Conservatives and liberals are both mad over the Senate’s mundane filibuster compromise. Liberals wanted the filibuster abolished or severely pared back, and conservatives didn’t want any reforms at all. Of course, the sides are exactly flipped from 2005, when it was Senate Republicans who threatened the “constitutional option.” Both sides are afflicted with short-termist thinking.
Abolishing the filibuster is the long-term desirable thing to do. Gaping holes in the federal judiciary and the arcane monstrosity that is the federal tax code owe their existence to the filibuster and the immense status-quo bias in the U.S. Congress. Sure, bad things would get through if the filibuster were abolished. Obamacare was only enacted because Dems briefly held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. But the country is now facing severe problems across the board, from taxation to debt to health care to virtually unsupervised regulatory agencies. We need radical, comprehensive policy surgery, not more insanely complex, achingly tentative, compromise procedures that allow the infections in the national political economy to fester further. Abolish the filibuster and, while we’re at it, the presidential veto (amend the Constitution).
PILEUS 
This is satire, right?
Yeah, I’m not too sure of this either. I tend to like more checks on behaviors than opportunities – though Jason is right that the filibuster has also allowed for mischief. So I can bang on one of my favorite drums – institutions can’t ultimately save us from ourselves (though they of course matter).
Institutions do matter on the margins, of course. I’d say the view that the filibuster helps preserve useful checks and balances is about 20 years out of date, however. It creates an extreme status quo bias unmatched in any other Western democracy. That’s fine if the status quo is pro-liberty, but it’s not (any longer). Politicians have baked disaster into the status quo. It’s better to have the capacity to reverse bad legislation (like our tax code and health insurance regs) than extreme hurdles to new legislation. Also bear in mind spatial models of bureaucratic decision-making: congressional gridlock lets executive bureaucracies run wild.
I’m open to the basic argument. However, I guess I’m terrified of further reverses for the cause of liberty and a lot less hopeful about getting even a filibusterless Congress to do things in favor of liberty.
Your point about the effects of congressional gridlock is a strong one.
Professor Sorens,
I had long been meaning to ask for your analysis of what the state of affairs would look like if we had continued to allow Congress to grow at the Constitutional ratio of 1 rep : 30,000 constituents.
Obviously, nowadays its impossible. But might it have stopped the growth of Leviathan if the artificial cap of 435 had not been put on in the 1920s? Would a mere doubling or so of Congress– to, say, about 1000 reps — do anything to help our policy outcomes? (Maybe by helping oversight against the Executive?)
People talk about that as a possible solution. But there are pluses and minuses. With a legislature that big, there would be significant free-rider problems, and leadership might actually have more influence. Jowei Chen at Michigan (one of my former undergraduate students, as it happens) has done some work on this at the state level. On the other hand, part of what he finds is that states w/ larger legislatures spend less. I think that’s probably good; he seems to think that’s probably bad. In NH, you get more ideological variation in the legislature because of its size (400 reps for a small state). There would be more Ron Pauls in a Congress of 1000 — on the other hand, each one would be less influential. On the whole, I don’t think it’s an institutional reform that would change things greatly on its own. But if combined with flexible, real-time voting a la L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy, *that* might be interesting (if very sci-fi).