A majority of Senate Democrats recently joined with Republicans in urging protection of the filibuster, warning that changing it would destroy the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”
In a 2017 letter to party leaders, a bipartisan group of over 60 senators, including 32 Democrats, said that bickering over policies should not mean that one side can end the yearslong requirement for 60 votes to move on.
The letter, distributed this week by the Republican National Committee, is the latest hiccup on President Joe Biden’s personal flip-flop to advocating a relaxation of the filibuster to OK Democratic-supported voting reforms.
“As an institutionalist, I believe that the threat to our democracy is so grave that we must find a way to pass these voting rights bills,” Biden said in Georgia on Tuesday at the Atlanta University Center Consortium, according to a New York Times report. “Let the majority prevail, and if that bare minimum is blocked, we have no option but to change the Senate rules, including getting rid of the filibuster for this.”
The letter, and dozens of other past statements collected by the RNC, are in line with then-presidential candidate Biden’s comments in 2019 that changing the Senate rule would be a “very dangerous thing to do.”
For decades, Democrats defended the Senate filibuster.
Now they have completely flipped! pic.twitter.com/20JTPruw4k
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 10, 2022
The fight opens Biden and Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer to embarrassing charges of hypocrisy on considering their past demands that Republicans not be allowed to change the 60-vote requirement because their agenda was being stalled just like Biden’s is today.
Of all the comments the RNC put out, Schumer’s was the most forceful and insulting to anybody considering a change.
In 2005, halfway into former President George Bush’s two terms, he scolded, “Bottom line is very simple: The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the founding fathers called ‘the cooling saucer of democracy’ into the rubber stamp of dictatorship. We will not let them. They want, because they can’t get their way on every judge, to change the rules in midstream, to wash away 200 years of history. They want to make this country into a banana republic, where if you don’t get your way, you change the rules. Are we going to let them? It’ll be a doomsday for democracy if we do.”
Even Vice President Kamala Harris, during her short 2020 presidential run, warned about killing it, noting that without it, Republicans might have killed funding for Planned Parenthood.
Schumer’s deputy, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, was also forceful in past statements. He claimed in 2018 that getting rid of the filibuster would be the “end of the Senate as it was originally devised,” and in 2005, he explained that it helped to “preserve the voice of the minority in America” and “preserve checks and balances.”
Here’s the list produced by the RNC.
