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By Paul Zummo Posted in Uncategorized — Comments () / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Peter Augustine responds to the same David Brooks column that I discussed yesterday, and more clearly captures what I was trying to argue.

Brooks then goes on to compare their abolitionist enthusiasm with "the social conservatives' attempt to end the judicial filibuster." But doing away with the filibuster won't produce a civil war. The filibuster isn't in the Constitution or any of our constitutional documents. It is merely part of the way the Senate regulates itself and has no constitutional or founding status at all.

Clearly the constitutional principle that governs the two houses of Congress is majority rule. The two houses are supposed to check each other, and in turn be checked by the other two branches of government. There's no constitutional foundation for the Senate's perversely building yet another counter-majoritarian check into its internal structure. In truth, there's always been something vaguely but insistently unconstitutional about the filibuster. Liberals used to know this quite well back in the days when it was understood to be a perverse mechanism used by Southern racists to block civil-rights legislation favored by most members of Congress and most Americans. What did Martin Luther King Jr., another authority appealed to by Brooks, think about the filibuster?

I'm not taking a stand on whether or when Senate Republicans should compromise on the filibuster issue. I'm merely saying that their threat to end it is not an example of unbridled evangelical enthusiasm comparable to abolitionism. Think about how the clever Brooks is trying to structure "mainstream" American opinion here. Don't be seduced!