The Senate filibuster isn’t part of the Constitution of the United States. That’s deliberate. The American founders always wanted to balance majority power and minority rights, but not with a veto. When they wrote the second Constitution, they already knew that supermajority rule was a bad idea. America’s first Constitution demonstrated in frustrating detail how supermajority governance fails.
What? Did you forget about the first one?
After the American Revolution, Congress wrote and passed the first Constitution: The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The Articles were short, sweet, simple to read, and a dismal failure. Our first attempt at democratic governance didn’t last a decade.
To be fair, before then, none of the founders had written a Constitution. It was the first draft of liberal democracy. We had some lessons to learn. The Articles had more than a few flaws: only voluntary taxes, no judiciary, and no executive. It was a few bricks short of a load. Still, we doomed the Articles by saddling them with supermajority requirements. Decisive action on most critical functions required approval from nine of the thirteen states before we could start. We don’t have to imagine how that worked. Worse, Congress couldn’t fix their new government because of the second supermajority: all thirteen states had to approve any amendment. Any single state could kill a change it didn’t love.
The government under the Articles was an international disaster. We couldn’t take federal actions, pay our bills, or act on a global scale. It was humiliating. We pitched the first Constitution in the trash and wrote a second, brand new one: The Constitution of the United States. Here’s to hoping the second shot’s the charm.
Unsurprisingly, our new and improved Constitution did not have the filibuster or anything like the Senate’s cloture rules. The painful experience was still fresh. The founders had watched supermajorities devolve down to minority obstruction and sniping.
I hope we can find a better balance between majority rule and minority rights. We didn’t base America on utilitarianism (“The greatest good for the greatest number”), and I don’t want to start now. But constant minority obstruction isn’t even a compromise. Haven’t we learned anything from the fiasco of our first Constitution?
