Pluralities Support Voting Rights And Ending Filibuster

The charts above are from the CBS News / YouGov Poll -- done between January 12th and 14th of a nationwide sample of 2,094 adults, with a 2.5 point margin of error.

 

We Must Protect The Right To Vote Or Lose Our Democracy

 

Anyone who has been paying attention knows our democracy is in trouble. The loser in our last presidential election has been telling a big lie -- that he won the 2020 election, but it was stolen from him through massive fraud. It's not true, but he has convinced many people that it is.

He even encouraged his deluded supporters to stage a violent insurrection at our U.S. Capitol building. When that failed, Republicans in red states began passing a whole raft of laws to suppress voting and give GOP legislatures the ability to change the outcome of voting in many states. The goal, of course, is to make sure Republicans will win future elections -- even if they have to cheat to do so.

If we allow these anti-democracy Republicans to be successful, we will lose our democracy. It will be replaced by an authoritarian government that refuses to recognize the will of the voters.

This must be stopped, and the only way to stop it is to pass federal laws to protect the right of citizens to vote and to protect the valid outcome of that voting. There are bills to do exactly that. They have been passed in the House, and are currently pending approval in the Senate.

The problem is that Democrats (who support the bills) only have 50 votes in the Senate. And the Republicans are filibustering the voting rights bills -- meaning it will take 60 votes to pass them. There is no chance of getting those 60 votes, since the Republicans are unanimous in their opposition.

The only way the bills can be passed to protect voting (and our democracy) is for the filibuster to be banned on voting rights bills. This could be done if all 50 Democrats voted to do that, and Vice-President Harris casts the tie-breaking vote.

Unfortunately, there are two Democrats -- Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema -- who love the filibuster. They even refuse to carve out an exception for voting rights and to protect election results. They seem to think that an archaic Senate rule (the filibuster) that is not in the Constitution is more important than the right of every citizen to vote. More important than democracy itself, which depends on the right to vote.

Their refusal is making it possible for Republicans to suppress the vote, and possibly even overturn the will of the voters in some states. They are enabling a future coup by anti democracy Republicans. 

Their behavior is shameful!

Sinema's Stance On Filibuster Is Inconsistent & Nonsensical

 

The following op-ed on Krysten Sinema's stance on the filibuster is by Ja'han Jones at MSNBC.com:

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s rambling speech Thursday defending the filibuster and refusing to bypass it to advance voting rights legislation was a total dud. With the warmth and sincerity of a Frigidaire, the Arizona Democrat spoke from a lectern on the Senate floor about the merits of a racist relic historically used to beat back civil rights measures.  

The filibuster, she claimed, is “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.”

And if millions of Americans in the minority party believe in creating obstacles for the opposing party to vote, or the minority party wants to gerrymander districts that diminish the power of Black and brown voters? So be it, according to Sinema’s logic. 

But her rationale for defending the filibuster is as inconsistent as it is immoral. Sinema, as some have noted, supported bypassing the filibuster just over a month ago in order to raise the debt ceiling on a party-line vote. She doesn’t think Republicans should be allowed to damage America’s credit, but she thinks allowing them to damage American democracy is a virtue.

It’s a contradiction Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., called out during his own Senate speech last month after the debt limit vote: 

Be very clear, last week we changed the rules of the Senate. To address another important issue, the economy. This is a step, a change in the Senate rules we haven’t been willing to take to save our broken democracy, but one that a bipartisan majority of this chamber thought was necessary in order to keep our economy strong. We changed the rules to protect the full faith and credit of the United States government. We’ve decided we must do it for the economy, but not for the democracy.

Sinema may well succeed in thwarting voting rights legislation due to the outsize power she wields in the Senate, but the more she explains her stance, the more incoherent it becomes.

