I thought I’d weigh in on John Sides’ on-going conversation with Ezra Klein about congressional rules, partisanship, and obstruction– an exchange that originated in Ezra’s Newsweek piece about congressional dysfunction.
John raises a number of important points here in response to Ezra’s argument. In particular, John raises doubts about Ezra’s claim that “getting rid of the rules meant to ensure bipartisanship may actually discourage partisanship.” As John suggests, a careful assessment of recent House history suggests precisely the opposite: It’s actually quite hard to both empower majorities and promote bipartisanship.
Ezra offers a thoughtful response to John’s objection–suggesting that ending Senate obstruction might in fact have a collateral effect in the House: Once obstruction becomes futile under new Senate rules, the minority party in the House might also move away from its strategy of “lockstep opposition.”
I think Ezra makes a valuable contribution by considering House and Senate procedural strategies and practices in tandem. Still, I might read the recent history of Congress a little differently. I’m not so sure that the intense partisanship we see in the House today is the result of increased Senate obstructionism. Nor would I expect that changing Senate rules to limit obstructionism would break the House’s lockstep opposition.
I tend to see the procedural trends in both chambers (e.g. restrictive majoritarian rules in the House, endless cloture voting in the Senate) as each chamber’s unique response to partisan polarization. We see partisanship start rising in both chambers in the early 1980s, and we see majority leaders in both chambers start to innovate however they can under the rules to try to gain control of their respective chambers. Those responses look different, of course, because leaders are operating under different rules. House majoritarian rules allowed the Rules Committee to get more creative with special rules (self-executing among them…), and amplified polarization by limiting amending opportunities for moderates in both parties. Senate leaders didn’t have that option due to the supermajoritarian features of Rule 22. So instead, we see Senate leaders starting in the 1980s (and continuing until today) innovate under the rules in lots of different ways– including more complex unanimous consent agreements and more cloture motions on a wider array of motions.
I would think of these procedural changes as parallel trends– each chamber’s response to the rise in polarization over the past three decades. If the filibuster were to be curtailed, I’m not sure that we would have a good basis for expecting House partisanship to subside. Looking back at recent Senate rule changes, amending Rule 22 in 1979 and 1986 (limiting the post-cloture filibuster), for example, did not lead House Democratic leaders to loosen the reigns on minority Republicans. Were significant filibuster reform to occur, my hunch is that the forces that gave rise to partisanship in the House would still be in play– as would House leaders’ incentives to limit minority rights to participate.