Vice President Kamala Harris said over the weekend that she “cannot wait” to vote to break the “archaic” Senate filibuster to push abortion and voting rights legislation through the chamber.
Harris made the comments while delivering the keynote address at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in National Harbor, Md., on Saturday. The vice president focused her speech on highlighting the stakes of the November midterms while taking aim at Republicans for blocking her party’s policy agenda in the speech. She also touted the Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments, referencing the COVID-19, infrastructure, and gun safety packages signed into law and the recent launch of a large-scale student loan forgiveness program.
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“Democrats, with just two more seats in the Senate, we can codify Roe v. Wade, we can put the protections of Roe in law,” Harris said after noting that other parts of President Joe Biden’s agenda had stalled. “With two more seats in the United States Senate we can pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Two more seats! That’s right, two more seats.”
The vice president went on to point out that Biden had publicly said that he supports carve outs to the legislative filibuster, 60 vote threshold required to pass most legislation in the Senate, on the issues of voting rights and abortion access. She then gleefully added that she “cannot wait” to “cast the deciding vote” to work around the rule.
“You know, our president, our President Joe Biden, he’s been clear. He’s kind of done with those archaic Senate rules that are standing in the way of those two issues. He’s made that clear and has said that, he will not allow that to obstruct those two issues,” she said. “And, you know, for me, as vice president, I’m also president of the Senate, and in our first year in office, some historians here may know, I actually broke John Adams’s record of casting the most tie breaking votes in a single term, how about that? And so that being the case, I cannot wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights. I cannot wait! Fifty-nine days!”
The Senate is currently split 50-50, with Harris serving as the critical 51st vote in her capacity as president of the chamber, meaning Democrats need 10 Republicans to move any major legislation forward given the filibuster rule. Biden and the Democrats have passed legislation two ways: compromise deals with Republicans that would provide enough votes or through the budget reconciliation process. Reconciliation allows certain measures regarding revenues, spending, and the debt to be approved with a 51-vote threshold.
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The problem for Democrats currently, however, is that two of the 50 in the Senate oppose eliminating the filibuster, meaning they lack the votes necessary to do so. Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have faced an intense, very public pressure campaign from their own party to shift their stance on the issue, but the two moderates have refused.
After giving up on pressuring Manchin and Sinema to come around on the matter, Democrats refocused their energy on expanding their number of seats in the Senate. Numerous Democratic Senate candidates have presented themselves as a vote to override the filibuster and thus break the logjam on the party’s legislative agenda.
