Earlier today, Senator Kyrsten Sinema (of Arizona) gave a speech on the floor of the United States Senate.
Her Democratic colleagues are — as we speak — trying to overcome the Senate loophole known as the filibuster, which Republicans are abusing to prevent anyone from stopping them from dismantling our democracy in broad daylight.
Yet Sinema stood there repeatedly lamenting the “disease of division infecting our country.”
Of course, she’s hardly the only politician to ever complain about “division.”
The problem with Sinema’s obsession over “division” is that she pretends it’s a two-way street, with Democrats and Republicans equally responsible.
But that is flat-out ridiculous.
- Serious commentators like Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute have long pointed out that the growing political divide in the United States reflects what they call “asymmetric polarization.”
- In other words, it is Republicans who have gone scorched earth on democracy, not Democrats.
- Mann and Ornstein wrote that *before* Donald Trump came to power — subverting basic norms of decency, competence, and truthfulness — and *before* Trump made the Big Lie definitional for the Republican Party.
- In fact, many of the worst Republican scorched-earth policies — including voter suppression targeting people of color, extreme gerrymandering, and preparation for outright election sabotage — are the very things the democracy bills under consideration in the Senate aim to redress.
So Sinema is wrong about who’s to blame for “division.”
Senator Sinema is also wrong — extremely, catastrophically wrong — about the role of the filibuster.
Sinema seems to think that the filibuster encourages bipartisanship.
In practice, it does the exact opposite.
- Not that long ago, filibusters were relatively rare, and it took only 51 senators to advance most bills.
- Senators from the two major parties might fight tooth and nail, but at the end of the day, once either party got to 51 “yea” votes, what would actually happen is that senators who had been opposed would come onboard so that they could try to influence the exact language of the legislation and so that they could get some credit for something that was going to pass anyway.
- In other words, avoiding the filibuster facilitated bipartisanship!
- But now, all it takes is for Mitch McConnell to invoke the filibuster and everything grinds to a halt, with the only “winner” being partisan obstructionism.
- That isn’t how this is supposed to work.
- The filibuster originated by accident, does not even appear in the Constitution, and has been exploited again and again to perpetuate white supremacism.
- And the Framers, imperfect though they were, never intended for the Senate to be rendered essentially dysfunctional by a minority of its members.
On top of all of that, Sinema seems to be ignoring another reality:
There is going to be infinitely more “division” — and exactly zero “bipartisanship” — if Trumpist Republicans are permitted to subvert our democracy and install themselves in office all across the land.
Join me in sending a message to Senator Kyrsten Sinema:
Our democracy is at a tipping point. And you — yes, you — are at risk of going down as the senator who enabled the irreversible fall of democracy in America. Please join your colleagues in the Senate’s Democratic caucus to disarm Mitch McConnell — who has weaponized the Senate filibuster over and over again — for the purpose of securing our democracy by passing the Freedom To Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (bills you have repeatedly said you support).
Add your name now.
Thank you for taking action.
For democracy,
- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen
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