In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.

Alexis De Tocqueville, the 19th Century observer of the young American republic, was onto something.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, columnist Greg Sargent pointed out that “everyone had a grand old time mocking Sen. Joe Manchin III for claiming on Tuesday that we’ve had the filibuster for 232 years. This is historically false.” The filibuster- the arcane Senate rule that requires 60 votes to end debate on a bill and move to a vote on the bill itself- is directly counter to the original intention to have few supermajority requirements in the Constitution. Frustrated by the feckless nature of the original national government which, under the Articles of Confederation, required a supermajority (9 of 13 states) to pass legislation, the Framers intended both Houses of Congress to function on simple majority votes. The ability to end debate on a bill dates to 1917 when the “cloture” was added to Senate rules. Until then, the filibuster was used as a delaying tactic by a minority attempting to force some compromise to a bill they opposed, or have the majority abandon it altogether. As such, it was a favorite tactic of southern segregationists wanting to block civil rights and anti-lynching legislation. The current form requiring 60 votes to end debate dates back to 1975… Which is a little less than 232 years ago.

We can only guess which was Joe Manchin’s worst subject in school- math or history. Maybe it’s too much to ask that the people we send to Washington as Senators know something about the history of the place.

This brings us to the zany fashionista from Arizona, Senator Kyrsten Sinema. She also opposes elimination or tinkering with the filibuster and spoke today on the Senate floor to reiterate her reasons. Invoking the need for bipartisanship, she asserted the necessity for a minority veto over the actions of the majority:

But what is the legislative filibuster other than a tool that requires new federal policy to be broadly supported by Senators representing a broader cross-section of Americans – a guardrail, inevitably viewed as an obstacle by whoever holds the Senate majority, but which in reality ensures that millions of Americans represented by the minority party have a voice in the process?

Of course, the assertion that the filibuster means a broader cross-section of Americans is represented is not supported by the evidence: “[A]ccording to the calculation of Ian Millhiser, writing for Vox, if you add up the population of states and assign half to each of their two senators, the Democratic half of the Senate represents 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.”

Senator Sinema must be quite aware that, in 2017, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell eliminated the filibuster for nominations to the Supreme Court. He cited as justification the move by the Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid (recently-deceased) to engineer a rules change in 2013 to allow nominations to the lower Federal courts to pass with a simple majority. Ms. Sinema was in the House at the time and was aware of the obstructive actions of the Republican minority in the Senate, especially the filibustering of judicial nominations.

Sinema and Manchin are not the only two Democratic Senators loathe to toss the filibuster into the dustbin of history (if they can find it), only the two most publically vocal. Of course, on the Republican side, where serious policy issues have been jettisoned in service to the Trumpist appetite for power, we have a non-stop parade of goose-stepping performance artists cosplaying as politicians- Greene, Gaetz, Boebert, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson… The list is long, much longer than the list of serious Senators and Representatives.

The shame is that we elect all of them. WTF is wrong with us? Shouldn’t we expect more from our political leaders, the people we put in place ”to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”? Or is it simply our ignorance, our failure to grasp the fundamental issues of governance and policy, and to instead act as a demographic target of marketing campaigns rather than citizens making informed choices? In this time of social media, can we even tell the difference?

I’m beginning to think De Tocqueville had it right and we’re getting what we deserve.

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