Is the filibuster unconstitutional?

[Telesquare]

https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1435668330334113797
Reich is Wrong

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I like Reich, but this is silly. The filibuster is a Senate rule and can be scrapped or amended or edited as a Senate majority wills it. The Constitution explicitly protects the power of each House to make rules for itself.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     His argument seems to be based on a common caricature of Constitutional interpretation as "whatever the Founding Fathers thought about the Constitution". Looking at how originalist thought is currently applied in jurisprudence as the original public meaning of the text, it is hard to see the SCOTUS sustaining an argument that the filibuster violates the Constitution, even before getting into TimTurner's point that the Senate is empowered to make its own rules.

[brucejoel99]

Of course not, no: the filibuster isn't unconstitutional. The Rules Clause explicitly empowers both chambers of Congress to exercise the determination of their rules of proceedings that govern over their respective bodies as they see fit, & successive Senates for a long, long time now have chosen to maintain the filibuster as one such rule, so - even though the Constitution itself doesn't explicitly mention the filibuster in & of itself - it's absolutely constitutional, regardless of its political weirdness. Reich isn't just wrong on this, but laughably so for somebody who literally got his JD at f**king Yale.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

No, but it was used for Apartheid until 20th Century State Legislature you still 1912 elected the Senate that's why slavery was kept, and then direct election of Senators freed us from that but Dixiecrats continued to use Filibuster for Apartheid or Slavery

The Rs blocked Abe Fortas, Burger was good but he was the beginning of Citizens United as we have today, hopefully we can compromise if D's get a Supermajority Senate and get 11 not 13 judges and get rid of Citizens United, if Roberts is swing again, he would get rid of Citizens United

But, he is a Maverick not a Liberal

[ibagli]

This reminds me of a very serious argument I remember hearing...I think after George Voinovich killed John Bolton's nomination to the UN (if not about that, then about the judicial filibusters around that same time), that it was literally unconstitutional for the Senate to block a nomination on policy grounds.

[Sir Mohamed]

No, because it's a senate rule that can be modified or abolished by a simple majority vote. If a majority wants to get rid of the rule in question, it would be gone. If rule change was also in need of 60 votes, that would be a different question.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The filibuster is unconstitutional in the sense that Reich would like very much for it to be unconstitutional. As I've already said in another thread on this board tonight, in practice that's what pretty much all of the most out-there ideas in US constitutional interpretation--including the out-there ideas that are controlling precedent!--boil down to in the end.