Chuck Schumer is doing us a favour.
While parties often try to hide or deny radical plans ahead of elections, the Senate Majority Leader has been more outspoken.
Speaking at a press conference at the Democratic National Convention, Schumer suggested he would seek to end the filibuster to pass voting rights and abortion legislation if Democrats win the White House, the Senate and all three chambers of Congress in November.
This will be a turning point for the US government.
There is no way to prevent a legislative filibuster in the slightest.
The workaround to the long-standing 60-vote requirement in the Senate to pass non-financial bills may start with voting rights and abortion, but it certainly won’t end there.
Why can mandatory nationwide abortion on demand pass with 51 votes, but not Medicare for All or a Green New Deal?
Schumer has already said he wants a major new climate change bill and has dismissed any criticism of the national debt.
Causes of drooling in pets
If the legislative filibuster becomes severely eroded, a group of Democratic senators who want a particular bill will demand that they be exempted as well.
And left-wing interest groups will also insist on equal treatment: if Planned Parenthood can be granted an exception to the national abortion law, there is no reason why labor unions shouldn’t be allowed exceptions for all of their priorities, too.
Eating it increases your appetite.
From comprehensive immigration reform to national gun control, everything Democrats want but can’t get now because they don’t have 60 votes or bipartisan support would be achievable.
Unilateral measures struck down by the courts, including Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief plan, would be resurrected and rejected by Congress.
A Democratic separation of powers in Washington without the filibuster could easily tilt the political order fundamentally in the Democrats’ favor.
Congress could pass “court reform” that would immediately wipe out the constitutionalist majority on the Supreme Court that it has built up over decades and allow the states of Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., to easily add electoral votes and more senators to the Democrats.
Although the makeup of the filibuster has changed over the years, it is a practice that has characterized the Senate since its founding.
The filibuster’s ability to make it difficult to pass crucial legislation based on temporary majority votes is entirely in keeping with the spirit of America’s constitutional structure, which is precisely why progressives now despise the filibuster (even though they made ample use of it during the Trump administration).
Schumer is not making baseless threats.
The Senate majority has already tried to block the filibuster in 2022 in the name of “voting rights.”
The only Democrats who voted against the measure were Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom are no longer Democrats and are set to leave the Senate.
Moderate Democrats are silent
It’s entirely possible that other Senate Democrats privately think blocking the filibuster is a mistake, but they’re unlikely to speak up.
The pressure and abuse that Manchin and Sinema endured was visible for all to see.
All of the new Democratic senators who could become president after the November elections are opposed to the filibuster, and no moderates like Manchin or Sinema have emerged.
If Schumer wins, it would fundamentally change the nature of one institution, the Senate, and open the door to fundamentally changing other institutions.
This will be a blatant power struggle.
It would trample norms for progressive ends and concentrate power in Washington in unprecedented ways.
The best part is, we were warned.
