Addressing the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting Sept. 10, 2022, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, Vice President Kamala Harris boasted about how, as president of the Senate, she had broken “John Adams’s record of casting the most tiebreaking votes in a single term.”
Harris was reliving how, a month earlier on Aug. 7, she had broken a tie vote in support of the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act, a boondoggle spending bill—which actually had the opposite effect, further fueling runaway inflation.
Harris also cast the tiebreaker for an even more expensive boondoggle, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, on Feb. 5, 2021—a scant two weeks after taking office.
Harris went on to exult: “I cannot wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights. I cannot wait!”
Two years and two weeks later, in a Sept. 24 interview during her unsuccessful bid for elevation to the presidency, Harris doubled down, averring that the Senate should do away outright with the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote threshold for most controversial bills to pass.
“I’ve been very clear. I think we should eliminate the filibuster for [Roe v. Wade], and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person [sic] and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio.
(Never mind that Harris raised no similar objections to not letting “every person” make the decision about his or her own bodies with respect to COVID-19 vaccinations.)
If voters on Nov. 5 had handed Democrats unitary control of the House, Senate, and presidency, they almost certainly would have felt empowered to resurrect the euphemistically named Women’s Health Protection Act, which would go far beyond just “codifying Roe v. Wade” into federal law.
According to liberal Vox, the radical Women’s Health Protection Act “would not only restore the pre-Dobbs status quo, but dismantle a slew of state restrictions on abortion.” (So much for the notion of federalism as envisioned by the Founders.)
The Women’s Health Protection Act twice passed a Democrat-controlled House, but was thwarted by a filibuster.
But Harris’ remarks on codifying Roe were predicated on the premise that not only would she win the presidency, but that her fellow Democrats would retain control of the Senate and retake the House of Representatives, and that a Vice President Tim Walz would assume her role as tiebreaker if necessary.
In August, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had likewise hinted of plans to do away with the filibuster in a presumptive Democrat-controlled 119th Congress if outgoing Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who wisely opposed the filibuster’s abolition, had both been replaced by Democrats who would march in lockstep with Schumer’s scheme.
According to NBC News, Schumer told Politico on Aug. 19 that two bills he would try to pass in the absence of the filibuster were the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would strip virtually all election-related authority from the states, handing it to unelected federal bureaucrats. (Again, so much for federalism.)
Schumer was quoted as saying there would be “consensus in my caucus to try and do that,” calling the two measures “very, very important.” Of course they are: They want nothing less than one-party, antidemocratic Democratic Party rule in perpetuity.
To that same end, abolishing the filibuster also would have enabled Democrats to grant amnesty and a path to citizenship—along with voting rights, which is all they really care about there—to an estimated 20 million immigrants in the country illegally.
Then there’s the equally radical Equality Act, which would have added sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under federal civil rights law. It would have given the back of the hand to Americans who hold traditional beliefs about biological sex and marriage and would have kicked Title IX and girls and women’s athletics to the curb.
But as we know, Harris—now a lame duck—lost in a landslide, the House remained in Republican hands, and Senate Democrats lost four seats and, with them, the majority. Schumer will be demoted to minority leader in the 119thCongress, and all of the loathsome bills on Democrats’ wish list are on ice for at least the next four years.
So now, with the script flipped, Schumer and fellow Senate Democrats have a sudden, newfound respect for the filibuster.
It’s worth noting here that when Schumer & Co. themselves were most recently in the minority, they unashamedly—albeit hypocritically—embraced the use of the filibuster to block the Republicans’ agenda 327 times in 2020 alone, according to one tally.
What they’re now saying amounts to: “That was then, and this is now.”
If there were a Mount Rushmore for chutzpah, Schumer’s face would be on it. He is now shamelessly urging Republicans not to do to Democrats what they were planning to do to Republicans.
Then-President Donald Trump arrives on July 3, 2020, for Independence Day events at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“To my Republican colleagues, I offer a word of caution in good faith,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Nov. 12, presumably with a straight face. “Take care not to misread the will of the people, and do not abandon the need for bipartisanship. After winning an election, the temptation may be to go to the extreme. We’ve seen that happen over the decades, and it has consistently backfired on the party in power.”
“So, instead of going to the extremes, I remind my colleagues that this body is most effective when it’s bipartisan,” Schumer said. “If we want the next four years in the Senate to be as productive as the last four, the only way that will happen is through bipartisan cooperation.”
Of course, Republicans won’t attempt to repeal the filibuster, because they are well aware that Senate majorities are fleeting and they will need it again when they are back in the minority. That’s because the filibuster is the only real procedural tool the minority party has at its disposal to thwart legislation it opposes.
But the first time Senate Democrats filibuster legislation pushed by returning President Donald Trump, the new majority Senate Republicans should not just call them out on their brazen hypocrisy. Instead, perhaps, the GOP should call Democrats’ bluff with a proposal to repeal the filibuster and get them on record defending it and opposing its abolition.
Originally published by The Washington Times
