Democrats Eye Filibuster Reform With Support for Elimination Elusive
Democrats Eye Filibuster Reform With Support for Elimination ElusiveDemocrats are increasingly in favor of reverting back to a ‘talking filibuster,’ while Republicans warn of unprecedented Senate gridlock if the stall tactic is ever eliminated.
DEMOCRATS DON'T HAVE the numbers needed to eliminate the filibuster but are now instead finding new support for reforms, with President Joe Biden becoming the latest and highest profile leader in the party to back changes to the decades-old rule used to hold up legislation.
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Progressives and a number of Democratic senators want to completely gut the filibuster, a stall tactic employed by the minority party that they see as the biggest hurdle to implementing Biden's agenda. With the filibuster in place, Democrats face serious challenges in getting their bills signed into law since they hold a narrow edge in a 50-50 split Senate. Most legislation needs 60 votes to end debate and advance to final passage, meaning they need at least 10 Republicans to vote with them.
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Even as pressure builds to abolish it, there's currently not enough support within the Democratic Party to go "nuclear." While many haven't abandoned those plans, Democrats are also eyeing various reforms, including a return to the "talking filibuster," which requires the senator holding up a bill to remain physically present and speak on the Senate floor.
And while the president and a sizable number of Democratic senators remain resistant to ending the filibuster, Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, indicated Tuesday evening that he's coming around to more of an incremental change.
"I don't think that you have to eliminate the filibuster – you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days. You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking," Biden said in an interview with ABC News.
"That's what it's supposed to be," he added when asked if he backs a talking filibuster. "It's getting to the point where, you know, democracy is having a hard time functioning."
Talking filibusters have barely been used in several decades and have essentially become "silent" ones, George Washington University political science professor Sarah Binder writes in The Washington Post. Without needing to go to the floor, the threat of the filibuster tests the majority to find 60 votes for cloture, which would end debate on legislation.
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Biden doesn't have any power to make those changes, but his comments are significant for filibuster critics who see his support as influential. Still, the talking filibuster – depending on how it'd be structured – wouldn't ultimately do much for the majority since the 60-vote threshold would still exist and block their agenda. But Democrats see it as a way to at least force senators to put their opposition on display, while others believe it could possibly limit the number of filibusters because of a time-consuming rule.
Democrats – both ones who want a complete overhaul and those who lean toward modifications – praised Biden's openness to change and an acknowledgement of what they say is a tool that "has really shackled the Senate and made it far less productive."
Still, there's no clear consensus around a singular reform proposal and some resistance remains to doing anything at all.
"I think this is a process. And there are some who are skeptical of any change in the rules," Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois told reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday. "We have to demonstrate to them how the rules can be used and abused before we go any further."
Binder wrote that some proposals for a talking filibuster requiring a senator to speak on the floor and not yield would likely not need a formal rules change.
But to establish a new precedent like axing the legislative filibuster, Democrats will need a simple majority that requires all 50 senators to support it. But the party hasn't achieved unity on the issue with a number of members still opposed to a complete overhaul, ranging from moderates like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to veteran senators like Dianne Feinstein of California.
One of the biggest opponents is Manchin, who has repeatedly said under no circumstances would he do away with the filibuster and the 60 votes needed to end debate. But in an interview earlier this month with NBC's "Meet the Press," Manchin signaled his openness to a talking filibuster and making senators opposed to legislation work for it.
As Democratic calls grow louder for reforms, Republicans remain fiercely opposed to the elimination of the filibuster. They contend that it would irreparably damage the Senate and not only hobble whichever party is in the minority at the time but also the chances for bipartisan compromise on legislation.
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dedicated his Tuesday morning floor speech to the pitfalls of nixing the filibuster, arguing that it still wouldn't grant Democrats their wish list of priorities. And he laid out a hypothetical Senate by previewing how the minority party could hold up the most basic functions of the upper chamber.
"Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like," McConnell said. "I want our colleagues to imagine a world where every single task … requires a physical quorum, which, by the way, the vice president does not count in determining a quorum."
"Everything that Democrat Senates did to Presidents Bush and Trump, everything the Republican Senate did to President Obama would be child's play compared to the disaster that Democrats would create for their own priorities if they break the Senate," he added.
In the wake of Biden's comments, Republicans on Wednesday further dismissed the talking filibuster, echoing similar sentiments that it wouldn't change the calculus for the majority and only create more delays. They also argued that Democrats wanted to preserve the filibuster when they were in the minority over the past six years, though debate over elimination started to gain some steam during the Democratic presidential primary leading up to 2020.
"When Republicans were in the majority, there was no talk on the part of the Democrats for eliminating the filibusters. In fact, they argued for keeping the filibuster and we Republicans did so," GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said Wednesday. "Having a talking filibuster? Heck, we could all talk. I'm not sure that changes much."
But even with the threat of a more paralyzed Senate, Democrats are itching for at least some sort of change and welcome the recent momentum for reforms. They view the filibuster as a "Jim Crow relic" that sought to prevent the passage of civil rights legislation six decades ago.
The filibuster has steadily eroded in recent years but specifically for judicial nominations before the Senate. In 2013, Democrats used the nuclear option and got rid of the filibuster for federal judicial and executive branch nominees. And by 2017, Republicans went further and nixed it for Supreme Court nominations.
But with the filibuster still intact for use against legislation, much of Democrats' agenda is essentially dead on arrival, including recent House-passed bills related to LGBTQ workplace rights and voting and election reforms. And there are limited instances to use the budget reconciliation process, which removes the filibuster and allows legislation like the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill to pass with only a simple majority.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has yet to indicate where he stands on the issue but publicly continues to leave the door to filibuster reform – though it's unclear how far he'd go. The next big-ticket item on the agenda is the "For the People Act," the sweeping elections bill that has passed the House twice but has never come before the Senate until now. Filibuster critics hope to galvanize more support for their cause if Republicans block the bill, which is expected since none in the House voted for it and most GOP senators have indicated their opposition.
"We will see if our Republican friends join us. If they don't join us, our caucus will come together and decide the appropriate action to take. Everything is on the table," the New York Democrat said at a Wednesday press conference to introduce the bill. "Failure is not an option."
While outside groups are still pushing for full elimination, they praised Biden and other top Democrats like Durbin for throwing their support behind more incremental reforms and see it as a pivotal step in the process towards an overhaul.
"President Biden's willingness to reform the Senate filibuster suggests he will not let a Jim Crow relic that has no place in the Constitution stand in the way of the results he promised to deliver," said Adam Jentleson, executive director of progressive group Battle Born Collective and former deputy chief of staff to Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada. "There is a long way to go in this fight, but this is significant and we look forward to the president's continued leadership on this issue."
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Lisa Hagen, Reporter
Lisa Hagen is a politics reporter for U.S. News & World Report covering Congress, the 2020 ... READ MORE
Tags: Congress, Senate, Chuck Schumer, Democratic Party, Mitch McConnell
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