this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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That's not their purpose, they just need to look the part. They are comfortable in the 'my hands are tied' position. They can propose bills they know will not make it. When they have a supermajority, like they had not long ago, they are in trouble. They have no choice but to stop proposing bills and find reasons to say they are 'sabotaged'. They played this game for centuries, still works.
The last true supermajority I'm aware of only lasted 72 days, back in 2009. It's when the Fair Pay act was signed, Affordable Care Act, and a few different attempts to reform Wall Street. They were certainly not as life-changing as I'd like, but I'm admittedly pretty far to the Left of the average US voter.
The even stronger supermajority before that was in 1965, and that got the creation of Medicare & Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, Freedom of Info Act, etc.
The Dems are a weak centrist party, and the leadership is center-right at best, but even so - those two times where they had a supermajority in the Senate gave us some good to at least quasi-good stuff. I'm totally on board for bashing the Democrats, but it's hard to convey the amount of damage the truly undemocratic Senate has done over the decades, and I think we can't avoid the reality that there was a lot that got done in that brief period when the Republicans couldn't stop them. The ability to block legislation in the Senate is just incredible. Things just can't get passed, unless it's something the Republicans will agree to - so it's far easier for shitty stuff to get passed. Unfortunately, there are enough right wing democrats that will go along with the shitty stuff the Republicans propose, in no small part because their constituents actually like it. We're losing the propaganda war, because those with capital have far more power to wield.
So there's a lot of problems to fix - deeply undemocratic institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College, the entirety of the GOP, weakass right-wing Democrats, and the voters themselves. Unfortunately, yeah...the interests of Capital have intervened and made sure to cripple Education and control the media landscape, so to get back to my main point, since I'm losing the thread here - I'm agreed that the Democrats are shit, but we can't ignore reality that when they've had actual full control of the Federal government, things were at least going in a decent direction.
The senate doesn't actually need a supermajority to end a filibuster; they approve the rules that set how many votes are needed to break a filibuster with a simple majority.
Similarly they can replace the parliamentarian at will, as republicans have done in the past, but chose to keep a parliamentarian that prevented them from using budget reconciliation to fulfill their promises to the voters.
Well sure, the Democrats could kill the filibuster with a simply majority (if they could get 51 senators on board) but they filibuster a lot as well, to prevent some Republican legislation. So I can see why they're too pragmatic - or cowardly - to remove it. Not the best source/graph, but a source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-are-so-many-democrats-considering-ending-the-filibuster/
As for the parliamentarian: they haven't been removed in a while, and the one before that also served for a pretty long time...I think the Democrats (again, cowardly or pragmatically) are simply trying not to escalate and make the parliamentarian a puppet of the current simple majority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentarian_of_the_United_States_Senate
I'm all in favor of nuking the filibuster, mind you: which would make the whole budget reconciliation thing a moot point. but I can understand the desire for some in the party to retain it as a tool. Fat lot of good it's doing us now, of course.