Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a blistering critique Wednesday on the Senate floor of President Joe Biden’s speech calling for changes to the upper chamber’s filibuster rule, calling the president’s remarks “profoundly unpresidential.”
“Look, I have known, liked, and personally respected Joe Biden for many years,” McConnell said. “I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday.”
In a speech in Atlanta on Tuesday, Biden called on the Senate to pass voting rights legislation, endorsing ending or at least curtailing the filibuster to do so. The filibuster requires 60 Senate votes, rather than a simple majority of 51, to pass most legislation.
“The filibuster has been used to generate compromise in the past and promote some bipartisanship,” Biden said. “But it’s also been used to obstruct — including and especially obstruct civil rights and voting rights.”
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In the speech, Biden asked Republicans if they want to be “on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?”
“Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor?” Biden asked. “Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
McConnell on Wednesday argued that opposing the elimination of the filibuster should not be characterized by the president as akin to being on the side of Confederate or segregationist figures.
“He compared a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors,” McConnell said. “How profoundly unpresidential.”
McConnell argued that voting rights are not in peril, adding that Georgia has more early voting days than Biden’s home state of Delaware. Delaware will begin to permit early voting this year.
“Sen. Biden was right about the filibuster, and President Biden is wrong,” McConnell argued, noting Biden’s previous support for the rule.
Biden and McConnell were Senate colleagues from 1985-2009 and worked together during Biden’s eight years as vice president, ending in 2017.
McConnell notably bypassed the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to confirm three of then-President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees with a simple majority after his predecessor, Harry Reid, made a rule change to confirm some of then-President Barack Obama’s nominations for other posts. Reid lay in state in the Capitol on Wednesday.
Senate Republicans warned against the calls from Biden and some Senate Democrats to do away with the filibuster.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who in 2020 became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to impeach a president of his own party, argued in a Tuesday speech that the prospect that Trump would seek the presidency again should give Democrats pause in doing away with the rule.
“There is also a reasonable chance Republicans will win both houses in Congress and that Donald Trump himself could once again be elected president in 2024,” Romney said. “Have Democrats thought what it would mean for them, for the Democrat minority, to have no power whatsoever?”
Romney argued that Biden has gone “down the same tragic road taken by President Trump — casting doubt on the reliability of American elections.”
Much of Biden’s agenda has stalled in the Senate, including voting rights legislation, and Senate Democrats are weighing moves to scale back or even eliminate the filibuster in order to pass their key items by lowering the 60-vote threshold to 51 votes.
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But Democrats do not appear universally on board with the plan. Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have argued in favor of keeping the filibuster. But others, including Sen. Mark Kelly, Sinema’s Arizona colleague, have balked at the prospect.
