WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Wednesday delivered remarks on the U.S. Senate floor arguing that the 60 vote threshold to pass legislation is dangerous under the current political climate, and that the Senate should value the will of the voters, who elected a majority of Democrats in Congress, over Senate tradition.
“The argument to keep the 60 vote threshold to guarantee policy consistency or to uphold Senate tradition is downright dangerous. Because this argument essentially prioritizes consistency over democracy. At the very moment when Americans have less faith than ever before that this place has the capacity to implement the will of the people, the 60 vote threshold is a slap in the face of majoritarianism, which is the bedrock principal of American democracy—the idea that the majority of Americans get to decide the direction of this country. Not elites. Not oligarchs. People. Regular people. To say that Americans can have an election, [choose] leaders of a particular view, and then watch while the rules of democracy deliberately stop the voters’ will from being enacted, is to thumb our nose at the American electorate—at the very moment when they are actively considering whether American democracy has anything left to offer them,” Murphy said.
Murphy continued: “The 60 vote threshold, in a country built on the strength of direct democracy, stands out like a sore, rotting thumb—this anti-majoritarian drain clog, designed intentionally to stop the majority of Americans from getting what they want from government.”
“Consistency as a value has merit. It does. But in this business, consistency is often put on an unhealthy pedestal. What is the value of being consistent? All the circumstances around you are changing. Where is the strength in sticking to your position when everything else around you is in metamorphosis? When democracy itself is being attacked in a brutal, coordinated, and unprecedented volley of blows, what is the good of holding to a position, just for the sake of being consistent, if the primary consequence is to simply greenlight the assault to continue,” Murphy concluded. “Consistency and tradition and bipartisanship—they matter. But not at the expense of democracy. Not at a moment when millions of voters are questioning the wisdom of American democracy, because no matter who they elect, nothing seems to change. And not when one party has increasingly abandoned the joint project to which all members of this body swore an oath as a condition of our membership. I yield the floor.”
On Tuesday, Murphy joined MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports to discuss the For the People Act and future of the filibuster in the United States Senate.
A full transcript of Murphy’s remarks can be found below:
“Mr. President. My state proudly calls itself the Land of Steady Habits. Some people in Connecticut think it’s kind [of] a funny thing to be proud of—being resistant to change—but honestly, in the Northeast, the crucible of America, we know we know that there’s a real value to consistency and tradition. A nation as unique as ours—multicultural, democratic, ever expanding in scope and ambition—we probably can’t hold together unless there is some agreement between all our different peoples about the expectations that we have for each other in the conduct of our national business. Without tradition, our nation’s defining dynamism, it might break us.
“So, yeah, it’s wildly old fashioned to hold town meetings where every citizen must has got to show up on one particular day to help make decisions about how you spend money or what rate you pay taxes. But that way of governing, created in New England some four centuries ago, is still the method of decision making in many of our towns. It may not be the most efficient means of government, but tradition matters. It helps to hold us together as a country.
“So I know and appreciate the value of consistency. I don’t deny it. And so, earlier this week, I read with interest an opinion piece, penned by one of my friends in the Senate Democratic Caucus, making the argument that amongst the most important reasons to preserve the 60 vote threshold in the Senate is to the advance the value of consistency in American politics.
“Now, I was glad to read it. I’m proud of my colleague because for too long, the punditry and the activists—they’ve had near exclusive domain over the debate about the wisdom of changing the rules of this body. And so it’s been strange, given how much this place means to the 100 of us who serve here, that we’ve mostly left the dialogue over its future to those that don’t work inside this chamber every day.
“Yes, right now, there is a disagreement amongst Senate Democrats, and between the majority of Senate Democrats and the majority of Senate Republicans about how the Senate should operate. But there’s no merit in hiding this dispute. There[‘s] no valor in letting others define the terms and lay out the conflicting arguments, which I readily submit, are compelling on both sides.
“So let’s have the debate. Let’s have it right here. Now. No more shadow boxing. The stakes, I would argue, are too important.
“So let me start here. The argument to keep the 60 vote threshold to guarantee policy consistency or to uphold Senate tradition is downright dangerous. Because this argument essentially prioritizes consistency over democracy. At the very moment when Americans have less faith than ever before that this place has the capacity to implement the will of the people, the 60 vote threshold is a slap in the face of majoritarianism—which is the bedrock principal of American democracy—the idea that the majority of people get to decide the direction of this country. Not elites. Not oligarchs like in other nations. People. Regular people. To say that Americans can have an election, [choose] leaders of a particular view, and then watch while the rules of democracy deliberately stop the voters will from being enacted, is to thumb our nose at the American electorate—at the very moment when they are actively considering whether American democracy has anything left to offer them.
