Everybody’s Getting the Filibuster—and the Senate—All Wrong

“But let us be clear: It is not fair to claim that the filibuster is a ‘relic of Jim Crow,’ either.”

By my lights, everyone—from the progressive left to the MAGA right—talking about the filibuster and the United States Senate itself is either ignorant of important historical facts or is misrepresenting them.

Let us set the record straight.

First, the United States Senate itself was not created for the explicit purpose of being “anti-majoritarian,” as the typically thoughtful editors of the Commentary magazine claimed on a recent podcast. Yes, when viewed from the perspective of the nation as a whole, the Senate’s equal state representational structure seems anti-majoritarian. But the fundamental point of the Senate was not to be anti-majoritarian. The point was to give equal representation to the states as separate political communities. Excuse the upcoming academic citations, but this is really important in the context of the filibuster debate. Here is the short of it:

As scholars such as Michael Klarman have pointed out, the Constitution of the United States drafted by the framers during the summer of 1787 was “stunningly nationalist.” Previously, the separate colonies-turned-states had governed themselves under the loosely knit Articles of Confederation. Even though the results were disastrous, Americans’ state-based political identities were still extremely strong; Americans were still wary of a powerful, cohesive central government. Americans identified with their states far more than they did with their young nation (the opposite is true today), and these state-based differences were overlaid with highly salient economic, moral, and religious differences. Rhode Islanders identified with Rhode Island, and South Carolinians identified with South Carolina. This helps explain why George Washington himself had to break up fights between New Englanders and Southerners during the Revolutionary War. The differences ran deep. The colonies-turned-states were the organic political communities of the day. The nation was very much a construct—flimsy, perhaps waiting to be founded.