filibuster

The Senate filibuster is one of the biggest things standing in the way of anti-voter suppression laws, raising the minimum wage and immigration reform. What is this loophole, and how does it affect governing today?

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It’s a big week in the Senate for voting rights. Democrats have two bills that include measures to bolster and protect elections.

But the bills are almost certain to fail.

Why has it proved almost impossible to pass legislation so integral to the agenda of President Biden and the Democrats?

Guest: Astead W. Herndon, a national political reporter for The New York Times.

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Background reading: 

• Here’s what to know about voting rights and the battle over elections.
• Democrats’ bid to force through a bill intended to offset state voting restrictions appeared destined to fall to a Republican filibuster.

For more information on today’s episode, visit 

nytimes.com/thedaily

. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Joe Biden and just about every elected Democrat in America make one final run at Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on voting rights, Dr. Fauci says we’re all getting Omicron and calls one Republican Senator a moron, and Alyssa Mastromonaco joins to break down the worst punditry of the week in another round of Take Appreciator. 

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

Senator Tammy Duckworth talks about disability rights, Michael Kosta quizzes people about current events, and author Michael Pollan discusses "This Is Your Mind on Plants.”

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Democrats schedule a vote on a new voting rights bill while Republicans run more Big Lie candidates, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe talks to Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor about his race against Trump supporter Glenn Youngkin, and the week’s worst punditry gets its due in a new installment of The Take Appreciators.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. 

For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

Mehdi Hasan joins Jon Favreau to discuss Joe Biden’s town hall in Cincinnati, the Republican intra-party battle over vaccines and the 1/6 commission, and Tom Brady’s devastating takedown of Donald Trump. Then, Equis Research co-founder Stephanie Valencia talks to Jon about immigration and other issues on the minds of Latino voters.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. 

For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

The For the People Act, a bill created by House Democrats after the 2018 midterm elections, could have been the most sweeping expansion of voting rights in a generation.

On Tuesday night, however, Senate Republicans filibustered the bill before it could even be debated.

What lessons can we take from its demise? 

Guest: Nicholas Fandos, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times. 

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Background reading: 

• By blocking the sweeping voting rights bill, Republicans dealt a blow to Democrats’ attempts to counter a wave of state-level ballot restrictions, while also supercharging a campaign to end the legislative filibuster.
• In the wake of the bill’s demise, Democrats and civil rights groups have reaffirmed their resolve to fight for voting protections in Congress.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Hawaii Sen. Mazie K. Hirono reflects on her trailblazing career, her memoir, "Heart of Fire," and sparring with Sen. Ted Cruz about her anti-hate crimes bill protecting Asian Americans.

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Trevor explores several aspects of government and politics in the U.S., including the history of the Senate filibuster, presidents who lied about their health and pioneering first ladies.

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Trevor explores the history of the Senate filibuster, a mass shooter in the Atlanta area kills several Asian women, and actor and singer Cynthia Erivo discusses her role in "Genius: Aretha."

In honor of Women's History Month, help level the playing field for girls of color in STEM by donating at dailyshow.com/BlackGirlsCode.

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The Senate is where Joe Biden’s agenda will live or die. More specifically, the intricacies of archaic Senate rules — the budget reconciliation process, the filibuster, the majority leader’s ability to control the floor — combined with the fealty today’s senators have to yesterday’s structures will decide the agenda’s fate. It would be the gravest mistake for progressives, or anyone else, to consider the fight over how the Senate works to be a sideshow compared with debates over a $15 minimum wage, a Green New Deal or democracy reform. The fight over how the Senate works is what will decide all those other debates.

Adam Jentleson served as deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid when he was the majority leader. Jentleson was high enough to see how the institution really worked, and young enough to be free of gauzy nostalgia from the days of yore. And his book, "Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy," is both blistering and persuasive. “This is not a particularly uplifting history,” Jentleson writes. But nor is it without hope. “Unlike many of the structural features that determine the politics of our era, the Senate is relatively easy to reform.”

So I invited Jentleson on my podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show,” to explain how the modern Senate really works, why it works that way, and how to fix it. Along the way, we discuss what can — and crucially can’t — be passed through budget reconciliation, why senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continue to defend the filibuster (and why Jentleson thinks they will change their minds), the foundational myths of the Senate, like the idea that the modern filibuster encourages compromise, how Mitch McConnell understands the American political system better than his opponents and much more.

Recommendations:

"Double Indemnity" by James Cain

"Master of the Senate" by Robert Caro

"The Sum of Us" by Heather McGhee

"Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

"I don’t think conservatism can do its job in a free society in opposition to the institutions of that society,” Yuval Levin told me. “I think it can only function in defense of them.”

Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, as well as the author of a number of great books, most recently, “A Time to Build.” I wanted to talk to him about a very specific question, though: What will the Republican Party become? Levin is one of its most thoughtful and sober analysts — a temperament that may, I realize, make him unsuited to interpreting its current incarnation, in which a majority of House Republicans voted to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election and one of them is, well, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But Levin’s diagnosis is interesting. Histories of the modern Republican Party often place Ronald Reagan at their center. That is, in Levin’s view, a mistake. “I think Reagan is better understood as a detour from a history that is otherwise a story of a constant struggle between populism and conservatism,” he said. Donald Trump was an inheritor of a tradition that stretches long before him — Pat Buchanan’s tradition, and Strom Thurmond’s tradition. He didn’t form a new Republican Party; he allowed a long-existing part to express itself.

Behind that lie institutional changes both in the Republican Party and in the broader structure of American politics. That’s why I wanted to talk to Levin for this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show”: He, like me, thinks in terms of institutions. “The question for us in the coming years is whether we can move a little more in the direction of a politics of ‘what does government do,’ and less of a politics of ‘who rules,’” he says.

That’s exactly the right question, in my view. But we have very different views of what kinds of institutional changes would get us there. I’d like to see a more democratized, majoritarian system. Levin would, among other things, add a filibuster to the House.

So this is more than just a conversation about how to fix the Republican Party. It’s a conversation about how to fix American politics — how to recenter it on policy that changes people’s lives, rather than symbolic clashes that merely harden our hearts.

Mentioned in this episode:

“Big Tech, Big Government: The Challenges of Regulating Internet Platforms,” National Affairs, Winter 2021

The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism by Henry Olsen

"Democrats, Here’s How to Lose in 2022. And Deserve It." by Ezra Klein

Recommendations: 

"On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters" by Edmund Burke

"Reflections On The Revolution In France" by Edmund Burke

"The American Crisis" by Thomas Paine

"The Rights of Man" by Thomas Paine

"Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition" by Roger Scruton

"Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand" by Mike Konczal

"Social Democratic Capitalism" by Lane Kenworthy

"The Upswing" by Robert Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

In this week's SYSK Select episode, although lots of people incorrectly believe the filibuster was an intentional rule created by the founders of the U.S., this ancient method of stalling legislation was actually brought about in America by accident. Learn the ins and outs of this contentious quirk of parliamentary rules that allows a single senator to hijack the proceedings of the entire legislative body in this episode.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.