Michael Knowles

I think that the problem is that once that glass is, in fact, broken, whether we break it, whether the Democrats break it, once the glass is broken, I do believe at this point that destroying the filibuster is basically the end of the country.

Because then the federal government is just going to decide on a pure majoritarian basis to make extraordinarily wide ranging moves, including things like stacking the Supreme Court.

So all the checks and balances will basically be broken.

If there's one vulnerable point in the federal government where if you just put your finger on it, you shove the entire thing just collapses into dust in terms of the checks and balances orders.

It right now is the filibuster.

Because again, if somebody breaks the filibuster, shoves a bunch of their friends onto the Supreme Court, they can do anything and there's no one there to stop them.

And if we turn into a pure majoritarian country, defeating all of the designs of the founders, then it's basically it.

Now, Matt's argument, which is the preemptive argument, which is like, they're going to do it, so we should do it first, because otherwise they're going to do it, and we'll basically sat there, and what do we have?

Our sort of moral suasion behind us.

I definitely hear that argument.

It's why, you know, I thought an elegant solution that was proposed by our friend Jeremy Boring a while back, which I actually passed on to Thune,

was that we ought to pursue a constitutional amendment to enshrine the filibuster permanently in the constitution.

And if Democrats won't go for it, then you nuke the filibuster.

So you basically say, listen, either we're all in this together or none of us are in it together, but we're not gonna do this on the basis of good faith.

I thought that was kind of an elegant solution, but I will say that just on a pragmatic level,

The Republicans, number one, do not have the votes to destroy the filibuster right now.

Number two, if the Democrats do destroy the filibuster, again, these things do have a way of turning around and clocking them both ways.

So let's say that the Democrats destroy the filibuster, and let's say that the Democrats are capable of shoving a couple more states into the Senate.

Now, I'm old enough to remember when Alaska was admitted, well, I'm not quite that old, but Alaska was admitted as a Democratic state in the union, and Hawaii was admitted as a Republican state in the union.

And so everyone always thinks that whatever is happening in this moment politically in any of these given states is sort of the final status of those given states.