Manchin's Excuses For Keeping Filibuster Don't Make Sense

 

Joe Manchin is still refusing to do anything about the Senate filibuster, and his excuses for protecting the filibuster are making no sense at all. The following is part of an op-ed on this by Greg Sargent in The Washington Post:

Everyone had a grand old time mocking Sen. Joe Manchin III for claimingon Tuesday that we’ve had the filibuster for 232 years. This is historically false. What’s more, the West Virginia Democrat’s deeper argument here — that in some sense the filibuster preserves a vision of the Senate in keeping with that of the framers — is also profoundly off-base.

But now Manchin has expanded even further on that deeper argument. And the case he made in this regard captures the essential fallacy of the pro-filibuster position as clearly as one could possibly expect.

The stakes are high. Democrats are making one final push for a package of protections for voting rights and democracy. Given uniform GOP opposition, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will hold a vote soon on whether to suspend the filibuster to pass them. . . .

Manchin has now offered a new justification for this position.

“I mean, voting is very important. It is a bedrock of democracy,” Manchin told reporters Tuesday. “But to break the opportunity for the minority to participate completely — that’s just not who we are.”

This idea, that even a temporary filibuster carve-out betrays “who we are,” essentially posits that the Senate supermajority requirement is in some sense more faithful to American liberal constitutionalism than protecting voting rights is.

This is absurd. First, the idea that nixing the filibuster would “break the opportunity for the minority to participate completely” is unintentionally revealing about Manchin’s true stance. It’s false on its face: Needing a simple majority to pass legislation doesn’t stop senators from the minority party from entering into negotiations with the majority party to try to influence said legislation.

In fact, ending the filibuster might increase the incentive for a bloc of GOP senators to seek such negotiations. Without it, bills could pass with a majority of fewer than 60 votes, meaning, say, five moderate Republicans would have more opportunities to get on legislation with a real chance of passage, burnishing their bipartisan cred while delivering for constituents. Moderate Democrats who want to be seen working with Republicans would help that happen.

What ending the filibuster actually would stop is the opportunity for the minority party to participate entirely on its own terms. With the filibuster, virtually nothing can pass. This facilitates and encourages a deliberate opposition strategy of denying the president’s party legislative victories to make the government under that party more dysfunctional.

This is the reality of the “opportunity for the minority to participate” that Manchin is personally enabling. And it actually reduces the opportunity for more bipartisan legislation to pass — the opposite of what he suggests.

Second, you know who is actually working hard to “break the opportunity of the minority to participate”? GOP-controlled state legislatures are. They are passing restrictions on voting access in many states, and they’re doing so by simple majority — on a largely partisan basis.

Manchin himself agrees this is a serious problem. That’s why he supports the Freedom to Vote Act, which would curb such GOP efforts by creating baseline standards for early voting, same-day registration and voting by mail, while also limiting partisan capture of election machinery.

What Manchin opposes is achieving those monumentally important things on a partisan basis. But here’s the rub: Either Republicans will keep restricting voting on a partisan basis, or Democrats will protect and expand voting access on a partisan basis. Partisanship will prevail either way. The only question is which partisanship prevails.

Is The Senate Filibuster Even Constitutional?

Our Founding Fathers did not include a filibuster in the Constitution, and they left it out intentionally. They did not think it should require a "super majority" to pass laws. That brings up the question -- is the modern Senate filibuster (especially considering how it is used) even a constitutional concept?

Here is part of what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has to say about this:

Yesterday, a member of our group named Emmet Bondurant, a distinguished constitutional lawyer from Georgia, commented on this page about the filibuster: 

The biggest lie of all is the Senate’s claim that it “is the greatest deliberative body in the world.” The filibuster makes the Senate the least deliberative legislative and least democratic legislative body by allowing a minority of Senators to prevent the Senate from debating, much less voting on, any legislation that is opposed by the minority party.

A decade ago, when Emmet and I served on the board of Common Cause, he brought a case before federal courts, arguing that the filibuster is unconstitutional. He didn’t get very far. (The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided that Common Cause lacked standing to make the argument, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) But this was before the high court became crammed with so-called “originalists” who believe the Constitution should be interpreted to mean what the Framers thought when they drafted it. 

