NYT’s Ezra Klein: “The Filibuster Is a Disaster”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, as the IMF chief told me, now is the time for countries to spend smartly on their recoveries. And for our next guest, he thinks President Biden should make good on his promise to quickly put money in the pockets of the American people. Ezra Klein is an author and a columnist for the “New York Times.” He also writes about polarization in American politics and he tackles a whole host of big issues in his new podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show” which premieres today. Here he is talking with our Walter Isaacson about bipartisanship and reforming the two-party system in America.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Ezra Klein, welcome to the show.

EZRA KLEIN, COLUMNIST, NEW YORK TIMES: Thank you so much.

ISAACSON: So, Biden seems to have a choice right now, he can either go big or he can go bipartisan. He can go for a great COVID relief stimulus bill or he can try to get bipartisan support. Which way should he go?

KLEIN: Isn’t that a shame, by the way, that is a choice people face now? He needs to go big. The American people elected Joe Biden to change their lives for the better. This is, I think, a really important point. It is very clear what he ran on. He offered a choice. The way political systems are supposed to work, like this canonical or this is theory, and in many other countries, it is actually practice, is politicians run for office, they make a series of promises about what they’re going to do, voters vote for them or they vote for their opponents. The people — the voters choose are supposed to pass some rough facsimile of their agenda and then voters can judge them on that. The way the American system works where voters vote for someone that someone may or may not take power, depending how the Electoral College (INAUDIBLE) work out, then whoever does take power can’t pass their agenda and then people argue about why nothing is happening and the electorate becomes more and more and more frustrated and begins thinking more and more about populous to outsiders. That is not a good way for the system to work. So, Joe Biden has a pass here (ph). He told the American people what he is going to do and he needs to keep that commitment to them. He always loves to say, a Biden never breaks a promise, the campaign is a promise.

ISAACSON: Well, let me push back on you. He actually ran also on being a unifier, on being a healer. He won in the primaries by being a moderate. He won the general election by saying he was going to unify us. Isn’t that the most important task?

KLEIN: I think that’s an interesting question of what he meant by unity. So, I have spoken to him during the campaign and watched what he said very closely and he’s always said that he wants to bring Americans together and he wants to try to win Republican support for his proposals. But never said — and he was always very careful never to say that he wouldn’t do what was necessary if he couldn’t get that support. There’s the things you try and then the things you adopt if you have to. I think as a macro question about American politics, this issue of how do we — unity, I think, is a very high goal to reach. But how do we engage people more productively in American politics? How do we make sure our disagreements are constructive? How do we make sure people feel politics is a more useful force in their lives? And that’s where I think making certain that when the public chooses new leadership, they get different results, actually becomes really important. Unity is not about what 15 people in Washington decided. Unity is not about seven Republican senators and seven Democratic senators having lunch together. In fact, a lot of things that seem to bring elite unity actually end up bringing public fracture because the public doesn’t get what they want. If a bunch of senators come together and cut the COVID Relief Bill in half and 500 million more people end up suffering because of that, that’s not going to unify the nation, that’s going to enrage people and properly so. So, I think that in the long history of not just American politics but international politics, you tend to see the most unifying effects coming from successful governance. And so, that’s my argument to Biden administration and in my “New York Times'” piece is the sole thing that’s going to matter or the thing they can control that is going to matters is, did they help people, did they help people fast enough for people to feel it by the next election and visibly enough for people to know that it came from the government.

ISAACSON: The group of centrist senators, Republicans and Democrats, a few of them, that have been discussing this week with the White House the COVID Relief Bill said $1,400 checks sent to a widespread group of Americans is not the most efficient or best way to do it. Leave aside the politics for a second. Tell me policy wise, do we send out $1,400 checks to most Americans?

KLEIN: I think we should but for a specific reason. I think that this is an unbelievably painful period and cash transfers are a good way to help people get through it. I think it is very, very important to recognize what we are doing here is not simply stimulating the economy. This is not like 2009 where the issue is. We have a lot of people who are idle, a lot of factories that are idle and want to put them all back to work. This is a period where we’re trying to give people a bridge to get through, accepting public health advice, it is going to require them to stay out of economy for an extended period of time. And to have that policy be more universalistic — we’re not fully universal. This only goes about $75,000 in income. And to have it be much simpler to administer, that is worth some tradeoff in targeting. There tends to be a fetishization of trying to get things exactly right through complex means testing and proposals, but then the issue is it’s hard to administer and lot of people should get them don’t. And also, they don’t build political support for themselves. I think one thing we have seen in recent years is you cannot separate the question of what is good policy and good politics. And I say that as somebody who cares a lot about what is good policy. But I think the last point worth making on this is it is 100 percent plausible that there are better alternatives out here. It would be wonderful if a bipartisan group of senators would come not with no or go slower or go half as big, but come up with something that is as effective and as significant and that is more targeted. This is the way these negotiations should work. There should be a goal that is relatively agreed on and then people should come up with better ways to come — to imagine the goal. If all they’re coming up and saying is, well, I’m sorry, but I’m worried that some people who made $62,000 that still have their job are going to get some help and they’re going to have a slightly better year in this miserable health scape that we are in than they otherwise would have, you got to offer something more constructive than that. The bipartisanship and centrists can’t just be saying no.

