I think that healing from the Trump debacle can best begin by we Never Trumpers admitting what we got wrong in the years leading up to Trump’s nomination. Over at First Things, I am starting a series of essays in which I explain how the various things I supported in the past helped pave the way for Trump. I start with how the filibuster reduces congressional accountability, strengthens the administrative state and the courts, and encourages frenzies of lawmaking by parties at their most extreme moments, while locking in those changes from future (narrower) congressional majorities.
This oscillation between congressional extremism and congressional paralysis helps create the appetite for a strongman who will discipline our useless politicians. We might not have as many people believing in Donald “Only I Can Fix It” Trump if they had hope that electing a congressional majority (even one with less than 60 Senate votes) and a normal president of their party would give their policy preferences a fair shake.
A sample:
When a party wins large congressional majorities, the filibuster rule creates perverse incentives for our polarized, ideological parties. The incentive is for the victorious party to pass as much of its agenda — especially the most unpopular parts of its agenda — by any means necessary, as quickly as possible, because it knows it has its majorities more by luck than by popular approval. Then, when it loses its majorities, it only has to hold on to forty-one Senate seats in order to prevent its work from being undone.
The result is that the politics of the filibuster looks like the politics of Obamacare — rushed, incompetent, corrupt, and ideologically intoxicated, in the service of an unpopular bill.