Originalism is an absurd position, of course. American society is so different today from what it was in the eighteenth century that any attempt to apply precepts from that time to this time is doomed to failure. But why not test the sincerity of the originalists sitting on today’s Supreme Court with an issue that the Framers would find a no-brainer? All evidence suggests they would agree with Emmet that the filibuster violates the Constitution.

The Framers went to great lengths to ensure that a minority of senators could not thwart the wishes of the majority. After all, a major reason they convened the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was because the Articles of Confederation (the precursor to the Constitution) required a super-majority vote of nine of the thirteen states, making the government weak and ineffective.

This led James Madison to argue against any super-majority requirement in the Constitution the Framers were then designing, writing that otherwise “the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed,“ and “It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.” And it led Alexander Hamilton to note “how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced” if a minority in either house of Congress had “the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary.”

This is why the Framers required no more than a simple majority in both houses of Congress to pass legislation. 

They carved out only five specific exceptions requiring a super-majority vote only in rare, high-stakes decisions: (1) impeachments, (2) expulsion of members, (3) overriding a presidential veto, (4) ratification of treaties, and (5) amendments to the Constitution. By being explicit about these five exceptions to majority rule, the Framers underscored their commitment to majority rule for the normal business of the nation. They would have rejected the filibuster, through which a minority of senators continually obstructs the majority.

So where did the filibuster come from? The Senate needed a mechanism to end debate on proposed laws and move to a vote. The Framers didn’t anticipate this problem. But in 1841, a small group of senators took advantage of this oversight to stage the first filibuster. They hoped to force their opponents to give in by prolonging debate and delaying a vote. 

This was what became known as the “talking filibuster” — as popularized in Frank Capra’s other great film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (a perfect compliment to his “It’s a Wonderful Life”). But contrary to the admirable character Jimmy Stewart plays in that film, the result was hardly admirable.

After the Civil War, the filibuster was used by Southern politicians to defeat Reconstruction legislation, including bills to protect the voting rights of Black Americans. Finally, in 1917, as a result of pressure from President Woodrow Wilson and the public, the Senate adopted a procedure for limiting debate and ending filibusters with a two-thirds vote of the Senate (67 votes). In the 1970s, the Senate reduced the number of votes required to end debate down to 60, and no longer required constant talking to delay a vote. 41 votes would do it.

Throughout much of the 20th century, filibusters remained rare. (Southern senators mainly used them to block anti-lynching, fair employment, voting rights, and other critical civil rights bills.) But that changed in 2007, after Democrats took over the Senate. Senate Republicans, now in the minority, used the 60-vote requirement with unprecedented frequency. . . .

Now we have a total mockery of majority rule. McConnell and his Republicans are stopping almost everything in its tracks. Just 41 Senate Republicans, representing only 21 percent of the country, are now blocking laws supported by the vast majority of Americans. This is exactly the opposite of what the Framers of the Constitution intended. To repeat: They unequivocally rejected the notion that a minority of Senators could obstruct the majority. 

My humble suggestion, therefore: Senators whose votes have been blocked by the senate minority should themselves take the issue to the Supreme Court. If anyone has standing to make this argument, they surely do. If the conservative majority on the Court stands by its “originalist” principles, they’ll abolish the filibuster as violating the Constitution.

Voting Is Too Important To Be Filibustered

There are two things necessary to sustain a democracy - the rule of law and citizen voting. Of those two, the one most important is the ability of every citizen to be able to exercise their right to vote. Without the right to vote, even the rule of law would soon disappear. Because this is true, one would expect Congress to make voting easier for all citizens.

But that is not happening. Republican legislatures across the country are doing just the opposite. They are making it harder to vote, using the excuse of preventing election fraud. The ignore the fact that there is virtually no fraud in U.S. elections. The real reason is to minimize the number of people who can vote (especially minorities and younger voters) in the hope that with a smaller voting population, they think they'll be able to achieve and retain power.

