Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who is challenging Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to be the next Senate majority leader, said Friday he wants to abolish the filibuster and ruled out a potential presidential run in 2028.
Van Hollen, speaking to reporters at the What’s Next conference in Denver, argued that legislation should pass the Senate with simple-majority votes and that the filibuster, which requires senators to muster 60 votes to pass most legislation, is “undemocratic.”
“My personal opinion is that we need democracy in the United States Senate and that means allowing ultimately a majority of senators to answer the call of the American people, so that means 51 votes,” Van Hollen said.
“My personal view has been all along that the filibuster is an antidemocratic — small ‘d’ — provision. It’s not in our Constitution. It was put in there by senators to enhance their power over the power of the people,” he added.
I believe the Senate has outgrown its original intended purpose. It served as a balance of power between “territories” that were more independent.
We are more of a nation with a united national identity now than we were at our nation’s founding. We would not have had the union without the current set up because those original territories might not have agreed to unite under a shared flag to oppose British rule, yet alone unite afterwards. I would say even the Civil War is evidence that we were a looser collection of states at the time.
The House of Representatives serve shorter terms, the legislation they pass through may not be geared towards what’s best for the country long term, but what would help them secure reelection in the short term. The Senate having longer terms make sense purely for our long term national outlook. But our current Senate structure fails at fulfilling that goal at a national level, imo. The Senate not being based on population means it does not look out for our long term national interests, but instead the individual Senators long term career prospects in their state. It also gives those states more weight and their lower level population more power relatively.
I think each individual region should be weighted evenly, no state should be winner take all. If you live somewhere with say a population of 100,000. Then you should have a proportional amount of representation to a place with 1,000,000. Forget the borders of the states, I want each block of people in our nation to have proportional representation. No gerrymandering and full proportional representation.