Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris recently announced that she would favor eliminating the U.S. Senate’s filibuster rule to codify the former rule of Roe v. Wade (1973) that treated abortion as a civil right. Roe was overruled by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), returning the issue to the state governments to decide. Eliminating the filibuster for ordinary legislation, as Harris proposes, is enormously dangerous, as it would further transform the American political system into a purely majoritarian one that would empower temporary, bare majorities in the national government to impose their will on a deeply divided country.

Currently, the filibuster rule in the Senate means that ordinary legislation requires sixty votes for a cloture vote, which forces an end to a filibuster. Without the filibuster, any measure that can obtain fifty-one votes can be passed and imposed on the American people if the U.S. House of Representatives and president agree. One party rule can be very dangerous to liberty and prosperity, and it could be used for and against both “sides” in American politics, depending who is in power at a given moment. Harris, like any other politician in “our democracy,” is not thinking about the future. Instead, she is thinking solely of the November 2024 election. This underscores an important point, not about Harris in particular, but about the politics of “democracy” in general.

In democratic politics, the time horizon that concerns political elites is limited to the next election cycle, so the system is systematically biased against long-term rational decision making. Indeed, as economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe has cogently argued, the incentives of politicians in democracies are to focus on the present and discount the future very heavily. Politicians in democracies seek to present themselves as holding and acting upon grand political and moral principles, but whether they hold such principles is not relevant to their behavior, which is instead motivated principally by short-term advantage. Thus, whatever they may say about the basis for their decisions, the true reason is their conviction that it will help set them up for victory in the next election cycle. This is why their actions so often seem puzzlingly irrational. They do things that have a great and damaging long-term cost, whether it is excessive spending, outrageous levels of public debt, dangerous foreign policy commitments, and the like. They are not thinking about the long-term impact of their actions but are committed to short-term political success and nothing more. This is the essence of a democratic political system.

One of the contributions of public choice theory is to show how rules can make institutions act as if the people operating them had a longer time horizon than they really do. One of the ways rules can do this is to establish procedures that limit the power of bare majorities, which are typically transitory and driven by short-term gain without regard to long-term consequences. This, in fact, was a reason the United States Senate was originally elected by the state legislatures rather than by voters. It gave the states direct representation in the national political system and limited the ability of temporary popular majorities to force their immediate desires through the political system, which is why James Madison contrasted the Constitution’s system with democracies, where policies shifted with fleeting majorities. Procedures and institutions that encourage deliberation and require compromise among competing interests mimic longer-term rational behavior because they force those in the institution that act as if they cared about a broader range of interests than they really do.

Unfortunately, history has demonstrated that constitutional design is not sufficient to restrain government. The short-term interests of political actors will eventually erode the restraints on their conduct that constitutional rules provide, so a democratic political system has a built-in bias toward government overreach and incessant growth, with the corresponding destruction of individual liberty. One of the institutional procedures employed to restrain Congress is the filibuster, and it is now under threat of elimination by politicians eager to say whatever will gain them votes in the next election. The filibuster was present in the United States Senate from its inception, as it never had a rule limiting debate, so from the earliest sessions, senators would seek to defeat legislation by “talking it to death.” By empowering the minority, the filibuster enabled the Senate to act as if its members were motivated by a broader range of interests than their own immediate, short-term ones.

But the filibuster has been previously eroded and is now threatened with elimination entirely over the abortion issue; ironically, an issue created by the erosion of the filibuster itself. In 2013, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid adopted the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster for nominations (except nominations to the Supreme Court) because they wanted President Barack Obama to get his nominees approved, and Republicans had been using the filibuster to obstruct Democrats’ nominations to the executive branch and courts. It was not that Democrats disliked the filibuster, because they threatened to filibuster President Donald Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in 2017. In response to the threat, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations. Thus, the filibuster was now gone for all nominations.

Consider the results from the Democrats’ perspective. Now, because first Democrats, and then Republicans, did away with the filibuster for nominations, they paved the way for the current conservative Supreme Court that Democrats despise. When the filibuster was in effect, presidents typically had to choose moderate, compromise nominees that could prevent a filibuster by the opposition. Now, it is pointless for a president to choose a compromise candidate if their party controls the Senate, because a bare majority can prevail with no possibility of a filibuster requiring sixty votes for cloture. This new procedure has produced the conservative Court that has Democrats demanding further “reforms,” such as packing the Court, term limits for justices, and a “code of ethics” to enable Congress to politically threaten individual justices. It will never occur to Democratic elites that they had a hand in producing the very Court they cannot stand, and it does not occur to them that their newly proposed “reforms” might one day backfire on them. All they can imagine is how calls for “reform” will provide them with points to score in the 2024 election cycle. They do not think of a future when Republicans might use these tools to pack the Court, intimidate liberal justices with ethics challenges, or require liberal justices to retire, because politicians in a democracy are incentivized to focus solely on the immediate future.

Changing the rules to get what you want sounds like a great idea, until it is used to do things you don’t like. With stunning irony, the Democratic politicians whose lack of foresight in removing the filibuster for nominations produced the Supreme Court they now say they cannot abide and must “reform” may next remove the filibuster for ordinary legislation to codify a rule overruled by the Court their lack of foresight created. The adage to “be careful what you ask for—you might just get it” applies here. The short-term thinking that characterizes “our democracy” continues to erode institutional restraints on government and thus poses grave dangers for the long-term future.