Democrats are arguing the legislative filibuster is racist. But not one of them has apologized for using and defending it when it gave them an advantage.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska gave them the opportunity to do just that during a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday. In it, he blasted Senate Democrats for hypocritically trying to gut the filibuster, a legislative stall tactic that requires 60 votes (out of 100 senators), now that President Biden is in office, even though they used it repeatedly over the past few years.
He pointed out that many of the same Democrats calling the filibuster a “relic of the Jim Crow era” and a “tool of racist oppression” gladly used it during the Trump administration to block the Republican agenda. Just last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of the foremost critics of the filibuster, joined the dozens of Democrats who used it to block police reform legislation. And Sen. Ed Markey, her Massachusetts colleague who now agrees with Warren that the filibuster is “rooted in a racist past,” signed a letter in 2017 defending it as “an important tradition of the Senate.”
“They used the same rule last year, and you weren’t racist when you used the rule last year,” Sasse said. “Was it really a tool of Jim Crow when it was used against Tim Scott last year? I don’t think so, and I don’t think any of you think so. If somebody wants to come to the floor and repent of their racism for having used the filibuster last year, please do.”
(Scott is a black Republican senator from South Carolina.)
No Democrat seriously believes the filibuster is racist. But by arguing that it is, Democrats aren’t just being hypocritical, they’re also being strategic. Democrats know that H.R. 1, a radical bill that tramples the states’ right to determine their own election processes and gets rid of most voting regulations, won’t survive a Republican filibuster. They’ve already advertised H.R. 1 as an extension of the Voting Rights Act, a civil rights bill that ended racial discrimination at the ballot box. So when Republicans do kill H.R. 1 using the filibuster, Democrats can point and say, “Look! We told you this tool is only used to disenfranchise minority people!”
This is how Democrats will drum up support for removing the filibuster, and it will be much more difficult for centrist Democrats such as Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to resist activist demands once the pressure begins to build. But people ought to keep in mind that the Democrats accusing Republicans and centrists of enabling racism in the Senate by defending the filibuster did the exact same thing just a few years ago. Was the filibuster not racist then?
