Luke Pickrell talks with Thomas Geoghegan about the role undemocratic political institutions such as the Senate play in shaping our country. Geoghegan is a longtime labor lawyer and the author of The History of Democracy Has Yet To Be Written (2021) and two critical articles, “The Infernal Senate” (1994) and “Abolish the Senate” (2020). This interview was originally published on the Democratic Constitution Blog.
How did you become interested in politics, the Senate, the Constitution, and democracy?
Thomas Geoghegan: I grew up in a family of Democrats and politics was always the topic du jour. In the case of the Senate, I’m a union-side labor lawyer. I represent unions. Sometimes, I bring suits for employee groups that need to be represented by unions against employers. Sometimes, I bring suits for union members who want their unions to be more democratic and accountable. Over the years, I’ve had a real commitment to bringing back a labor movement to address the inequality in the country and give people a sense of control over their lives through collective bargaining, a more democratic workplace, and having a say in what their benefits ought to be.
While living this life as a union-side lawyer, it became clear to me that there’s one obstacle in the way of a labor movement: the existence of the Senate. Substantial labor law reform passed the House at least four times, including under Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden.
However, labor law reform always dies in the Senate because the Senate is not representative. It is not the real United States. It’s a funhouse mirror version of the United States in which North Dakota has the same representation as California (60,000 people have the same voting rights as 40 million people). The Senate has grown more unrepresentative over time through the persistent use of the filibuster.
The Filibuster was basically unknown until the 1970s. It was occasionally used to protect slavery and Jim Crow laws in the South, but it was very episodic and rarely invoked because people were ashamed to invoke it. It’s the norm for anything not part of a budget bill today. This is the basis of my interest. The Senate exists to frustrate the Left.
Why did you write “The Infernal Senate”?
TG: The Republicans had taken control of the House in the 1994 elections. I was upset that so much of the Clinton agenda had stalled in the Senate. The loss of the House in the 1994 elections was traumatic. I had all these friends who, over the years, had loved the filibuster in the Senate because that was what anti-war senators had used in the 1960s to protest against the Vietnam War. People like Russ Goldsmith were all in favor of the filibuster. I wanted to educate people that the problem is the filibuster and the problem is the Senate, not the House.
We’ve got to clear the way for the House to get its agenda through, which means going after the Senate. The Senate exists to frustrate the House. That’s what it’s there for because that’s what the framers intended. The House is the only institution representing the people because it’s based on the principle of one person and one equal vote. To the extent that you can scale down the barrier that the Senate poses, the more likely the country can move to the left on the issues that I care about, which is, you know, higher wages, more income inequality, better pensions, health insurance, and protection from insecurity for the vulnerable. The vulnerable include many people who voted for Trump, too.
We don’t have a political system based on one person, one equal vote in this country. But this phrase, which you use in both of your articles, isn’t used very much on the Left. Why is it important to critique our political system based on one person, one equal vote?
TG: Every other democracy in the world — Britain, France, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, you name it — is based on one person, one vote. The only exception to this rule is the United States. The whole nature of the republican principle (and I’m not talking about democracy, but the principle of being represented by others) is based on one person, one vote. That’s what makes it republican. That’s not how the Senate works.
This matters politically because it creates regional conflicts that have the effect of stopping any meaningful change. The fault lines line up in curious ways. So, for example, the South had less population than the North, but the South was equally represented in the Senate up through the Civil War, and that’s why nothing could be done about slavery. The slave states had a way of staying in power.
Today’s Republicans have been in the minority, seriously in the minority, for decades (notwithstanding the recent Trump victory). Still, Trump’s victory is a function of a dysfunctional country that has been rendered dysfunctional because, over the years, a minority, the Republicans, have been able to stop a majority, the Democrats, from acting.
You can see it in the Biden administration. Biden proposed sweeping labor law reform. It went nowhere in the Senate because Joe Manchin (D-WV) refused to remove the filibuster. One Democratic senator stopped the entire Biden agenda, even though Manchin said he favored labor law reform. But he wouldn’t change the filibuster, which killed labor law reform. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) was the same.
Without the filibuster, we would be in the second year of sweeping labor law reform. People don’t grasp this because it gets lost in the noise, but Biden was very pro-union. As a union-side labor lawyer, I’ve read the bill that passed the House, the [Protecting the Right to Organize] Act. It would have upended the way wages are handed out in this country. So, a new election came around, and two-thirds of the white working class voted for Trump because they didn’t see Biden doing anything for them. Well, let’s blame it on the Senate.
Nobody has been taught this in school. You just learned, “Oh, there’s the Senate. It’s always been there. And it’s part of democracy.” No, it’s anti-democratic. The framers didn’t believe in democracy. You wish there were some way to go to all the civics classes in high schools around America and say, “Wake up, kids, this is going to be your life. You’re screwed. You’re not in a democracy.”
Has the climate of constitutional or Senate critique changed since 1994?
TG: There was a dramatic change during the Obama administration, especially regarding the filibuster. The filibuster was sacrosanct even at the beginning of the Obama administration. Obama said he would change how Washington worked, but he went to Washington with no plan to change the filibuster. So, he lost his agenda, just like Carter. By the end of the Obama second term, even though the Republicans were in control of both houses, the Democrats were sufficiently aghast of the filibuster. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the filibuster was beloved by the Left. They thought it would stop some invasion of a foreign country (which it never does). The notion of some heroic lone senator getting up on the floor and denouncing the war in Vietnam had this huge emotional appeal.
There’s a broader understanding that the Senate is bad for democracy. But this sentiment is harder to pinpoint because people accept the Senate as a given. “You’ll never have it gone from the Constitution,” they say. But that could happen. You could create representation friendlier to progressive initiatives coming out of the House by adding the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states. You could also break up California, Texas, Florida, and New York and create more senators.
It would be easy to get rid of the filibuster, but the Republican majority in the Senate is committed to preserving it because they don’t want to pass any affirmative legislation except tax cuts. They know how close the country came to creating a new labor movement that would have pushed the country to the left.
What does Trump’s election mean for the movement for a political system based on one person, one vote?
TG: There’s one way for the Republicans to stay in power: to shut down the Democrats by making it impossible for them to do anything. Then the Republicans go to the country and say, “You see, nothing’s changed.” However, nothing has changed because minority power is being used to stop the majority will. In the first Obama years, for example, Mitch McConnell said, “Even though we’re a minority, we’ve got the filibuster, and we’re not going to let anything through.” During the Biden administration, you had McConnell and Manchin shutting everything down. The Build Back Better Act offered $3 trillion in infrastructure support, childcare, and income support for the vulnerable. But by the time the bill got through the Senate, nothing was left except roads, bridges, solar, etc. We’d have had the Build Back Better Act, except for the filibuster.
The Constitution skews politics to privilege minority voices. That’s why we’re in the spot we’re in right now. The country opted for an opposition party that is no longer McConnell’s, but something close to a criminal gang. It’s just tragic, but it’s part of the design of the Constitution. The Constitution frustrates our government in a way that no other democracy on the planet right now is frustrated.
Look at the Republican House. The Republicans control the House in part because so many congressional districts are gerrymandered. The House has passed bills prohibiting gerrymandering at different times, and the Senate kills them. What protects the gerrymandering of the House? The Senate. The Senate is the reason the House is bad. Our political structures guide us to certain outcomes; they don’t necessarily dictate results, but they skew us toward certain mischievous outcomes.