“My colleague argues, quite powerfully, that the requirement to achieve 60 votes to pass legislation in the Senate guards against rapid policy change, giving several examples, including education and environment policy, and voting rules, as areas where danger might lie if one majority imposed a policy in one Congress that would be undone by the next.
“I want to walk us through this argument. My first approach might be to postpone the harder question of whether or not to value consistency over democracy and to simply accept, for a moment, the prioritization of consistency and tradition. I do so knowing that our Founding Fathers also prioritized consistency. In Federalists 9 and 10, Hamilton and Madison discuss what they call the problem of factions. Madison says that a faction is ‘a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, adverse to the rights of other citizens.’ Notice here that Madison doesn’t really care whether the faction represents a minority or majority of citizens. He simply defines it by its cause’s malevolence. Now, of course, this was, and still is, tricky business—rich, White men defining for everyone else what cause is righteous and which cause is wicked. But our Founding Fathers built our system of government to make rapid change—even change supported by the majority of voters—very, very hard to implement.
“How did they do this? And I want to lay this out, because if you do care about preventing rapid policy shifts, it’s important to understand why the 60 vote threshold isn’t necessary—is overkill—given all the other barriers our system has to prevent rapid policy shifts. First, our Founding Fathers established a bicameral legislature as opposed to a unicameral parliamentary system. That meant that no change could be implemented until two different legislative bodies agreed to the exact same text. Second, they layered on top of the bicameral legislative structure—a unitary President with the power to veto that legislation. Third, they put in place an unelected body, the Supreme Court, that could invalidate any statutory changes that conflicted with the Constitution. Fourth, they put the House, the Senate, and the Presidency all on overlapping, conflicting election schedules, guaranteeing that it would be 100 percent impossible for the voters to sweep out all elected officials and replace them with a new slate all at one moment. And fifth, the Founders built a few supermajority requirements—but only for selective occasions: treaties, impeachments, constitutional amendments. The stuff that could last forever—the Founding Fathers did want extra consensus around all that.
“All of that design has lasted and [is] still with us today. But there are other parts of the original design intended to protect the value of consistency—to protect against the danger of faction—that have not lasted. The Founders also believed that only White men should vote. And that citizens shouldn’t be trusted to directly select the members of this body. That’s all history. Because for all the anti-faction design that we’ve kept, we’ve changed just as much. And all the change has moved in only one direction—toward more majoritarian democracy.
“Why? Well, because as our grand experiment, American experiment, matured, we saw proof of concept. The people could be trusted to govern themselves. They could choose leaders that were more able, more honest, more effective, than any king or queen, any sultan or emperor. So we extended the franchise universally. We directly elected the Senate. And as America expanded, the new states out West, they gobbled up even more democracy. The west decided to not just elect legislators, but judges and prosecutors, dog catchers and insurance commissioners. Majoritarian rule was addictive, and our country as it grew, it demanded more and more of it.
“And that brings us to the 60 vote threshold. The 60 vote threshold, in a country built on the strength of direct democracy, stands out like a sore, rotting thumb—this anti-majoritarian drain clog, designed intentionally to stop the majority of Americans from getting what they want from government.
“Proponents of existing Senate rules say that in the name of bipartisanship or tradition or consistency of policy, we should purposefully frustrate the changing will of the electorate. But why? Why not trust voters? For instance, voters elected a president and a Congress in 2008 that promised to enact a system of universal health care. Now it just so happened that the only time in the last forty years, there were 60 votes in the Senate was during a few brief months after that election. And so a universal health care law was passed.
“But why should it not be up the voters, and not politicians, to review the efficacy of a major policy change like that, and if they so choose, elect leaders to rescind [or] revise it? I don’t want the ACA repealed, but I’m deeply uncomfortable that a 60 vote threshold robs from voters that decision.
“This preference for policy consistency, intentionally blind to the merits of the policy over direct democracy, is particularly insidious at this moment in American history. First, because the 60 vote threshold is being used [in a] very, very different way today than at any time prior in our chamber’s history. Up until the 1970s, cloture[s] were almost non-existent in the Senate. Legislative filibusters were used, in those days, mostly by racist Southern White Senators to stop civil rights bills. But, in the 70s, that tactic became more widely employed, but it was still used sparingly.
