Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is upset about the delays to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. He’s so upset, in fact, he appears to have forgotten how math works.
Sanders tweeted Friday that “2 senators cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 senators and 210 House members want. We must stand with the working families of our country. We must combat climate change. We must delay passing the Infrastructure Bill until we pass a strong Reconciliation Bill.”
2 senators cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 senators and 210 House members want. We must stand with the working families of our country. We must combat climate change. We must delay passing the Infrastructure Bill until we pass a strong Reconciliation Bill.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) October 1, 2021
Sanders is directly calling for the minority in both houses of Congress to be able to pass legislation. Again, 48 senators make up a minority in the Senate, as do 210 representatives in the House, which has 432 members. Sanders is not complaining about the filibuster or the “tyranny of the minority,” which he has decried before. He is explicitly calling for the tyranny of the minority, if only for legislation he likes.
Who would have guessed that the millionaire socialist is both a hypocrite and bad at math?
The reality is that Sanders has failed to update the Democratic Party’s anti-Senate talking points to account for the fact that there are 52 senators opposed to the reconciliation bill. The Democratic Party’s hatred of the filibuster was already born of partisan whining, given how much Senate Democrats love the filibuster when the GOP runs the chamber. Sanders’s complaining that legislative minorities can’t pass bills over the objection of the majority simply amplifies that.
Sanders will never see any legislative defeat as legitimate because, in his mind, the majority of the country is actually in favor of his socialist utopia. But if that’s the case, then, in the words of his Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, there is a very simple solution to this: “Elect more liberals.”
