| Review of: | Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate by Gregory J. Wawro, Eric Schickler |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Vincent G. Moscardelli |
| Reviewed in: | The Journal of Politics |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 69, Issue 2, Pages 587-594 |
Book Reviews
Academic interest in the United States Senate is on the rise. Yet, while the filibuster-arguably the institution's defining feature in the eyes of the public-remains a subject of popular fascination, this surge in scholarship has yielded little consensus on the causes or consequences of this unique form of legislative obstruction. Are Senate majorities unable to secure their agendas due to obstruction by the minority, thus rendering the Senate an antimajoritarian institution? If so, why are minority rights not exploited even more fully than they are? Why did the Senate move to adopt a formal rule limiting debate in 1917, and what have been the implications of that reform? These are the primary questions to which Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler offer answers in their book
Wawro and Schickler begin answering these questions by asserting that filibusters may be usefully framed as "wars of attrition" (34). In this framework, majorities accommodate obstruction because the costs they incur in the form of the occasional failure to secure preferred legislation do not outweigh the informational benefits obstruction provides. Specifically, minority obstruction reveals information about preference intensity that is electorally valuable to majority senators representing heterogeneous constituencies. Three concepts are central to the war of attrition game they develop: the costs associated with obstruction, the credibility of threats by the majority to adopt rules changes that would limit or end obstruction, and the salience of the issue being debated. The authors demonstrate that for much of the period before 1917, the costs of obstruction were high for the minority, and the majority's threats to change the rules were extremely credible. The latter was true because committed majorities had shown on numerous occasions that they could use "procedural innovation-the creation of new precedents-to defeat obstruction" (72). This is important because it distinguishes the authors' account of the Senate's failure to enact majoritarian reform from that offered in the only other recent book on the filibuster, Binder and Smith's
Thus, on issues of equal salience to both sides, the interaction of costs and credible threats produced an equilibrium in the early Senate in which "relatively narrow majorities" were "remarkably successful" in securing passage of preferred legislation, even in cases in which the minority engaged in obstruction (20). It is important to note, though, that this equilibrium could only obtain in the presence of broadly held norms that dictated restraint in the practice of obstructionism once a clear majority was revealed. Through analysis of senators' statements, the authors show that such norms did exist for much of the nineteenth century and that they were reinforced by the majority's willingness to take aggressive action to end obstruction. However, the equilibrium began to unravel around the turn of the twentieth century, as increased workload (which increased the costs of obstruction for the majority) and growth in the size of the chamber (which undermined the norm of restraint) fundamentally altered senators' cost-benefit calculations. It was in the wake of these changes that the Senate adopted Rule XXII, which allowed for a two-thirds majority to end debate.
Wawro and Schickler summarize the implications of their theory for lawmaking in the precloture Senate as follows: "narrow floor majorities should generally be successful in enacting favored legislation, except when the minority is more intense in its commitment than the majority or when the legislation is considered at the very end of a Congress" (87). They show that aggregate patterns in winning coalition sizes, majority coalition building strategies, and support for dilatory motions are consistent with their theory. Winning coalitions on significant legislation were generally not universal or near universal, although they tended to be larger near the end of the legislative session when time constraints that generated "uncertainty about how large a coalition had to be in order to overcome obstruction" (20) led risk-averse coalition builders to build supermajority coalitions. The authors also investigate the role of issue salience by focusing on obstruction and slavery in the antebellum Senate, finding that senators' "use of and support for dilatory tactics" (160) were sensitive to the salience of the underlying policy issue.
The authors then turn to the task of pinpointing the reasons why cloture reform finally took place in 1917 and why it took the form that it did. They conclude that "the uncertainty that filibusters presented to the appropriations process was a primary concern in the efforts" to enact cloture reform (238) and that empowering a supermajority to bring debate to a close allowed filibusters to continue to play out as wars of attrition (thus retaining their informational benefits) for at least a few more decades. Establishing this empirically is made difficult by the dynamism of this period of Senate history [which witnessed the adoption of Rule XXII in 1917, the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, a 1914 rules change that for the first time "obligated presiding officers to enforce the provisions" of unanimous consent agreements (225), and the passage of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921], but the authors should be commended for the rigor with which they attempt to rule out these and other alternative explanations.
In the concluding chapter, Wawro and Schickler link their historical analysis to contemporary battles over judicial nominations and Republicans' threats to "use rulings by the presiding officer to eliminate super-majority requirements for nominations" (265)-the so-called "nuclear" or "constitutional" option. While still valuable, this is the least satisfying portion of the book for two reasons. First, the empirical analysis ends in 1946, creating a disjuncture between the core of the book and the concluding chapter, which emphasizes the last quarter century. Second, the authors' theory offers little insight into why, if filibusters no longer play out as wars of attrition, the Senate has not (yet) adopted a majority cloture rule. Their discussion of possible explanations-most notably the advent of "costless" filibusters (260) and the assault on senators' "personal power goals" (263) that such reforms would entail-does not represent a substantial advancement over that provided by Binder and Smith.
In sum, this book represents an outstanding contribution to our understanding of filibusters, obstruction, and lawmaking in pre-1946 Senate. It advances significantly our understanding of obstruction and its practice over the first one-and-a-half centuries of Senate history, and the questions it generates in the process will keep students of the Senate busy for years to come. The authors collect and analyze a variety of data and evidence, including floor votes, floor speeches, letters and memoirs, rules and precedents, and contemporary journalistic accounts, and they dedicate enormous energy to testing the predictions derived from their theory and to ruling out alternative explanations drawn from the fields of political science and history in systematic, thorough, and rigorous fashion. The book's primary strengths lie in this commitment to empirical testing and the novel and compelling explanation the authors provide for why no cloture rule was necessary for much of the Senate's early history. It should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand legislative obstruction and the historical development of the U.S. Senate.