Ben Wikler
speaker
485 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Ben Wikler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The country's almost perfectly cleaved in half in this way.
Wisconsin is a microcosm of this national picture.
And because it's so agonizingly evenly balanced, the country keeps toppling from one side to the other.
We've had more changeovers in who holds power in the House, the Senate, and the presidency in the last 26 years, this century, than any other time in American history.
And I make the case in the book that if we want to get out of this, this period of instability where people keep voting for change, not getting it or not liking the change that they have, and then voting to throw the bums out and get a different bunch of people who they immediately get disillusioned with too,
We need to change the systems that block things from actually happening.
And the first and biggest one of those is the Senate filibuster.
We're in a period right now where no party is likely to get 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster.
And where both parties have a political incentive to stop the other side from doing big things, which means that voters screaming out for change, voting for change, do not get it from our political system.
On the biggest...
most intensive issues of each individual moment.
And that will continue to be the case as long as the Senate says that you need a supermajority in order to pass legislation.
The filibuster is the exact opposite of what the founders intended.
They considered the idea of requiring a supermajority and they rejected it.
It was not part of the Constitution.
It was actually created by accident when they changed the rules of the Senate when Aaron Burr suggested revising the Senate rulebook.
No one noticed that they could filibuster for years after that.
Then there were 80 years where it was only used to block civil rights legislation.
And then much more recently, Mitch McConnell discovered that he could use it to try to torpedo anything Barack Obama wanted.
So we got the Affordable Care Act.
Showing 201–220 of 485 · page 11 of 25
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