To combat these efforts at voter suppression, a bill is in Congress (the Freedom To Vote Act). This bill would make it easier for every citizens to exercise his/her right to vote while protecting against voter fraud. But sadly, the Republicans in Congress don't want to make it easier for citizens to vote. The Senate Republicans just voted unanimously to keep a filibuster against the voting rights bill. It is just one more example of why the filibuster (which is not in the Constitution) must be eliminated.

The following is part of an op-ed at MSNBC.com by Jessica Levinson on this issue:

Our democracy is based on the fundamental principle that all eligible citizens must have access to the ballot box and that each of those votes be given equal weight. A representative system of government lacks legitimacy if it fails to allow its citizens to pick who represents them. Why should we give any credence to the decisions of a president, a senator or a member of the House who got the job through a farcical election that blocked some from voting? Or, to put it another way: If our elected officials rigged the system and suppressed our votes to get or keep their gigs, why should we give them any authority?

This is why we must all turn to Wednesday’s failed attempt to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and make its eventual passage our first, second, third and fourth priorities. You don’t build a house until you have the blueprints. You don’t build a democracy without ensuring the right to vote.

Every single Republican in the Senate voted against even having a debate about the Freedom to Vote Act, which is already a compromised and whittled-down version of its former self. Again for the folks in back: Every single member of the Republican Party who serves in our nation’s top legislative chamber is a big “no” on even discussing ways to protect the right to vote. This is partisanship at its absolute worst. This is the epitome of party before country. . . .

We don’t need new restrictive state laws to protect our right to vote. We need new federal legislation to protect us from the restrictive voting laws.

Enter the Freedom to Vote Act.

It would push back against some state efforts to make voting less accessible. The bill tackles the twin problems of voter suppression and the influence of money in politics. With respect to voting rights, the bill would, among other things, implement automatic and same-day voter registration (allowing people to opt out, instead of making them opt in), make it easier to vote by mail, increase early voting, lessen the impact of some restrictive voter identification laws, make Election Day a federal holiday, increase punishments for those who engage in voting intimidation, and attempt to reduce partisan gerrymandering. As to the issue of money in politics, the bill would create a voluntary system of public campaign financing, increase campaign finance disclosure and reorganize the dysfunctional Federal Election Commission. . . .

It is time for voters to demand that their elected officials explain why we shouldn’t even proceed with a vote on the Freedom to Vote Act. We must ask our elected officials which provisions, specifically, they oppose and why. Why, for instance, should we not make it easier for people to register to vote and then give them more options for how and when to vote? We know these reforms don’t threaten the safety and integrity of our elections. Could it simply be that these reforms threaten the continued viability of Republicans?

There are so many deeply and immediately pressing issues facing our country. But for this moment, we must focus on the foundational one. By definition, the seed of our democracy is the right to vote. The right to vote is the right that leads to everything else we care about: a strong economy, an end to the pandemic, accessible health care and superior education.

Democrats control the White House, the House and the Senate. This is a once-in-a-generation moment. Democrats, abolish the filibuster. Pass true voting rights protections. Ensure that our grand experiment in self-governance continues. It is not a foregone conclusion that it will.

Cruz Tells Huge Lie To Justify Filibustering Debt Limit Raise

The House has passed a funding bill to keep the government running past September 30th. Included in the bill is a suspension of the debt limit (which needs to be raised pretty soon to keep the government from defaulting on its debts). The bill now goes to the Senate. But in the Senate, Ted Cruz has already said he would filibuster raising the debt limit -- and he has told a huge lie to justify that filibuster.

Steve Been explains at MSNBC.com:

Sen. Ted Cruz indicated last week that he intends to push the nation closer to a deliberate, self-imposed crisis, and as NBC News reportedyesterday, the Texas Republican isn't backing away from his threat to crash the economy on purpose.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, promised to filibuster it, saying there is 'no universe' in which he would consent to allowing a simple majority vote on extending the debt limit.

The GOP senator added that extending the debt limit would make it "easier for [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer and the Democrats to add trillions more in debt."

