Chuck Schumer’s cynical theater of failure

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promised his Democratic caucus a month of pain and failure to start the new year. Yesterday, he began to deliver on that pledge by starting debate on two partisan voting reform bills that everyone knows are going to fail.

All 50 Democrats support both bills, but neither has the backing of even a single Republican. Schumer did take advantage of a commonly used procedural trick that allows the Senate to save time by skipping an initial vote to begin debate (this is done by having the House amend previously passed Senate legislation and send it back to the Senate as a “message”), but Senate rules still require 60 votes to end debate before Democrats can move on to final passage.