Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City

Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Chris Pope. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,

where his work primarily focuses on health care policy, hospitals, entitlements, and health

insurance markets. Chris has also been a regular writer for City Journal for a few years now, tackling all those

topics and more, including the subject of today's discussion, Congress. Chris, thanks very

much for joining us. Thanks for inviting me, Brian. Since the election outcome was clarified,

the balance of power in the Senate now stands at 50-50.

But with Vice President Kamala Harris able to cast a tie-breaking vote, the Democrats basically have narrow control of both the Senate and the House.

One of the issues we're going to be hearing a lot more about, as the Biden administration

picks up momentum this year, is going to be the Senate's filibuster.

Liberals, as you've noted, are increasingly keen to abolish the 60-vote threshold to overcome a Republican

filibuster. And they've been encouraged in this seemingly by President Biden and his predecessor,

President Obama. When you wrote about this issue for us, I think it was back in October,

you said the abolishing of the filibuster would be unlikely. Why do you think that's true?

And have you seen anything that would change your mind in recent developments?

Yeah, I think back in October, when I made that prediction, I was actually, I think,

like most people, assuming that the Democrats were going to have a more sizable majority

even than they currently did.

I think most people back then were kind of assuming they would get maybe 53 or so seats.

And it seems like they're only going to get 50 seats.

We know that they only have 50 seats with the vice president as a type breaking vote.

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