Sen. Mike Lee on Wednesday urged conservatives to retain the Senate filibuster, which allows a minority of senators to prevent a bill from being debated or passed, despite a growing desire on the right to eliminate the procedural hurdle.
“The filibuster has helped us stop a lot of bad legislation, and if we got rid of it, it would then be used as a vehicle for passing … bad legislation that we would dislike,” the Tea Party senator told the audience at the Heritage Action’s Conservative Policy Summit.
Lee’s panel had been scheduled as a debate with House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, who favors changing Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, but last-minute House votes prevented the Virginia Republican from attending. The audience was primed for the conversation by lawmakers who commented on the filibuster throughout the day, especially from House members who are tired of passing bills that die in the Senate.
Lee offered up what he saw as the strongest arguments for changing the rule, in an effort to knock them down in the minds of conservatives. First, he observed that the Constitution specifies the scenarios that require a two-thirds majority, and said they’re rare. That would include the ratification of treaties, for instance, but not day-to-day legislation.
“The fact that a supermajority is proscribed in some instances and not others would suggest, perhaps, in the eyes of some, misguided as they may be, that there is to be no supermajority requirement right here,” Lee allowed.
That’s misguided, he added, because the Constitution also specifies that the House and Senate are allowed to establish their own procedural rules. “That’s entirely within our authority to do that, [so] there is nothing incompatible with the Constitution about the filibuster rule,” he said.
Lee also addressed the frustrations of conservatives who regard the omnibus spending bill that passed at the end of last year as evidence that, without changing the Senate rules, President Obama and a minority of Democrats can ignore the will of the voters who swept Republicans into office in 2014. “If you want more bills like the omnibus in December of 2015, just get rid of the filibuster and that’ll do it,” he said.
Instead of eliminating the filibuster, he suggested, Senate leadership should prevent lawmakers from going home on weekends when major legislation needs to be debated. That would put pressure on senators who are comfortably voting on a party-line. And, with the filibuster in place, it would give the Senate majority an incentive to allow amendments to bills that otherwise would be negotiated by congressional leaders.
“If we were following the filibuster rule, the cloture standard, properly, which would involve actually staying in session and allowing members opportunities for input, we would have had amendments to those and getting rid of the filibuster would actually increase not decrease the number of circumstances in which we’re face with a 2,242 page bill negotiated in secret in the course of months by four people,” Lee said.
