The Sinema Rule
Simply put: imagine the same law being used against you and your ideals following the next election.
Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema and I don’t share a great deal in common. As a doctrinaire, left-of-center Democrat who is strongly pro-abortion, a gun control proponent and supports the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021, Sinema’s views and mine are wildly far apart. But we share a vision of the proper role of the US Senate in moderating our politics, and specifically, the role of the filibuster in preventing wild swings in our nation’s body of laws.
This view of the Senate has placed Sinema at odds with her Democrat counterparts, excepting of course, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. But Sinema has captured the essence of the filibuster, I think, best. Manchin’s positions on abortion and gun control likely reflect the views of his conservative constituency, while Sinema has the tougher job of explaining why the filibuster really matters - and should matter to Democrats - in the first place. Because the filibuster has stalled out legislation she actually supports. That’s a tough act to explain.
In her own words, here’s how she explains it:
"In four years or any time when the other party gains control, without the filibuster in place, all those voting rights protections could be wiped out with a simple majority vote," Sinema said during an August 2021 interview on "The View."
In other words, Democrats should be cautious in passing laws or adopting policies which might carry over to a new Congress, or a Republican administration, which would be inclined to use those same laws and policies against the Democrats. This in fact happened when Democrat Senator Harry Reid ended the filibuster for the Senate’s advise and consent of Obama’s presidential appointments (the “nuclear option”), which was expanded by Senator Mitch McConnell to include Supreme Court nominees. Now these confirmations simply proceed along a more or less straight, party line vote. There’s no longer a need to put forth moderate candidates or appointees with broadly recognized accomplishments - any partisan hack will suffice, so long as you have 50+1 votes to get it done.
Perhaps some Democrats have been paying attention. I know back during the George W. Bush administration they were. I recall the warnings Democrats raised about the Patriot Act and how it could be used to target American citizens. I wish we’d have listened to those Democrats because they were right. Secret FISA warrants issued by clandestine courts were used repeatedly by Democrats to target the Trump administration.
There’s no way of knowing for sure, but this may be another reason why the DHS’s Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board has been placed - at least temporarily - on the shelf. For it’s one thing to have such a monster fighting in your corner, but imagine if the other side gets its hands on it. I doubt anybody in the White House considered this, but possibly cooler heads asked this very question.
This is the Sinema Rule.
And it’s a good rule to play politics by. If a law or Senate rule, say, is a good idea, then it must be a good idea if the other guy can use it too. Or, as in the case of the dreadfully titled DGB, it’s just not a good idea. The same goes for the election-rigging John Lewis bill. What if Republicans decide to play the same game? Then we end up with more votes cast than there are people eligible to vote - and elections have no legitimacy. So this only works when just one side does it. And how’s that supposed to work?
This is what Schumer proposed with killing the filibuster, “just for this one vote” then we’ll put the filibuster back. Right. Like once you’ve let that genie out of the bottle, it’s ever going back in. The truth is you need a whiteboard to sketch out all the various positions Schumer has had on the filibuster over the years.
And the filibuster is what makes the Senate different. Without it, we could abolish the Senate altogether and simply allocate two more representatives to each state on an at-large basis. Then whatever the House passes, we just send straight to the president’s desk. Even for short term political gain I cannot fathom why Democrat senators would willingly dilute the power they have. A zero-vote majority swung by the vice president is hardly a pretext for “winner-take-all” politics.
The Founders didn’t intend for our country to operate as a pure democracy, but rather a constitutional republic with strong state representation in the upper house - the Senate. The idea was to prevent temporary passions from becoming law. The Senate accomplishes this today through the filibuster - it slows things down and takes the emotion out of legislation. It tempers partisan savagery.
Perhaps Democrats don’t expect they’ll ever lose the majority again. Or perhaps they don’t care - that the enactment of laws affecting 330 million people and a $23 trillion economy are just so much virtue signaling to their rabid base.
Or maybe they have an expectation that the laws they violated in 2020 to mass-mail ballots and pay harvesters to collect the votes they needed will be just enough to ensure they won’t be a minority party again.
If that’s so, they should tell Kyrsten Sinema.