By Chris Satullo

Eleven days ago, my landlord here, one Dick Polman, published a post headlined “Smash the filibuster.”

Uh, tell us how you really feel, Dick.

Turns out, today, finally, I feel the same way. Yes, smash the filibuster. Pulverize the sucker. Obliterate the obnoxious beast. Nuke the bejesus out of it and throw the smoking remains into the nearest landfill.

That’s me now. But last week, as I read Dick’s piece, I was feeling far more ambivalent.

A piece of folk wisdom was on my mind: “Be careful what you wish for.”

When your team is running things on Capitol Hill, it’s always tempting to say, “Hey, we won. Let’s get big stuff done. Let’s get rid of this pesky bit of parliamentary arcana that keeps slowing our roll.”

As Dick pointed out, it’s hard to explain the filibuster to any moderately logical person unfamiliar with the ways of Capitol Hill. How can such a damaging quirk be tolerated in the “world’s greatest democracy”? Why allow 40 senators who might represent only 25 percent of the nation’s people to block a bill supported by most voters?

Until this week, though, there was a pebble in my shoe, nagging me, counseling not so fast.

I kept thinking about the downstream effects of former Senate Majority Harry Reid’s little adventure in filleting the filibuster in 2013. Exasperated by Mitch McConnell’s obstinate skill at using the tactic to delay or thwart Barack Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominations, Reid invoked the so-called “nuclear option,” unilaterally changing the Senate’s rules. 

Henceforth, Reid declared, the filibuster rule would not apply to any judicial nominees except for the Supreme Court. District and appellate judges could be confirmed by simple majority vote.

To liberals, it sounded good at the time. Except, in an entirely predictable outcome, this move ended up easing the path of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett onto the nation’s highest court.

How so? When McConnell became majority leader, he said, Backatcha!, invoking the nuclear option for high court justices. Simple majority and they’re in! Without that, there’s almost no chance those three all would have been invited to don the big black robes, which has left the court with a painful surfeit of Aquinas-suckled, Federalist-fed justices who yearn to bring back the 1880s.

Also, during the Trump administration, that 24-7 foundry of bad ideas, it was comforting to know the filibuster was one thing that could block some of the nonsense cooked up by the likes of Stephen Miller and the House’s Freedom Caucus.

So, while feeling none of the nostalgia for Senate tradition that apparently feeds Joe Biden’s qualms about quashing the filibuster, neither did I share the fierce certainty of so many, including my own wife and son, that the filibuster had to die.

As it happens, for a college course I teach, this week I had occasion to reread Federalist 10, James Madison’s great, pained meditation on the evils of what he called “faction” and the difficulty of taming them. Madison, our most underappreciated Founder, wisely notes that faction – which he defines as any group seized by a partisan fervor to indulge self-interest at the expense of the general good – can come in two flavors: majority or minority. 

In other words, he very much anticipated what we’ve witnessed all too much in recent years: A legislative majority more interested in pursuing partisan ends than national ones, with scant concern for the rights or views of the minority.

Madison struggled to find a fully satisfactory plan for curbing the ill effects of that state of play. The filibuster, though invented when the Republic was young, took a long time to evolve, almost by accident, into a key weapon for cooling the jets of a determined Senate majority.

Unfortunately, it was used in this way for ill as often as for good, becoming a cudgel wielded by segregationists opposing the great civil rights gains of the mid-century.

So, not a great record overall. Still, when I thought about how comforting it was in recent years to possess any tool to limit the damage a troika such as Trump-McCarthy-McConnell could do, hanging on to the filibuster could seem prudent.

Madison also recognized the problem of a minority faction becoming deft at obstruction, the very ill that filibuster takes nuclear. But he hoped his Big Idea – a bicameral legislature representing a large and diverse republic – would be a sufficient antidote. 

He could not have anticipated what a toxic brew ingredients such as gerrymandering, Fox News, insane Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance and voter rights, the Koch brothers, and Mark Zuckerberg’s arrogance would inflict on our times.

But here we are: We now have the GOP, an erstwhile majority party having a devil of time admitting it’s now the minority, clinging to a sour mix of ideas either tired and disproven – or plain batshit crazy. This pottage is being rejected by an increasing majority of those Americans not in thrall to evil fantasies. Deep down, sane GOP leaders know the jig will soon be up – but to delay that day, they’ll claim the specious mantle of near-majority to justify their use of every obstructionist trick in the parliamentary bag.

Wielding filibuster, they’ll say:

• No! to a right-sized pandemic relief plan – with no coherent critique of Joe Biden’s proposal other than “Uh … too big?” and no serious alternative.

• No! to a climate change plan commensurate with the approaching catastrophe – because too much of the money that sustains their electoral clout comes from energy interests.

•  No! to desperately needed action to protect voter rights and end gerrymandering, because their party’s electoral survival depends on suppressing votes and drawing crooked lines. And because they’ve been spewing cynical lies about massive election fraud for so long that their siloed base – and even some of their less-sharp elected colleagues – now swallow that B.S. whole.

• No! to any and all attempts to take on systemic racial inequities, because no matter how much some august GOP figures want to pretend otherwise, their party now depends for its survival on racist dog whistles.

Meanwhile, here’s one thing the GOP caucus can get to yes on:  giving a standing O to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon fan who thinks school shootings are fake and “Jewish space lasers” are real. 

That was the deed this week that pushed me over the line into filibuster foe. A party led by such people does not deserve that weapon.

Madison was right:  Minority rights matter and steps must be taken to preserve them. But he was also right: Minority factions consumed by self-interest must not be allowed to thwart actions vital to the common good.

Particularly a faction that wants to censure John McCain’s widow while cheering on liars who foment insurrection.

The pendulum keeps on swinging. Right now the filibuster empowers an obnoxious partisan minority at the expense of the common good to a degree I’ve never before seen in my lifetime.

Someday, if God grants me enough years, I may see a different moment when I’ll wish ruefully that the filibuster were still around. But the immediate harm the tactic will do now to our troubled land far outweighs any speculative harm down the road.

My son is right. My wife is right. Dick is right. Heck, and I don’t say this often, AOC is right – and I was wrong.

Filibuster has to go. Nuke the sucker.

If you agree, contact Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the two Democratic senators whose wan support of the filibuster is the only thing keeping it alive. Tell them to change their mind, as I have. I know these two are in shaky seats on mostly red turf. But they’re not up for re-election until 2024.

What are voters going to recall four years now – a vote on a parliamentary rule most of them couldn’t explain? Or the wave of useful action against pandemic, recession, climate change and corporate misbehavior that might flow from a Congress freed from the shackles of filibuster?

No guts, no glory.

Thoughts? You can email me at csatullo@gmail.com

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia