OPINION:
Upon returning from foreign travel and discovering that Congress had not yet settled on a solution to the recent unpleasantness of the government shutdown, the president of the United States suggested that the best way to proceed would be for Senate Republicans to act unilaterally (if necessary) to amend Senate Rule 22.
That rule, which requires 60 votes to proceed to most questions in the U.S. Senate, is designed to protect senators from votes they would rather not take and to require a certain amount of bipartisan acceptance of whatever the Senate might be preparing to do.
Most senators understand both purposes of the rule as well as the fact that the rule gives them outsize leverage in the event they need it. Without it, the world’s greatest deliberative body would be reduced to a smaller, older, less interesting version of the House of Representatives. That would be unfortunate for a number of reasons.
One of the most striking features of the Senate is that there are very few close votes; votes routinely go 77-23 or 82-18. That is primarily because Rule 22 (as a practical matter) guarantees that although not every senator will favor the vote at hand, every senator has accepted — or at least tolerated — the process that has resulted in the vote. That ensures that minority voices are accommodated during the consideration of legislation.
That is important because the inescapable reality is that pretty much everyone sitting in the Senate has been, is now or will eventually be in the minority.
So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that the president’s suggestion — which was seconded by various folks in the administration as well as a handful of Republican senatorial candidates — was mostly ignored by actual senators and their leadership. Senators (like the rest of us) tend to act in their own best interests absent any other compelling exigencies.
That said, the reality is that the 60-vote threshold has been chipped away at over the years and now no longer applies to judicial nominees (thank you, late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) and, more recently, to executive branch nominees (thank you, Senate Majority Leader John Thune). Over time, those exceptions will probably guarantee more politicized, less competent judges and political appointees.
For those who are concerned that the Senate has too many qualms or moves too slowly, the good news is that it seems likely and unfortunate that, over time, Rule 22 will become honored only in memory. Eventually, the Senate will house enough careless and/or fundamentally unintelligent senators who are prepared to give up their own power for something as fleeting and ephemeral as a sequence of votes on what will no doubt be the most questionable of policies.
It does seem that the knife will ultimately be held by the Democrats. Between the two parties, they are less likely to have control of 60 votes in the Senate in our lifetimes. At the moment, there are 10 Democratic senators (Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Gary C. Peters and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona) representing states won by President Trump. There is only one Republican senator (Susan M. Collins of Maine) representing a state carried by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Nor does it seem likely that the Democrats will be able to win states such as Florida or Ohio anytime in the near future. The same cannot be said about Republicans and places such as Minnesota and New Mexico.
When the 60-vote threshold is gone, all of us — senators and citizens — will miss it. The legislative process will become less protective of the minority, less precise, less fair and less focused on ensuring the integrity of the process and the preservation of regular order. In short, it will be yet another step toward emasculation and eventual reduction to irrelevance of Congress.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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