Dario Lopez-Mills/AP Photo
A policeman talks to people asking for information outside of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, May 24, 2022, after an 18-year-old gunman opened fire at the school, killing 21 people, 19 of them children.
You know your country is in a bad way when you’ve developed a sort of hierarchy of the awfulness of mass shootings, depending on the location and the number and identity of the victims. It’s safe to say the worst of all happen in an elementary school. The Sandy Hook massacre was a special kind of horror that transfixed the nation for days, and now so is Uvalde, Texas, where a lone gunman butchered 19 children and two adults in a local school on Tuesday.
In response, some senators proposed a vote on a background check bill that has passed the House several times, most recently last March. The swing Democratic votes in the Senate leaped into action to clarify that nothing of the sort would be done. Reached by reporters at the Capitol asking if he would support ending the Senate filibuster to clear the way for the bill, Joe Manchin refused, insisting, “The filibuster is the only thing that prevents us from total insanity.” Kyrsten Sinema concurred, telling reporters that she doesn’t think “D.C. solutions are realistic here.”
The Senate leadership barely even pretended to try to force their hands by scheduling a vote. Instead, senators are reportedly going on their Memorial Day recess. It’s a broken, worthless institution.
Now, as my colleague David Dayen writes, the background check measure under consideration probably would not do much to curb mass shootings. This particular one was committed by an 18-year-old with no criminal record, so he would not have been stopped. On the other hand, as I have previously argued, there is good evidence that even a package of fairly modest reforms—more rigorous and quick national background checks, plus waiting periods, age limits, restrictions on guns shows, and so on—would make a reasonable dent in gun violence if taken together. Many crimes are committed impulsively; it stands to reason that making it harder and slower to obtain a gun would make some difference, even if much more aggressive policy would obviously be warranted.
It’s worth mentioning that in a 2019 poll, 57 percent of Americans favored banning semiautomatic guns altogether—a legitimately bold measure that would make a big dent in gun violence.
At any rate, whatever gun control policy we might want will have to get through the Senate. That will be absolutely impossible unless the filibuster is abolished. Republicans will never, ever do anything of their own accord, and given the chamber’s increasing bias toward rural, disproportionately white states, Democrats will be very lucky to maintain 50 votes in the chamber, let alone 60.
The only way to get actual bipartisan action on gun violence is by abolishing the filibuster. A couple of Republican senators have expressed support for some modest gun control, and several more might jump on board if some legislation were actually going to pass. But so long as it’s possible for Republicans to bottle up President Biden’s agenda, humiliate his party, and demoralize liberal voters by blocking all normal legislation, they are going to do it. They’ve been doing it for 15 years straight.
The Senate’s hollow slogan is that it’s the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” but it is not even a deliberative body.
All this should be obvious to any bright nine-year-old, which is part of why Manchin and Sinema’s knee-jerk defense of the filibuster is so incomprehensible. Just in its basic structure, the Senate is already a gross affront to basic democratic principles of “one person, one vote” and governments “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But because of a stupid rules change in 1805 that accidentally created an infinite debate loophole, which has been progressively more and more ruthlessly exploited, senators representing just 11 percent of the population today can block any normal legislation.
The Senate’s hollow slogan is that it’s the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” but it is not even a deliberative body. Debates or even short arguments virtually never happen there, and those that do never affect legislative outcomes. Back in 2010, George Packer wrote a famous article for The New Yorker about how the Senate does not work, and since then it has only gotten worse. Today, all it takes to impose a filibuster, and thus grind the institution virtually to a halt, is a single Senate staffer sending a single email. This might be the most preposterous failure in the history of legislatures.
Now we have yet another horrifying school massacre where 19 innocent children were slaughtered, their bodies gruesomely mangled by high-velocity ammunition—a situation crying out for something to be done. But Sinema and Manchin still cling to the hidebound Senate rulebook and the fake history of the filibuster as something the Founding Fathers cooked up to ensure bipartisanship. In reality, the filibuster in its current incarnation was made up by Mitch McConnell in 2007—making it barely older than the kids who died on Tuesday.
The point of a body of elected representatives is to handle problems afflicting the body politic. Today, American schools are so plagued by terror of mass shooters that almost all of them drill for it regularly. As Kieran Healy writes, “My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion.” The Sandy Hook massacre was a decade ago, and the Senate has been doing nothing but blocking any gun control measures since that time. If any political body has ever forfeited its right to exist, it is the Senate.