“Consider this. In 1994, our colleague Senator Feinstein forced a vote here on the most controversial of all bills—a ban on assault weapons. It received fewer votes than the Manchin-Toomey background checks bill thirty years later. Senator Feinstein’s proposal got 52 votes; Manchin-Toomey got 54 votes. But the assault weapons ban became law while the background checks bill did not. Why? In 1994, many important votes, even the assault weapons ban, were allowed to proceed on a majority vote basis. Not so by 2013.
“Now, I can make the argument that Republicans started the rapid escalation of the 60 vote threshold’s use, but who really cares? Does it matter? Because today, both parties use it, almost without exception, in a way that looks radically different from the tactic’s utilization a half century ago. And so, I would argue that an overview of the history of 60 vote threshold, it doesn’t tell a story of the value the Senate places on consistency. No, it’s the opposite. Watching the way that the tactic has been used so differently over time, it shows the value the Senate places on change, in practice and tradition. Reforming this rule would frankly just pay heed to this reality.
“The second danger of valuing consistency over democracy at this moment lies in the signal that it sends to an American public that is in frankly no mood for the choices of elites to be continually substituted for their own collective judgment. Right now, Americans are in kind of a revolutionary mood, and for good reason. More Americans today than at any time in recent history, see themselves on the precipice of financial and sometimes spiritual ruin. They are done with economic and political elites jealously protecting the status quo, and the election of Donald Trump, though revealed by time to be a fraudulent and false prophet, was an unmistakable foot stomp by an electorate that is sick and tired of being taken for granted.
“So why on earth would our message, amidst this growing populist tempest, be to tell voters that rules in the Senate are required to protect them from their own bad judgment—to take from them, purposely, the ability to change policies, whenever and however they wish. I submit to you that today—right now—this replacement of popular will by anti-majoritarian rule rigging, could destroy us. Today, more than ever, voters want to know that their vote counts. Every election. And continuing to give a minorities here in the Senate power to stop change is dangerously disconsonant with the current political mood of this country. Take power away from the American people at your peril.
“Finally, on this question of the value we should place on consistency, I want to raise the problem of the city firehouse. Now, firehouses are creatures of consistency and tradition. Firefighters spend a lot of time in close quarters, and when that alarm rings, are required to work in precise, disciplined unison to get out the door in seconds in order to save lives and property. Practices change in a firehouse, but carefully and through consensus decision making. Keeping everyone together matters when the stakes are so high.
“But what were to happen if inside that firehouse, a sizable group of firefighters decided, one day, that the mission of the department should no longer be to put out fires, but to maybe instead, to just let them burn a little. Wouldn’t then the value of consensus decision making become a little less important? If you were a homeowner, wouldn’t you want to make sure that the firefighters who still wanted to fight fires were setting the rules and not the guys who were okay with the houses in the neighborhood burning down?
“Now, I know this is a crude analogy, but to value consistency or tradition, I think you have to be pretty certain that everybody in your club, everybody on your team, is guided by the same foundational goal.
“In the case of the United States Senate, our goal, our endgame has always been simple: the preservation of American democracy, the belief that every American should have a say in who governs, and the persons that they choose, and no one else, should be seated in power. Now, we’ve had fights, often vicious in nature, over the course of our nation’s history over how fast we should expand the franchise, and how quickly we should reform our Constitution to allow more direct democracy.
“But never before has one party actively advocated for the lessening of democracy. Never before has one party openly advocated for candidates who received the smaller share of the vote to be made President of the United States. In the last year, a democratic Rubicon has been crossed by one party and we cannot ignore this devastating blow to our nation.
“You cannot value consistency in practice when a large faction of your group’s members don’t believe in the underlying mission of your organization any longer. The firehouse cannot just keep doing the same things it always has, year after year, for the sake of consistency, when two or three members that hop on every truck when that alarm sounds aren’t intending to put out the fire when they arrive at the building.
“Giving Republicans a veto power over legislation when they no longer believe, in the same way Democrats do, or Republicans used to, in the sacredness of the vote, is to risk the voluntary destruction of our democracy.
“Consistency as a value has merit. It does. But in this business, consistency is often put on an unhealthy pedestal. What is the value of being consistent when all the circumstances around you are changing? Where is the strength in sticking to your position when everything else around you is in metamorphosis? When democracy itself is being attacked, in a brutal, coordinated, and unprecedented volley of blows, what is the good of holding to a position, just for the sake of being consistent, if the primary consequence is to simply greenlight the assault to continue.
“Consistency and tradition and bipartisanship—they matter. But not at the expense of democracy. Not at a moment when millions of voters are questioning the wisdom of American democracy, because no matter who they elect, nothing seems to change. And not when one party has increasingly abandoned the joint project to which all members of this body swore an oath as a condition of our membership. I yield the floor.”
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