The Importance of Obedience

I think the urge to create norms is very natural, but they're extremely difficult to create. And I would argue that a lot of what's disturbing about the world right now is the erosion of those norms. We're left with either no obedience, disobedience to the enforceable and facing the choice of having to legislate improvements. The filibuster was a rule that even an individual senator can hold up debate basically an inevitable indefinitely. Now it requires de facto three-fifths of the Senate rather than 51% of the Senate to pass any legislation at all. This means that we are on the verge of losing a norm in the US Senate which I think is very valuable.