That doesn't make any sense.

There are plenty of members of Congress who are badly confused about the substantive details of governing. As a rule, Cruz isn't one of them. I've long argued that the Texas Republican's principle political problem is not that he's dumb, but rather, that he assumes everyone else is dumb.

His comments on the debt ceiling capture the problem nicely. As Cruz surely knows, raising the debt ceiling allows the United States to pay its bills, not to clear the way for new spending. The process is about paying for the stuff Congress already bought in the past, not giving lawmakers approval to buy new stuff in the future.

The GOP senator, in other words, is preparing to block important legislation — a bill that would prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations for the first time in our history — based on a rather obvious lie.

If Cruz follows through on his gambit and his effort succeeds, the results would be catastrophic. As The Washington Post's Catherine Rampell explained in her new column:

The government would have trouble paying Social Security checks, military salaries and all the creditors who'd previously lent money to Uncle Sam. A default would also violate the Constitution, which says 'the validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned.' Finally, it would trigger chaos throughout the global financial system. Financial markets currently treat U.S. debt as virtually risk-free, with all other assets benchmarked against it. If we demonstrate that our debt is not really risk-free — that we're instead cavalier about repaying our creditors — panic would tear through other markets as well.

Again, Cruz knows this. So do McConnell and many other congressional Republicans. They've decided to play with matches anyway, even if it's their own country's economy that burns.

Protecting The Right To Vote Should Not Be Filibustered

The House has passed a voting rights bill, and Democratic senators have agreed on another. But neither bill will become law because Senate Republicans will filibuster them -- and there are not 10 GOP senators that believe in protecting the right to vote by voting to stop that those filibusters.

This brings up what I consider to be a valid question -- how can a minority in the Senate stop (by using the filibuster) bills that only seek to guarantee citizens their constitutional right to vote? Should any constitutional right be stopped or limited by a filibuster? Isn't filibustering a constitutional right a violation of the Constitution?

Democrats don't have to completely eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, but they should carve out an exception for protecting the right to vote. Republicans carved out exceptions to the filibuster for approving judges and Supreme Court justices when they had a Senate majority. Isn't the right to vote at least that important?

The following is part of an article by Hayes Brown at MSNBC.com:

Senate Democrats are all finally on the same page on voting rights. The full text of the newly drafted Freedom to Vote Act dropped Tuesday, the first voting rights bill introduced this year featuring the support of the entire Democratic caucus.

That unity, unfortunately, will not inspire bipartisan comity from their Republican colleagues. Instead, the GOP will likely dig in their heels against what they know is a bill that will overturn their party’s state-level disenfranchisement efforts. A filibuster is inevitable.

What’s not written in stone is how the Democrats respond to this hurdle blocking what’s likely a once-in-a-generation chance to finally level the playing field for both parties and all of America’s voters. Because this is it — this is the ball game. There won't be time to start from scratch with a new bill. It’s not hyperbole to say the future of democracy itself depends on Congress passing voting rights legislation before the year is out. And doing so will require, at minimum, carving out an exception from the filibuster for voting rights protections.

The Freedom to Vote Act is the result of weeks of efforts from senators to craft a pared down version of the For the People Act, or S1. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was the lone Democratic holdout on that bill, voting with all 50 Republican senators in June to prevent the Senate from beginning debate on the bill. Since then, Manchin has worked with a group including Sens. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as well as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to hammer out a compromise.

What they produced doesn’t go as far as the For the People Act on reforming campaign ethics and finance, but it contains enough provisions to safeguard future elections against Republican tampering. It includes sections that would limit the ability of the GOP to box Democratic-voting minorities into convoluted districts through gerrymandering, overturn the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on how provisional ballots can be counted and roll back newly passed laws that make voting by mail harder.

If passed, the bill will also make Election Day a federal holiday, expand voter registration and boost the power of the courts to safeguard elections. . . .

