Stop pretending the filibuster incentivizes bipartisanship

I looked at Michigan’s COVID data today. In the last week the number of cases per day peaked at 837, though this number will likely be revised. In the week before the peak was 1427. This is a great improvement of the April peak above 8000 and cases per day are dropping quickly. The week before last the deaths per day peaked at 43, down from 83 in mid April. I’m still wary of going into a restaurant and sitting down for a meal. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, has a few interesting quotes. Susan Glasser of the New Yorker wrote:

“Turns out, things are much worse than we expected,” Daniel Ziblatt, one of the “How Democracies Die” authors, told me this week. He said he had never envisioned a scenario like the one that has played itself out among Republicans on Capitol Hill during the past few months. How could he have? It’s hard to imagine anyone in America, even when “How Democracies Die” was published, a year into Trump’s term, seriously contemplating an American President who would unleash an insurrection in order to steal an election that he clearly lost—and then still commanding the support of his party after doing so.

Stephen Richer of the National Review:

Even though an IRS audit might annoy you and cause you some stress, you’d eventually realize that you have nothing to fear as long as the audit is done fairly and properly. But you’d likely feel differently if the IRS outsourced the audit to someone who: * Had no applicable professional credentials * Had never previously run a tax audit * Believed that Hugo Chavez had nefariously controlled your tax-auditing software * Had publicly stated prior to examining your taxes that you’d certainly committed tax fraud That is what is happening to elections in Maricopa County, Ariz. — the home of almost two-thirds of Arizona’s voting population.

Steven White tweeted:

If 35 Senators from a single party are able to block a bill supported by a bipartisan group of 54 Senators, at the very least perhaps we can stop pretending that the filibuster incentivizes bipartisanship and cooperation. It's actually genuinely remarkable that 6 Republican Senators joined Democrats on a major bill. But instead of encouraging that to happen more often, the filibuster just prevents this kind of bipartisanship from even being a possibility.

On to other sources. Adam Jentleson, author of a book on the filibuster, tweeted:

One should expect a leader to secure a small number of votes from within their own party for broadly popular legislation backed by a POTUS of their own party and passed by a House controlled by their party. ... Good leaders get the votes - the whole point of being leader is that they have insight we do not possess (or are supposed to). It’s wrong to let them off the hook for doing their jobs. Pelosi got the votes in her caucus.

Evan Weber tweeted:

“Daddy, why are there no beaches? Did it always used to get this hot?” “Well, son. You see there was this thing called the filibuster. If we rid of it we could’ve passed a lot of laws to turn things around. But a man named Joe & a woman named Krysten told a turtle named Mitch…”

Michael Li, a redistricting and voting counsel for the Brennan Center, tweeted a quote from The Atlantic:

The senior White House official told me Biden aides believe that the best way to overcome Republicans’ undermining of upcoming elections is to maintain Democratic control of the House and Senate. And the best way to achieve that is for Biden to pass the agenda he ran on, which includes working to mitigate political conflict and compromising with Republicans where possible. “We have to go win elections in 2022, so we keep control of the House and Senate, which is the single most critical thing to protecting us for 2024,” the official said.

Li responded:

If this accurately reflects the White House view that Democrats can keep the House in 2022 and 2024 despite new voter suppression laws, the White House is seriously discounting the effect of gerrymandering in the upcoming round of redistricting.

Leah McElrath responded to an article from the Washington Post:

Biden’s DOJ just asked a federal judge to dismiss lawsuit against Trump and Barr for the violent clearing of protesters in Lafayette Square by police and the US military. They’re arguing immunity. Which was Trump’s same argument.

That isn’t good. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary.

It's pretty crazy that most students in America are only taught about a handful of important Black Americans. Imagine if it were the other way around: "Welcome to White History 101. We start off with Thomas Jefferson, where it all began. And then, well, nothing really happened until Tom Hanks.” Class dismissed. —Trevor Noah