On Friday’s broadcast of C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) argued against the filibuster and also said that “We are still a country that still has a Senate that massively overrepresents land at the expense of people. And I think it’s our collective job as Americans to push to make our government closer to the idea of a truly equal, representative democracy that our founders described but never totally created.”
Casten said, “I’m not a senator. I would argue that when the overwhelming majority of the American people want something, we should pay attention to the majority of the American people and not the rights of 40 senators to block the will of the majority, but, ultimately, that’s a question for my Senate colleagues to decide what they want to prioritize.”
He added that conversation about fixing institutions is “a conversation that all of us, as Americans, need to have. Because when we can have a conversation that says it is completely reasonable to talk about totally overhauling our campaign finance laws, it’s completely reasonable to talk about overhauling healthcare reform or overhauling the way we regulate guns in America, but it’s considered to be horribly naive to talk about changing the rules of Senate procedure, which is essentially what a conversation about the filibuster is, I think we need to raise our ambition and say we got to this point on our 250th birthday almost, not because our founders designed perfect institutions, but, because, over time, the American people have demanded that those institutions improve. We are a country now where you can vote even if you are not a property-holding white male. That’s really good. We’re a country now where you can directly vote for senators. That’s really good. We didn’t used to be that way. We are still a country that doesn’t allow you to directly vote for presidents. We are still a country that still has a Senate that massively overrepresents land at the expense of people. And I think it’s our collective job as Americans to push to make our government closer to the idea of a truly equal, representative democracy that our founders described but never totally created. And that’s our task. That’s always been our task as Americans…how do we push towards that greater vision of America?”
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