The Gun Bill Failed Because the Senate is Wildly Undemocratic

     This is a point of both Ezra Klein and Nate Cohen and it's pretty sobering. After all, if the Senate is wildly undemocratic what can we say about the House? It's the House where 54% of votes were for Democrats and yet thanks to gerrymandering, the GOP has a 31 vote margin.

     Yet the Senate is quite a mess as well. As Cohen points out, President Obama is pretty angry about the bill's being filibustered. He-and we the public-has good reason:

     "The compromise on background checks died today in the Senate. And President Obama is as angry as we’ve ever seen him."

      We're so used to the 60 vote requirement we seldom reflect on just how undemocratic this is. We talk about how gun control went down for defeat when it got 54 votes-really 55 as Reid voted no for procedural reasons. Yet it failed:

       "Late this afternoon, the Senate failed to pass a bipartisan proposal to extend background checks to all private gun sales, including those sold over the internet or at gun shows. Note the very intentional wording here: “failed to pass.” That’s not the same as “rejected” or “defeated.” The measure actually had support from 54 senators. But it takes 60 to break a filibuster. In other words, supporters had a very clear majority. They just didn't have what it takes to overcome obstruction by the minority."

     http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112949/senate-fails-expand-gun-background-checks-obama-gets-angry

     "And the supporters' majority was even bigger than it seems. If you assume, for sake of argument, each senator represents half of his or her state’s population, then senators voting for the bill represented about 194 million people, while the senators voting against the bill represented about 118 million people. That’s getting close to a two-thirds majority in favor of the measure."

      Regarding the President's anger, Cohen says it's well placed though it's on all the Democrats-even Harry Reid and up to a point Obama himself. After all, if they had pushed filibuster reform harder we would have a considerably less undemocratic Senate right now. The President challenged us to have the staying power to fight on this issue. 

      "But Obama didn’t just call out opponents. He also called out allies, with reason. The filibuster isn’t their fault—that’s on Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate, and even Obama for failing to change the chamber’s voting rules. (That failure has hobbled the Obama presidency since day one.) But the failure to support gun legislation more intensely is very much a product of apathy.

The point is those who care deeply about preventing more and more gun violence will have to be as passionate, and as organized, and as vocal as those who blocked these common-sense steps to help keep our kids safe.  Ultimately, you outnumber those who argued the other way. But they're better organized. They're better financed. They’ve been at it longer.  And they make sure to stay focused on this one issue during election time. … So to change Washington, you, the American people, are going to have to sustain some passion about this.  And when necessary, you’ve got to send the right people to Washington.  And that requires strength, and it requires persistence. 

     "That last part was particularly important, since Obama was framing the gun issue, explicitly, as something that would come up in future elections. “If this Congress refuses to listen to the American people and pass common-sense gun legislation, then the real impact is going to have to come from the voters,” Obama said. This may not be what all Democrats want to hear; the few who voted against the bill come from rural states where supporting gun control is risky. But Obama put down a clear marker. He’s going to keep fighting for this. The question is whether his supporters will be fighting with him."

     This point that if this Congress fails is unable to pass such modest gun legislation then we need a new Congress was also made by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in her powerful op-ed today.

      http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/gun-control-delay-not-defeat.html

    A delay not a defeat. It's up to us to make this true. However, in fighting this we face a radically undemocratic couple of Houses of Congress. Ezra Klein puts it in very vivid and stark terms:

      "The gun vote didn't fail because a couple of red-state Democrats bolted, or even because too many senators are afraid of the National Rifle Association, or even because Sen. Pat Toomey couldn't bring along more Republicans."

       "Those factors help explain why the gun vote didn't clear the extraordinary bar set for it to succeed. But they’re not the main reason it failed."

       "The gun vote failed because of the way the Senate is designed. It failed because the Senate wildly over-represents small, rural states and, on top of that, requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass most pieces of legislation."

      "The Manchin-Toomey bill received 54 aye votes and 46 nay votes. That is to say, a solid majority of senators voted for it. In most legislative bodies around the world, that would have been enough. But it wasn't a sufficient supermajority for the U.S. Senate."

     "Of the senators from the 25 largest states, the Manchin-Toomey legislation received 33 aye votes and 17 nay votes — a more than 2:1 margin, putting it well beyond the 3/5ths threshold required to break a filibuster. But of the senators from the 25 smallest states, it received only 21 aye votes and 29 nay votes."

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/18/wonkbook-the-gun-bill-failed-because-the-senate-is-wildly-undemocratic/

     Klen makes the point that while it's often made to sound like the filibuster is as all American as Mom and apple pie and that going after it is in some sense an attack on the Constitution itself, the filibuster only came many years after the first Congress:

     "It’s typical to say that this is how the Senate’s always been. It’s also wrong. The filibuster didn’t emerge until decades after the first congress, and its constant use is a thoroughly modern development."

    "As for the small state bias, that, too, has changed over time. During the first Congress, Virginia, the largest state, was roughly 12 times the size of Delaware, which was, at the time, the smallest state. Today, California is 66 times the size of Wyoming. That makes the Senate five times less proportionate today than it was at the founding."

    "It’s easy to question the strategies of the gun bill’s architects, but the truth is they compromised repeatedly, sought support widely and openly, worked hard to address criticisms and allay concerns, and did everything in their power to marshal public opinion on their behalf. They did what they were supposed to do."

   "But then the Senate did what it is built to do. It took a bill supported by most Americans and killed it because it was intensely opposed by a minority who disproportionately live in small, rural states."

   "So between the gerrymandered House and the undemocratic by design Senate the will of the minority is overrepresented in both Houses of Congress. Much of this architecture favoring small states originates with the Old Slave South's conspiracy to dominate the Union-which they were able to successfully do for the first 60 years until Lincoln in 1860.."

     If you think there are more honorable reasons for small state bias and the supermajority requirement you'd be wrong.