There can be no hope for the GOP to see the light on this one, as Manchin has insisted — the only way out is through changing the rules of the game. Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have been the two most vocal holdouts to preserving the filibuster. But Norman Eisen and Norman Ornstein argued in the Washington Post Tuesday that while eliminating the filibuster is probably off the table, changes to the filibuster are likely inevitable at this point.

Creating a carveout for voting rights then provides Democrats with the chance to send the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed in the House in August, to Biden’s desk as well. Together, the two bills can be the bulwark against the GOP’s attempts to revitalize Jim Crow for a modern era and dilute the poison that Republicans have allowed to seep into our elections. But this is the last chance on the table for the Senate to act. If the Democrats abrogate their duty to the American people in the name of tradition and civility, it will be decades before the damage done to our system will be able to be undone.

Is The Senate Filibuster Constitutional? (Maybe Not!)

The U.S. Senate is in a virtual deadlock. That's because, while they are a minority, the Senate Republicans have enough votes to sustain a filibuster. That means they have the power to block everything (except reconciliation bills and the approval of federal judges). 

One is left to wonder how it is in a democracy that the minority can block any bill by the majority. Is it even constitutional for that to happen? Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich says it is not constitutional. Here is his reasoning (from his own blog):

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about the filibuster these days. But here’s one thing about this old Senate rule you might not know: the filibuster actually violates the Constitution.

41 Senate Republicans, who represent only 21 percent of the American population, are blocking the “For the People Act,” which is supported by 67 percent of Americans. They’re also blocking an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour, supported by 62 percent of Americans. And so much else.  

Even some so-called moderate Democrats, like Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, have outsized power to block crucial legislation thanks to the filibuster.

Many of those who defend the filibuster consider themselves “originalists,” who claim to be following the Constitution as the Framers intended. 

But the filibuster is not in the Constitution. In fact, the Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that a minority of senators could not thwart the wishes of the majority. 

After all, a major reason they called the Constitutional Convention was that the Articles of Confederation (the precursor to the Constitution) required a super-majority vote of nine of the thirteen states, making the government weak and ineffective.

James Madison argued against any super-majority requirement, writing that “the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed,“ and “It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.”

Alexander Hamilton, meanwhile, warned about “how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced” if a minority in either house of Congress had “the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary.”

Hence, the Framers required no more than a simple majority vote in both houses of Congress to pass legislation. They carved out specific exceptions, requiring a super-majority vote only for rare, high-stakes decisions: 

Impeachments.

Expulsion of members.

Overriding a presidential veto.

Ratification of treaties.

Constitutional amendments.

By being explicit about these exceptions where a super-majority is necessary, the Framers underscored their commitment to majority rule for the normal business of the nation.

They would have balked at the notion of a minority of senators continually obstructing the majority, which is now the case with the filibuster. 

So where did the filibuster come from? 

The Senate needed a mechanism to end debate on proposed laws, and move laws to a vote — a problem the Framers didn’t anticipate. In 1841, a small group of senators took full advantage of this oversight to stage the first filibuster. They hoped to hamstring the Senate and force their opponents to give in by prolonging debate and delaying a vote. 

This was what became known as the “talking filibuster” as popularized in the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But the results were hardly admirable.

After the Civil War, the filibuster was used by Southern politicians to defeat Reconstruction legislation, including bills to protect the voting rights of Black Americans.

In 1917, as a result of pressure from President Woodrow Wilson and the public, the Senate finally adopted a procedure for limiting debate and ending filibusters with a two-thirds vote (67 votes). In the 1970s, the Senate reduced the number of votes required to end debate down to 60, and no longer requiredconstant talking to delay a vote. 41 votes would do it.

Throughout much of the 20th century, despite all the rule changes, filibusters remained rare. Southern senators mainly used them to block anti-lynching, fair employment, voting rights, and other critical civil rights bills.

That all changed in 2006, after Democrats won a majority of Senate seats. Senate Republicans, now in the minority, used the 60-vote requirement with unprecedented frequency. After Barack Obama became president in 2008, the Republican minority blocked virtually every significant piece of legislation. Nothing could move without 60 votes.

