With the stroke of a pen, Joe Biden made many of us smile again.  The Muslim ban is gone. The Paris climate accord is back. The DREAMers are saved from deportation. Transgender Americans are welcomed back into the military. What a euphoric breath of fresh air after a four-year bout of Trump derangement syndrome! 

The trouble with euphoria, of course, is that it’s a temporary condition. As the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, “. . .even in heaven they don’t sing all the time.”  Although some of Biden’s sweet songs will keep playing for at least the next three years and nine months, at some point the music will stop, and the magic pen will be in the hands of a new president. 

Therein lies our problem. The structure of our government has become so flawed and broken that we have come to accept these massive bi-polar waves of transformation every four years. A Republican senate stonewalled Barak Obama, so he turned to executive orders to deal with immigration, climate change and human rights.  Donald Trump molded his presidency around undoing everything Obama did.  Then along comes Joe to undo what Trump did. 

The last thing the authors of our Constitution wanted was a government run by executive edict.  They’d had enough of the monarchy stuff. They saw Congress as the strongest of the three branches, and vested it with the power to enact laws through deliberation.  The president would then execute those laws.  It was the founders’ way of eliminating policy limbo, of protecting us from the vertigo of a revolving door of presidential fiat. 

And presidential fiat is precisely what we have now.  Congress, particularly the Senate, has abdicated it’s role of lawmaking. One study, for example, found that Congress has spent only a few days over the past five years even talking about the pressing issue of immigration, with no resolution.  The record is similar on other critical issues.  As a result, the president has become a one-person legislature.

The United States Senate was once touted as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Sadly, it has morphed into a dysfunctional morass. Gone are the days of scintillating debate and creative problem-solving. In their place is a dreary, vacuous rhetoric on an intellectual par with a dismissive schoolyard taunt.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats will do whatever they have to in order to pass legislation on gun control, voting rights and infrastructure, even if it means eliminating the filibuster. That’s the rule requiring 60 votes in the 100-member chamber to pass most measures.

Comes now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who needs to gain only one GOP senate seat in the next election to retake the majority. After hissing at Schumer’s quest to pass a liberal agenda on the heels of blowing up the filibuster, McConnell went into full toxic na-na-na-na-boo-boo mode.  If Democrats kill the filibuster, McConnell said his party, once it regains majority status, will “ram through” sweeping abortion restrictions, a hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border, nation-wide anti-union laws, defunding of Planned Parenthood and expansion of gun rights. Some of us are old enough to remember when Republican leaders designed legislative agendas based on well thought out policy concepts, rather than their value as weaponry.

We probably shouldn’t have been surprised to hear McConnell trot out the cold war trope of mutual assured destruction. In his mind, the Democrats passing voting rights protections by a one-vote majority, is a nuclear bomb, and must be met with a commensurate warhead of, say,  draconian abortion restrictions.  The strategy, of course, is to leave both sides so afraid of their opponent’s agenda that neither push the nuclear button. (See the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

At least so far, mutual assured destruction has protected us from the apocalypse by creating an absence of nuclear war.  The problem with transporting that strategy into the legislative arena, however, is that we end up with an absence of legislation.  And that is precisely the dysfunctional mess we have been in for some time.  The filibuster rule has so paralyzed the Senate that it no longer even attempts to deal with the pressing issues of the day.  

The Democrats need to call McConnell’s bluff. Drop the damn nuclear bomb already. Blow up the filibuster, pass strong voting rights protections, along with gun safety, immigration reform and a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage.   Let the legislative process play out the way the founders intended and the Constitution provides. 

Lawmaking was placed in the hands of Congress principally because legislators are ultimately accountable to the people in their districts or states. By sizeable majorities, those people support Row v. Wade, union rights and sensible gun laws, and oppose anti-immigration policies and defunding Planned Parenthood. If Republicans regain control of the Senate, they would be quickly throwing it away by enacting McConnell’s punitive agenda. Call his bluff. Even if he carries out his threat, voters will have an opportunity to respond in the next election.  Either way is better than a paralyzed Congress and the revolving door of executive orders.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison described the Senate as a “necessary fence” to protect “the people against their rulers.”  In this aspirational vision, deliberation, shared thoughts and healthy give-and-take before a simple majority vote would serve democracy far better than the king-like whims of a president.   Unfortunately, the Senate subsequently stumbled its way into paralysis, first through the filibuster rule, and more recently by a hyper partisanship centered on playing to the party base. 

Madison’s fence is sorely needed today, more than ever. It will not be easy to get there. But all journeys begin with a single step. 

It’s time to take that first step by killing the filibuster, and returning the Senate to majority rule.  

EPILOGUE:  Out of total disrespect for the timing of this post, Senator Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, just announced that he will never vote to kill or weaken the filibuster. To quote a former president: “Sad.”   In politics, however, “never” can have a fairly short life. (See “Read my lips: No new taxes.”)