The Democratic leadership doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster for the same reason the Republican leadership doesn’t want to get rid of it: The filibuster allows the leadership of both parties to keep their radical flanks at bay. Chuck Schumer needs the filibuster to protect himself from the Bernie Sanders wing in the Senate and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) wing in the House: if you can’t get to sixty, Bernie and AOC, we have to follow the lead of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Same goes for John Thune to whoever inhabits the radical role at any given moment in the GOP.
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For Trump, swap in Trump’s most rabid allies and foot soldiers in the Senate and the House — or Schumer’s and Hakeem Jeffries’s enemies in the Senate and the House — and you get a pretty clear sense of why the leaderships of both parties need the filibuster: It checks anyone who “defies party orthodoxy,” while providing “an excuse to avoid doing things.”
The fact that the Democrats want to keep the filibuster to keep progressives in check just makes their cave-in even worse.
Also, by acknowledging that this was the reason for their submission, it makes it first what we suspected: despite his denials, this move was orchestrated by Schumer, and the “defectors” were specifically chosen because they were either retiring or not up for re-election for so long that other “good deeds” for the manufactured to give them cover when they are up for re-election.
At this point, I’m only staying with the Democrats so I can pull them as far to the left in the primaries, after that they’re on their own.
I’m not sure where you got the idea they “acknowledged” this as their reason. It’s a wholly unsupported theory based on nothing but some random opinion in the NYT (although I do love the notion that this opinion somehow “got lost amid the excitement” as opposed to simply being uninteresting).
It doesn’t even make sense. You don’t need an opposition filibuster unless the majority of the party is “fringe” (straining the meaning of fringe). There are plenty of other ways to bury a bill or – worst case – excuse a couple defectors.
The writers at Jacobin want it to be true, because they need a reason why progressives aren’t in power that involves conspiracies.