In 2009, a record 67 filibusters occurred during the first half of the 111th Congress — double the entire 20-year period between 1950 and 1969. By the time the 111th Congress adjourned in December 2010, the filibuster count had ballooned to 137.

Now we have a total mockery of majority rule. And it bears repeating that just 41 Senate Republicans, representing only 21 percent of the country, are blocking critical laws supported by the vast majority of Americans. 

This is exactly the opposite of what the framers of the Constitution intended. They unequivocally rejected the notion that a minority of Senators could obstruct the majority. 

Every time Republicans use or defend the filibuster they’re directly violating the Constitution — the document they claim to be dedicated to. How can someone profess to be an “originalist” and defend the Constitution while repeatedly violating it?

Senators whose votes have been blocked by a minority should have standing to take this issue to the Supreme Court. And the Court should abolish the filibuster as violating the U.S. Constitution. 

The Filibuster Is A Tool For Cowards Who Don't Want Debate

On Tuesday, the Senate voting on stopping the filibuster against the voting rights bill. The vote was 50 Democrats in favor of stopping the filibuster and 50 Republicans in favor of keeping the filibuster going. It showed clearly that the Republicans aren't interested in debating or amending or voting on anything. They are using the filibuster to block everything until they can regain power. It was just another example of why the filibuster must be reformed or eliminated.

The following is part of an article on the filibuster by Hayes Brown for MSNBC.com:

I don’t know how much more bluntly I can say this: The filibuster isn’t a protector of democracy. It’s not the last bastion against tyranny of the majority. It’s a tool of cowards.

Because let’s be clear: Tuesday’s vote in the Senate wasn’t about passing S.1, the For the People Act. It wasn’t even the vote to begin the process of discussing and amending the bill. No, the vote was the first of two steps: first, asking the Senate to “end debate” on whether to turn the Senate’s full attention to bill; and then, if passed, a majority vote on whether to bring the bill to the Senate floor. That first, key step is what Senate Republicans rejected en masse. . . .

In a world that makes sense, Vice President Kamala Harris — who was presiding over the Senate — would have broken the resulting 50-50 tie. But because of the filibuster, the world’s greatest deliberative body was silenced in the name of unlimited debate. Sixty “yes” votes, just ten from Republicans, were required to break the impasse; zero Republicans obliged.

What was most galling about this whole shadow play is how unnecessary any of it was. It would have cost Republicans nothing to allow debate on S.1 to proceed — and then kill the bill before final passage or even filibustering the final vote. This was simply a GOP flex; a reminder that even though they’re in the minority, they still can effectively set the Senate’s agenda.

It also served as a reminder that as much as Democrats (rightly) complain about Republican obstruction, they have the ability to break the logjam. But as of now, there aren’t the 50 votes necessary to amend the Senate rule that empowers the filibuster, let alone abolish the procedure.

I wrote back in February that Manchin and Sen. Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz., the most outspoken Democratic defenders of the filibuster, were really “protecting themselves politically at the expense of the country.” It turns out I was too easy on them — especially Sinema.

The Arizona moderate published an op-ed in the Washington Poston Monday justifying her position on the filibuster. It was, to be generous, specious. To be ungenerous, it was fearful and timid, written from a place of distrust in America’s voters. Particularly ill-considered is her stance that the filibuster “helps protect the country from wild swings between opposing policy poles”. . . .

This vacillation between extremes in lawmaking based on the voters’ whims is something the Founders feared, especially in the House of Representatives, which has always been directly elected by the people. And the Constitution does include certain checks on the Senate that allow for more reasoned debate: Senate terms are longer than in the House and staggered, so that only one third of the body is up for re-election in any given national election. Senators were also originally chosen by state legislatures, which kept them a step removed from the masses. Notably, the filibuster is not one of those checks — it’s an accidental quirk of the Senate’s rules that was for most of its existence almost exclusively utilized to help hobble civil rights legislation.

