| While I'd prefer to get the first legislative crack at it, I am extremely convinced that the filibuster is poison to our country. Congress cannot pass anything meaningful except one omnibus spending bill each year via budget reconciliation, which has arcane rules around flat budget impact after 10 years. Since congress can't do anything, we naturally move more and more of the details of federal governance to executive agencies and executive orders. While not all of this is bad, it has a few horrible effects. First, the supreme court is more willing to interfere with executive action, amplifying its power as it finds reason to protect actions by the favored party and cancel actions by the disfavored party. Increasing the power of the supreme court shifts federal power towards an unelected branch that is the slowest to adjust to changing voter preference. Second, as more power within the executive gets concentrated specifically with the president we enable more and more federal action at the whims of exactly one person. This exposes us to the current situation, where Trump is unfettered in how he wields the executive branch rather than guiding it and having its power distributed across the executive branch. And we've also got the general popular dissatisfaction with congress and the democratic process because they can't get shit done. A country that has an enormously unfavorable opinion of congress is more primed for collapse into anti-democratic governance. Yes, if we didn't have the filibuster then the GOP could pass all sorts of nightmare legislation. But I'd prefer legislation enabled through the will of the people to this slow collapse into authoritarianism. |
> Since congress can't do anything, we naturally move more and more of the details of federal governance to executive agencies and executive orders.
It's really interesting how wildly different this is than parliamentary systems where Parliament is the ultimate authority and the executive's tenure simply ends if they lose the 'confidence' of a plurality in Parliament.
Instead we have a useless legislature as you described, and an executive whose claim to all this additional power is actually quite dubious, yet that executive controls nearly everything. I don't think a swing to the other party changes this, either (not that the DNC is capable of winning elections enough to ever hold the kind of power the GOP now has). I think from now on, the President will rule by executive action, and use creative avenues like rulings from friendly courts to vaguely legitimize this power.