Filibusters

Though Lodge had railed against Senate obstruction as a young Congressman in 1893, he later confessed that “within a year or two” of his ascension to the Senate, he had concluded that the filibuster was a wise practice and that its annihilation would “alter completely the character of the Senate.” ...The filibuster ensured that the “majority in this Senate” would be “something more than a numerical majority at any given moment.” By providing a “full opportunity for deliberation and discussion” on legislation, the filibuster would prevent legislation from being signed into law by the President with the support of only flimsy congressional majorities. Lodge recognized that the Senate’s protections for debate provided minorities and majorities alike with the potential to refine the public mind on proposed legislation. Members could bring every one of a bill’s consequences to the attention of the people before the next election. The high vote threshold to end filibusters, established in 1917, would encourage the majority party to build a real majority coalition for bills—not simply a narrow or fluctuating majority—by working to gain some support from members of the minority party. The ultimate value of the filibuster rested in the fact that it guaranteed that there would be “one body in the government where debate cannot be shut off arbitrarily at the will of a partisan majority.”...

Lodge insisted that the Senate existed to represent the states as unique political societies—not the majority of the nation’s voters—and he expressed that one of its most profound purposes was to check the rash legislation that would inevitably be produced by the House of Representatives.... The Senate was designed to represent “a political entity as different as possible” from the House of Representatives—namely, the states. The Senate was composed “not of representatives of popular constituencies, but of the ambassadors of sovereign States.” ...Because the Senate represents states by affording them equal representation irrespective of population, it is impossible to argue that it was designed to express a purist conception of national majority rule... For Lodge, as for Ellsworth and Sherman, the states were more than just artificial entities that amassed individual voters into convenient districts. The states were unique political societies with their own habits, customs, and traditions, and each mightily contributed to the overall health of the federal republic. ..

With the states exiled from the selection of Senators, the upper chamber would wrongly begin to perceive itself primarily as a majoritarian, national body rather than as a federalist institution based upon deliberation and consensus.

"Massachusetts Values and the Filibuster: A Short History," gordon dakota arnold, Law and Liberty (2021).