ISAACSON: Why do we need to get rid of the filibuster?

KLEIN: The filibuster is a disaster. I cannot say this clearly enough. And it is very poorly understood how bad it has become. So, because we have — for a very long time in American politics. So, the (INAUDIBLE), by the way. The filibuster is not part of the original design of the constitution. But for quite some time, we’ve had a filibuster in American politics and people believe they know what it is. You know, senators go to the floor and they talk and they talk and they talk, and — you know, and they care so much. We’ve all seen Mr. Smith goes to Washington, that’s not it at all. Nobody talks. It is completely procedural thing where some group of senators or more, often a party, just says, we are going to impose a 60-vote threshold, and if you can’t get it, nothing passes. Foremost throughout Senate’s history, filibusters were rarely used. If you look in sort of 1940 to 1975 period, there is about one vote on average per Senate session per year to break a filibuster. One. Now, the average session requires about 90, sometimes more than that. So, the filibuster has gone from something that small groups of senators or sometimes bigger ones use in moments of extraordinary intense opposition. And by the way, some of that opposition was quite grotesque looking back from any present perspective. The filibuster was primarily used in mid-20th century to stop anti-lynching and civil rights laws. It does not have a good history in this country. But even so, it was used rarely. It is now used all the time and it is in a more partisan scenario. So, basically, the minority party uses the filibuster to make sure the majority party cannot govern in a way that people can benefit from and then the minority party runs against the fact that the majority party failed to govern. That is a terrible way to set up incentives and accountability in a political system. So, even if it were not the case that this was an important — an unusual important year for governance, we should not have a filibuster because for — to what I was saying earlier, the way democracy is supposed to work is the public elect’s people, they get what they ask for and then they get to judge it. The filibuster is a central reason that does not happen in our system anymore, for both parties. And it is made a dysfunctional and, I think, increasingly toxic political system.

ISAACSON: But having to get 60 votes requires then that you get votes from the other party usually. Isn’t that a good thing to have some bipartisanship when we pass something really big like Obamacare?

KLEIN: It would be if you could. It would be if you could. But parties have incentive to win the next election, and that incentive overrides their incentive to compromise. So, it is common now to hear this explained explicitly. Mitch McConnell said during the Obama era, and I’m quoting with memory, so this is going to be sadly paraphrased, but he said that, I believed it was very important not to have our fingerprints on these bills. Because if people see a bill that is bipartisan, they think there’s consensus about it. And they see a bill that is partisan, they know there’s been great debate. It is the minority party’s incentive to make bills either not happen or make people think the governing party is governing in a partisan and poor way. And so, the minority party does not want to jump on. This is how other political systems work. This is very common worldwide. It is a weird American thing that we think bills are only plausible or they are only just if they have bipartisan majority. And other political systems or majorities have the (INAUDIBLE) to govern. What happens is the minority criticizes the majority and the majority tries to govern, and the public judges them and decides the minority is right in their criticisms. This idea that you need minority parties to jump on board with the majority is asking them to work against their political incentives because to be fair to Mitch McConnell who is often right in his assessment of how American politics works even if he is very cynical in what he does with the knowledge, to be fair to Mitch McConnell, it is true that if say Barack Obama had got in 25 Republican senators on the Affordable Care Act, he and the Democrats would have run around the country in 2010 saying, look at our great governance. We have finally solved this huge problem. We have bipartisan support. Give us more seats. And give Barack Obama, two years later, a second term. When minorities cooperate at that level of majority, they run the risk of losing their jobs and further losing power. When they obstruct majority, they give themselves a better chance of gaining power and gaining more seats and gaining the gavel back. So, you have to take the incentives at our system seriously. If you want to setup a system for cooperation, we could do that, we just haven’t. The filibuster is not a tool of compromise, it was a tool of sabotage.

ISAACSON: So, how do you set up a system of cooperation?

KLEIN: Well, there are a lot of better systems. We just import the New Zealand political system. Right now, I don’t think we’re going to restructure the American government at a rhythm (ph) branch level. What I do thing we could do is recognize that it is very hard in the American political system putting the filibuster entirely aside to get to a majority. We actually have every advanced democracy more what they call electorally generated veto players, more institutions that can say no to a bill or a change than any other advanced democracy, and it’s not actually even all that close. And so, it is hard. You usually have to win an election, a couple of elections in a row in order to gain majority power in this country. So, Democrats have not had a governing trifecta since 2010. And in order to get it, they had to win in 2018 and then win again in 2020. It’s a quite extraordinary level of mandate you need in the American system, much higher than in other systems in order to govern. So, when you have that, I think majorities should be able to govern. Getting rid of the filibuster, you could do a couple of other things on the side would at least help that, it would not make us into a swift moving system, it would not make us as easy to govern within as it is say in Canada or in the U.K. or in Germany or in a dozen other systems I could name, but it would help.

