filibuster
Article
filibuster is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 20, 2021 and November 11, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “the filibuster has always been a potential problem”; “removing a couple of checks and balances, like the filibuster”. It most often appears alongside Congress, US, 2014 Hungarian parliamentary election.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 20, 2021
- Last seen: November 11, 2021
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Congress (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 2014 Hungarian parliamentary election (1 shared issues)
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- @slatestarcodex (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Americans (1 shared issues)
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- Angela Merkel (1 shared issues)
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- Anglo-Saxon (1 shared issues)
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- Anne Applebaum (1 shared issues)
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- Argentina (1 shared issues)
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- Autocrat Book Club (1 shared issues)
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- Baltic country (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I'm not sure how Klein thinks of this. Maybe he would say that vetocracy is getting worse everywhere, but that partisan polarization turns potential veto points into actual veto points. That is, the filibuster has always been a potential problem. But Congress was able to get by with it for decades, because everyone was polite and cooperative and didn't want to screw things up too badly. Once polarization created irresistable pressure for politicians to use every weapon at their disposal, the filibuster went from a potential problem to an actual problem.
And yeah, it’s really bad that the US can’t do anything in less than six months and often doesn’t do it at all. A Congress that can pass important legislation in a few hours feels like a dream. To some degree there’s a tradeoff: if it’s hard to do anything, then it’s hard to oppress people; if it’s easy to do stuff, some of the stuff that gets done is bad. I don’t think we’re at the right point in that tradeoff right now and maybe removing a couple of checks and balances, like the filibuster, could be net good (or maybe it wouldn’t be, I’m not sure). But if you remove every single one of them and the leader can pass laws in ten minutes, then I think it’s fair to worry that you’ve lost some important aspect of liberalism.
Inline links: could be net good