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This Week's Column: 3 Cheers for the Filibuster
Listening to pundits like Paul Krugman bemoan that ramming through a 2,000+ page Senate bill was made so difficult by the horrible … filibuster, you’d think that this Senate rule dating back to the 19th Century was some kind of threat to democracy. In this week’s syndicated column, I argue the opposite:
On any given day, what is Congress more likely to do: violate or expand liberty? As nineteenth-century New York Judge Gideon Tucker put it, “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”
Libertarian science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein had a good idea. One of his novels depicted a bicameral legislature with one chamber needing a supermajority to pass laws and the other needing only a minority of votes to repeal them.
By the standard of protecting freedom and keeping government caged, that’s not a bad idea. It should be easier to repeal laws than to pass them.
More on why there should be MORE filibusters here.
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