ISAACSON: About four years ago you moved back to your home state of California. You are a progressive. That State of California has pretty much a progressive government at every level, they’re able to pass a whole lot of progressive policies. Why are things so bad there?

KLEIN: California is a real problem for any vision of progressive governance. I want to say that as clearly as I can. It is not a well governed state. We don’t — we have not been able to get housing right in the state. So, it is unaffordable for people to live near where they work. We can’t get transportation right. And currently or at least last I look, the day or two ago, California is ranking dead last, dead last, on vaccine distribution. So, there’s maybe some issues with data there, people can argue. But as far as data that we have, we’re dead last. That is a huge issue. I think there are a couple reasons for it, although I would not proclaim myself enough of an expert to know them all. But one of them, certainly, when it comes to housing and transportation issues, is progressives, in a funny way, they marry a comfort with federal — with government power and government action with also a discomfort in terms of how power is wielded. And so, in some states where there’s actually a lot of progressive control, what they end up doing is creating both. You both have sort of unified Democratic control of the state. But on the other hand, the state’s actually governing structure is shocked full of veto points. All these different neighborhood associations and little councils and boards of supervisors and a hundred other ways. And the way that a lot of these things were constructed was the hope was is it would make sure that those in power could not act without hearing those who would be affected. It is very a good idea. It’s a good progressive idea. But you create too many of them, well, people who show up, number one, are very unrepresented groups. You have people who, you know, don’t want anything built near their home because it may ruin their view. On the other hand, the people who would be helped by that new apartment building being built can actually — or don’t actually know to come to that meeting because they don’t live there yet. So, it creates a very, very, very heavy status quo bias. It ends up really advantaging those who already live in a place rather than those who need to live in a place. On top of that — and something I think about with California sometimes, you probably heard the old-line that Americans are symbolically conservative and operational liberal. That means when you ask some about questions of philosophy, should the government be big or small, you know, what is best done by the private sector or by the public, they sound pretty conservative. And then when you ask them about specific issues in policy, they sound quite liberal. They do want to have more government to ride the health insurance, a higher minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich, et cetera. I have a theory that California has become increasingly symbolically progressive but operationally conservative. That whatever it comes to a big symbolic issue, you know, fighting the Trump administration in courts or, you know, pushing back against this or that outrage, it is on social media, or, you know, making sure that every elected official roughly will say black lives matter, it is very, very liberal on those issues. But then when it becomes something about actually changing how we live, we need to build housing right here near you so other people can live here, we need to build a train station right here near you so we can have reasonable mass transit, we need to actually give out vaccines quickly even if that might mean some people end up somehow cutting in line, they become very operationally conservative. California does not like to change what is actually happening in it, it just likes to signal how progressive it is to the rest of the country. And that’s a pretty bad — that in my view is a pretty bad equilibrium to be at. So, if the California government is listening to me on this, like how you are running things here is a problem and it is a problem because you’re not going to have people in the long run trusting blue government and federal level either if they don’t see it working out well at the state level.

ISAACSON: Something weird has happened to me in the past few weeks, which is I no longer get up early in the morning and start doom scrolling through the Twitter feed and other things to find out, oh, my God, what just happened in politics. Is Joe Biden right, that it would be better if we all calm down, quit being so interested in politics and sort of calmed ourselves and sort of didn’t make politics such a fiery sport?

KLEIN: I think yes and no. I certainly think if you don’t make politics such a fiery sport, that is better. I certainly think it is better to have a president that who tweets boring things as opposed to keeping everybody transfixed with whatever outrage is going to come out of his phone next. And I do think it is good in general to lower the temperature a little bit. I would be a little careful because right now, what government is doing is so unbelievably consequential that I don’t in any way want anybody to hear me saying this is a time to tune out. In fact, this is a time for people to pay attention and to keep pressure on, but to pay attention not to symbolic outrages and conflicts but ask you to what the government is really doing. So, I mentioned earlier vaccine distribution. That is a place where there really does need to be attention on what the states and cities and for that matter, the federal government are doing. It needs to go faster. There are a bunch of places where they need to put pressure on regulators to be a little less conservative and a little less cautious. In California in particular, it took some time. And L.A. took a very long time to update to a less restrictive eligibility criteria so that more shots get in more arms more quickly. People need to be paying attention to things like this. So, yes. The great thing about Joe Biden is that he is trying to get people to not pay so much attention to him. But I don’t think he would say and I certainly wouldn’t say that it is a good time to not pay attention to things in the country. The question is always, are you paying attention in a constructive way or are you paying attention a hobbyist way, right? Are you following politics like a sport and looking for people who are just going to show you things that are going to make you furious, or are you following things that help you be an engaged citizen, and maybe actually even help you act upon the world? So, one thing in general that I always tell people to do is, it is great to do less following politics on your Twitter feed and more being engaged with politics or engaged with civic structure in your local community. You can almost always do a lot more to effect how things work right around you than you can nationally. But people are very attached to the political entertainment. And the important substantive consequences of the national scene still a rebalancing of the effort a little bit more towards state and local politics is healthy for most people.

ISAACSON: Ezra Klein, as always, thank you so much for joining us.

KLEIN: Thank you.