Obama is wrong about the filibuster

Yet for Democrats to change voting laws on a narrow party-line vote, after eliminating the legislative filibuster by exploiting a loophole in the Senate rules on a narrow party line, would invalidate their moral authority. What could be argued is a noble commitment to democracy would get portrayed as an underhanded partisan power grab. Republicans would charge Democrats, fairly or unfairly, as disingenuously changing the voting laws to help themselves at the ballot box.

And when Republicans return to power, as they eventually would, they would have every incentive to changes whatever rules they could to maximize their power. You think partisan gerrymandering is bad? Just wait until Republicans start carving up states to even the score after the partisan admission of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico to the union.

Such an arms race in the weaponization of rules is literally how democracies bring about their own demise, as explained by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who co-authored the book “How Democracies Die.” “The erosion of mutual toleration may motivate politicians to deploy their institutional powers as broadly as they can get away with,” they wrote. “Acts of constitutional hardball may then in turn further undermine mutual toleration, reinforcing beliefs that our rivals pose a dangerous threat. The result is politics without guardrails.”