Gaski: Save the SAVE Act, Not the Filibuster
by John F. Gaski, Ph.D.
On the prospect of ditching the Senate filibuster in order to pass the SAVE Act, Majority Leader John Thune has been heard to say, “The Democrats may intend to steal the car, but we don’t have to give them the keys.” Translated: Don’t provide future Dems with the filibuster weapon. The error of that shallow illogic, however, can be exposed as follows.
For background, to frame the legislative landscape, we should initially squelch the canard that the SAVE Act’s requirements, designed to prevent vote fraud, are onerous. Presumably, obtaining birth certificate or passport evidence of citizenship is a difficult impost. First, forget passports. They are explicitly not a necessary condition, only a sufficient one. (Readers will surely know the significance of that distinction for the focal issue. That is, holding a U.S. passport is not required.) And the difficulty of the alternative mode of proof, i.e., retrieving a birth certificate copy, has been debunked by those who have publicly demonstrated the ease of doing so online or by mail. The only American known to have had real difficulty producing a birth certificate is Barack Obama.
Moreover, most critics do not even challenge the SAVE Act’s other main provision, i.e., to require voter photo ID, because it is conspicuously reasonable. Some scorn the prospective act’s aim of eliminating mail-in ballots despite the near-universal recognition, even by Jimmy Carter’s commission, that they are a sure source of corruption ⎯ apart from the farce of the Y2020 vote count our nation experienced. Yet the mail-in aspect is secondary to the SAVE Act’s core essence.
The preceding merely clears the decks for the strategic crux: Regarding the Senate Republicans’ option of eliminating the filibuster to facilitate passage of the SAVE Act, many fear that such action would enable future Democrats, when they take power again, to pack the Supreme Court, engineer statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico (creating four extra Dem senators), and legalize tens of millions of illegal immigrants to vote Democrat — virtually establishing permanent one-party rule. Yes and no.
This issue should be viewed as a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma from game theory. The Republican choice plight: a) Kill the filibuster and (+) they are able to pass some valuable law, such as SAVE, but then (-) the Dems will eventually use the precedent to enact everything their side has always wanted to do to destroy the country! Conversely, b) don’t kill the filibuster and (-) lose the SAVE Act benefits, but (+) this Repub restraint could inhibit the Dems from nixing the filibuster in the future. The inherent strategic flaw in this approach should be obvious, but apparently is not to some Senate Republicans: The Dems will kill the filibuster when they get the chance, no matter what the Senate Repubs do now. (So it is not a true game because, while the Republicans have been playing, the Democrats are not.) At that point, Repubs will ask themselves, “What good did it do us not to eliminate the filibuster? If we had done so, the resulting reforms might even have prevented the Dems’ socialist takeover.”
We know the Dem intentions for the filibuster up front because they have told us they will abolish it. The world has recently relearned the tough lesson that when fanatical totalitarians tell you they will do something, believe them, whether the zealots are named Ayatollah or Hitler. Likewise with the totalitarian zealots we know as American liberal Democrats, presently concerning abolition of the Senate filibuster.
Therefore, the rational choice distilled from our quasi-game theory is for Senate Republicans to nuke the filibuster now, to enact vote reform law that may even succeed in forestalling the Democrats from taking absolute power to America’s detriment. (Voting integrity can be an obstacle to future election chicanery, in other words.) Any Repub action that lowers the probability of this grim Dem autocracy from 100 percent to even 90 percent is the preferred strategy. Otherwise, the Dems definitely will give themselves carte blanche to do all those terrible things they have long wanted to do to you.
Sleep well, comrades. And root for the Republicans to see the light.
John F. Gaski, Ph.D., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, studies the societal impact of marketing activity and power. He describes himself as “a long-time registered Democrat and long-time registered Republican — sequentially and intermittently, not simultaneously” ― which he trusts will dispatch any impression of partisanship.
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