More troubling, Sinema’s arguments depend on Democrats passing their agenda — and then losing elections precisely because they passed their agenda. Her essay is one that posits that voters can’t tell good ideas from bad ones and will punish officials who pass partisan laws, no matter how effective. It’s saying that the status quo, where almost nothing can get done in Congress without herculean effort and an inevitable drift to the right in the negotiating process, is preferable to any progress. And it’s an argument that is filled with crippling doubt in the ideals of the Democratic Party — the wild swings that she predicts suggests that Democrats’ ideas are just as indefensible to voters as the Republicans’ vastly more unpopular platform. . . .

If bills fail in the Senate, they should fail on their merits, exactly what the filibuster prevents. The GOP is afraid of spending the next few weeks in the Senate debating a bill filled with provisions to reduce corruption in elections, expand voting rights, and eliminate the partisan gerrymanders that keep politicians unaccountable. It makes a certain craven sense for them to use the filibuster to block this from happening. Democrats allowing it to happen is far more disturbing.

McConnell's Use Of The Filibuster Is The Real Story

 

The story that is getting all of the coverage on cable news is that of Joe Manchin. Manchin seems to believe that bipartisanship is still a possibility in the current Senate. But recent history has shown he is wrong. The real story is how Mitch McConnell has used the Senate filibuster to make Congress an unworkable institution.

Here is just a part of what Dan Rather says about it:

I will avoid going into too great detail about the filibuster. Many have written about it with far more scholarship and acumen than I can muster. But we must remember that it is not in the Constitution and that it was often a tool for segregationists. It was used with relative rarity until our modern political times. And it has been wielded by Senator McConnell to basically make Congress unworkable.

To me, that is the biggest story. We are struggling with a government that systematically cannot legislate. The filibuster is the tool for suppressing majority rule but the reason it has become so powerful and ubiquitous has a lot more to do with the Republicans wielding it than with Manchin who won’t get rid of it.  We have more and more members of the Republican caucus who want to be elected, not to solve the nation’s problems, but to get a launch pad for Fox News glory and the power and money they can get from building personal brands of outrage. So yes the press should cover Manchin, but they should also ask each of the Republican senators why they support the Big Lie, why most of them won’t investigate 1/6, what they want to do about our failing infrastructure, our worsening climate, the pandemic, or any of the serious issues that we are not confronting. 

We have a political party that is being radicalized against democracy, and the truth. They would rather talk about Dr. Seuss or the latest utterance of some Democratic lawmaker taken out of context and weaponized for countless segments on right-wing media than talk about bills. The old question of “how does a bill become a law” might as well be sent to a museum. Does Manchin play a role in this? Yes. But again, he is not the major actor. 

By focusing so much attention on Manchin we are not presenting the full narrative to the American people. The press is framing this as a fight within the Democratic Party. That lets Republicans waltz by the microphones and cameras without paying nearly enough of a political price for their cynicism and obstructionism. 

I have said many times that I believe our national government has been based on two strong political parties competing for votes in the marketplace of ideas. I still believe that is the strongest manifestation of our political system. But I recognize that is not what we have now. The only way we can restore that order is to figure out how to foster action in government. And for now, the desire for action rests within the Democratic Party. The Republicans want power, to be sure, but to what end? It doesn’t seem in service to the needs of the nation. 

I know to paint it in such stark terms is to risk being branded as biased. And I certainly have the scars to show that. But I do not see this as a matter of politics. Because politics without policy is a form of tyranny. It’s the abuse of power in service to the benefit of the few over the needs of the nation. It is privilege over justice. 

This is how our democracy is being eaten away from within. It amplifies a suite of injustices, such as tax laws heavily weighted in favor of the super wealthy, and the dramatic income inequality that produces, as well as a campaign finance system fueled by opaque dark money that corrupts many office holders in both parties. These forces are heavily invested in maintaining a broken status quo. Until and unless these realities are reversed, the survival of our country as we have known and loved it will remain in peril.