The Senate was designed to give the minority input, but the Framers rejected a supermajority threshold because it gives the minority a veto. Madison wanted the minority to have a voice, Calhoun wanted a veto. Manchin is defending Calhoun's vision of the Senate, not Madison's.
Madison called majority rule the “republican principle” and said that a supermajority threshold would cause “the fundamental principle of free government to be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.”
Hamilton said that while you may think a supermajority threshold promotes compromise “what at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison.” The “real operation” of a supermajority threshold is to “embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government.”
Calhoun had a different view. He thought the minority should have a veto- what he called, in his Disquisition on Government, “a negative on the others.” The Senate Manchin is defending has shifted away from Madison’s vision and fully embraced Calhoun’s vision of a minority veto.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Adam Jentleson 🎈

Adam Jentleson 🎈 Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @AJentleson

24 Mar
This is one of my favorite parts of the book: in 1957, Nixon teamed up with leading Senate liberals like Hubert Humphrey to try to nuke the filibuster to pass Eisenhower's strong civil rights bill. LBJ helped Russell & the white supremacist southern bloc defeat them. Then...
With the filibuster untouched, LBJ spent the summer of 1957 gutting Eisenhower's strong civil rights bill, making it so toothless that it was acceptable to Russell and the segregationists, who dropped their threat of a filibuster and let it pass. Of course...
Strom Thurmond waged his famous 24-hour filibuster against the 1957 bill. But he waited until LBJ had defanged it & until the rest of the southern bloc had signaled they wouldn't filibuster it. Thurmond's fellow white supremacist senators were furious at him for showing them up..
Read 8 tweets
23 Mar
It's quite literally a Jim Crow relic. The filibuster as we know it today, with the ability to impose a de facto supermajority threshold, was forged by self-avowed white supremacist senators during the Jim Crow era, for the express purpose of blocking civil rights bills.
When I say self-avowed white supremacists, I mean that literally, too. Here's Sen. Richard Russell, the chief practitioner, defender & innovator of the filibuster from the 1930s-1960s: "any southern white man worth a pinch of salt would give his all to maintain white supremacy.”
Or perhaps Senator Sasse would prefer to explain Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, another leading practitioner of the filibuster during the Jim Crow era and author of the book, "Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization."
Read 5 tweets
12 Mar
Dems should pay close attention to the elation they're feeling after passing the ARP combined with the off-balance defensiveness Republicans are showing. We should draw these threads together and ask: what happens if we just keep passing popular policies on a majority-vote basis?
One thing that might happen is, voters will start associating Dems with popular policies. Instead of explaining that we passed some muddle of a bill because we had to sacrifice good policy to secure a laughably small number of GOP votes, we can say we passed the popular thing!
Another thing that might happen is that some Rs might tire of being on the wrong side of very popular things. It's one thing when McConnell holds everyone together to defeat a big bill - that's a net gain for Rs. But what's the gain from voting against a bill that polls at 75%?
Read 5 tweets
4 Mar
Play it out: Republicans regain control of the WH and Congress. There's a bill they want to pass that has 50+ votes in the Senate but not 60. Does anyone really think that McConnell will let Dems filibuster it and just throw up his hands? Or will he nuke the filibuster himself?
Not an idle wager. Preserving the filibuster now in the hopes of using it later means giving up on issues like voting rights which are necessary to save our democracy. Is it worth sacrificing issues of that importance in the hopes that McConnell will let Dems keep the filibuster?
A few answers to this. First, wait and find out! Dems would quite literally be betting the fate of our democracy on the *hope* that McConnell decides to let Dems keep the filibuster. Giving up on voting rights while crossing your fingers that he keeps it is perhaps shortsighted.
Read 6 tweets
4 Mar
Folks whose response to filibuster reform is "but Manchin" must not remember 2013. When Obama took office, we were, conservatively, 20+ votes shy of reform. We got there in 2013. To be just a few votes shy this early, facing even more extreme obstruction, is a good place to be.
We are light years ahead of where I thought we'd be by now. I'll probably do a longer thread on this at some point, but on an issue like this, you look at how many layers of opposition you have to work through within the caucus - is it a 7-layer Ajax shield, or nah? On this...
... we've got elite consensus congealing, permission structure forming (with folks like David Brooks who Biden reads giving the green light) and senators like Coons and Tester who would have formed one of those layers of resistance already showing movement. Pretty darn good!
Read 5 tweets
19 Feb
This is an exciting agenda but using reconciliation again instead of taking it straight to the floor could be a big strategic mistake. Reconciliation lets Republicans off the hook, shifting attention from their obstruction to inter-party fights over what conforms to its rules...
By using reconciliation, you concede at the outset that Republicans will block the bill, cutting them out of the political narrative. The process takes weeks or months, during which time the narrative will be "Dems in disarray" as they argue over what should go in the package.
The antagonist becomes the Parliamentarian, not Republicans. Republicans get to sit on the sideline and take pot shots. Assembling a package of the size contemplated is a monumental task, which will be much harder without the centripetal unifying force of GOP obstruction.
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(