I wish I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal so’s I could read a particular opinion piece with my own two eyes, but instead I’ll have to depend on Professor Richardson:
More telling, perhaps, is an eye-popping op-ed published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal by Mike Solon, a former assistant to [Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY)], and Bill Greene, a former outreach director for former House Speaker John Boehner; both men are now lobbyists. In order to defend the filibuster, they argue that the measure protects “political nobodies” from having to pay attention to politics. If legislation could pass by a simple majority, Americans would have to get involved. The system, they suggest, is best managed by a minority of senators.
“Eliminating the Senate filibuster would end the freedom of America’s political innocents,” they write. “The lives that political nobodies spend playing, praying, fishing, tailgating, reading, hunting, gardening, studying and caring for their children would be spent rallying, canvassing, picketing, lobbying, protesting, texting, posting, parading and, above all, shouting.”
The authors suggest misleadingly that the men who framed the Constitution instituted the filibuster: they did not. They set up a Senate in which a simple majority passed legislation. The filibuster, used to require 60 votes to pass any legislation, has been deployed regularly only since about 2008.
Presuming this is accurate, I’d have to respond that Monitoring the Senators and Representatives who we, the citizens, have voted for is among the most important duties incumbent upon the citizens of the United States, as with any democracy, along with taking action when their competence is unsatisfying, or their positions lead to poor results.
Solon and Greene are basically advocating for the citizens to fail in their duties, to become not unlike foolish chikldren.
Solon and Greene are little more than wannabe autocrats, terrified of the change that actual citizen participation might bring.
