Congress believes getting demoted from the #1 branch to #3 at best is a feature. Legislating is hard, it involves accountability, and most importantly it takes time away from their cable news and social media schedules
And it's so much more lucrative, votes-wise, to rant and rave about the President and the other politicians doing the wrong thing, instead of trying to solve the problems that elected them.
I've seen the theory stated that Senators like the filibuster because it makes each of them individually more important (by raising the demand for aye votes), enabling them to extract more concessions when they are marginal to the passage of something.
On this analysis, the filibuster is a principal-agent problem, bad for the voters but good for the Senators.
(It would still have to be a balancing act; raising the threshold to 100 votes would make each Senator infinitely important in this sense, but it would make them unimportant in a more significant sense by removing the possibility of passing anything.)
That sounds less workable than the Articles of Confederation.
I think the single most influential factor is the principal-agent problem:
When given a choice between solving the problems they care most about, and *campaigning* on those problems, Republicans will almost always choose the latter.
Their Democratic counterparts are increasingly selected for wierdos who believe in their own causes enough to be willing to choose the former, BUT are also sane enough to recognize that any bold action carries a cost which could result in a catastrophically deep loss to the cynical GOP.
Politicians and bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) never want to solve the problems that created their jobs and keep them employed. It's no coincidence that global warming ramped up after the Cold War ended. It's no coincidence that the COVID lockdown panics showed up after the public had shown little interest in climate catastrophe. It's no coincidence that the AI scares began as COVID ran out of steam.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
Cynicism aside, it’s still important to understand the precise extent and character of the principal-agent problems at work here.
Because despite Mencken’s conspiratorial intonations, revolutionaries and reformers throughout history have been able to make gains in deleveraging humanity from its naturally paranoid, tribalistic state.
That last paragraph is hard to give any credence to. My experience and reading of history shows that every government "solution" is one-size-fits-nobody and that by the time the government fix is in place, markets have mostly solved the problem on their own and the problem has morphed into something different, but the same government non-fix is still applied, undoing the market fixes and restoring the old bad status quo.
Breaking up Standard Oil is a great example. Rockefeller got rich by making kerosene and other petroleum products cheaper, and his competitors went broke because they couldn't keep up. Standard Oil was losing share because it depended on Pennsylvania oil and ignored the cheaper oil coming out of Texas and Oklahoma.
Very few revolutions have made anybody better off except the revolutionaries who survived by stabbing everybody else in the back. The American revolution was one of the few to be a great success, but there's no telling how it differed from what gradual political change would have accomplished.
I also deny that humanity's natural state is paranoia and tribalism. Cooperation and competition is its natural state, and it is only political leaders who choose war.
A filibuster-less USA would become a true banana republic with EVERYTHING at stake every election. You want institutional inertial in your politics. Wild swings of policy at high frequency produce a very unsettled populace, and they WILL act to lower the impact of politics and restore a sense of normalcy and predictability to their (and our) lives.
The constitutional design of the USA has a volatile, close-to-the-people House (all members subject to election every 2 years) and a remote Senate (originally elected/appointed by state legislatures) only 1/3 of which is up for election every 2 years to serve 6-year terms (memories fade). The House was expected to express the more-or-less immediate "will of the people" (raw democracy) while the Senate was then to apply its more considered, conservative, and independent judgment, mostly absent the threat of electoral retaliation, thereby protecting the nation's institutions from the wild passions of the masses (republicanism).
I think they are just lazy. Abolish the fillerbuster means they'll have to work harder, be even more accountable to voters and will not only be more likely to anger interest groups but won't have anyone else to blame when their policies fail. While prestigous, campaigning for congress costs a lot of money and the salary is very low so they need to spend most of their time collecting campaign contributions. Only candidates like Romney or pelosi can afford to politic full time.
My preferred story is that senators are, depending how you look at it, either less ambitious, focused, or arrogant than one might presume. I don't know any senators personally but I know people who do, and by and large, the report is that they're serious people who take their obligations seriously. Dems love to hate on Mitch McConnell but one gets the sense that he really, really cares about the health of the Republic as he understands it. The nuclear option, and the stuff you propose subsequently, is a really radical change. They'd get more power, but the potential reputational harms, esp. in historical memory, are huge. No one wants to be remembered as Palpatine. So I think we can get to the behavior we observe with a straightforward story about risk-aversion and, crazy as this might sound, humility.
If senators evolve to look more like members of the house, it'll be a different story. I don't think MTG is constrained by legacy concerns the way John Thune is.