Filibuster

Is 52 the Magic Number?

Featured image On Meet the Press this morning, Kamala Harris said that if the Democrats pick up two Senate seats in the midterms, they will abolish the filibuster, at least selectively. The two additional seats, plus Harris’s own tie-breaker, will be needed to offset the votes of Senators Manchin and Sinema so as to create a majority in favor of altering Senate rules: Harris said, “In less than two months, we are »

When the filibuster was good!

Featured image When it comes to the Senate filibuster, I think in clichés. The hypocrisy of the Democrats’ effort to limit it last week is rank. Hypocrisy, however, is the mother’s milk of democratic politics. Hypocrisy is not the tribute that vice pays to virtue in this case. It reflects the feeling that we want to get our way. Embedding the feeling in high principle is funny its own way. In my »

Quotations from Dementia Joe, cont’d

Featured image President Biden is bringing his first year in office to a conclusion, not with a bang, but with a big bang of whimpers. This past week of failures has put an exclamation point on the big bang, magnified by Biden’s monumentally bad speech in Atlanta followed by the belly flop on “voting rights” and the Senate filibuster. Congratulations of some kind are in order. In the category of Quotations From »

Voting rights, lies, and videotape

Featured image President Biden and most Senate Democrats want to make “voting rights” a hill to die on. They want to “carve out” the Senate filibuster rules to ram their current bill through. Biden is headed to Atlanta today to perform in support of the Senate version of the bill. In its Senate incarnation it is titled the “Freedom to Vote Act.” Posing a question about the bill to Rep. James Clyburn »

Schuminations: Filibuster edition

Featured image Chuck Schumer all by himself should be enough to turn an honest person off to politics. The cheerleaders at Politico provide this preview of coming attractions: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has vowed the Senate will tackle voting rights legislation and will vote on changing key Senate rules by Jan. 17 if the GOP once again blocks the Democrats’ elections bill. “We must adapt. The Senate must evolve, like »

Manchin Makes It Official

Featured image Now that they control Congress, although by the barest of margins, the Democrats can do considerable damage. But for their long dreamt-of power grab–adding more states, packing the Supreme Court, institutionalizing electoral fraud–they need to break the filibuster. Ending the filibuster would require the votes of all 50 Democratic senators. That has always seemed unlikely, and yesterday Joe Manchin made it official in an op-ed in a local newspaper. Manchin »

Biden’s radical agenda likely to hit wall

Featured image Joe Biden, or whoever is pulling the strings, has an ambitious agenda. Too ambitious in a well-functioning democracy for a president who squeaked into the White House and whose party holds only half of the Senate seats. There is no mandate for the kind of sweeping change Biden and his handlers desire. One can debate whether ours is a well functioning democracy, but I hope it still functions well enough »

The filibuster is not a relic of the Jim Crow era

Featured image Among the falsehoods Joe Biden mouthed at his press conference yesterday was the claim that the Senate filibuster is “a relic of the Jim Crow era.” This line originated with Barack Obama. Biden said he agrees with Obama’s assertion. As many have pointed out, Biden defended the Senate filibuster for decades. And Obama himself defended it when he was a Senator. Thus Biden and Obama are both hypocrites. To make »

Sinema is a hard “no” on ending the filibuster [UPDATED]

Featured image Many of Joe Biden’s plans, and those of the leftists for whom he fronts, cannot be implemented in the next two years as long as the Senate filibuster remains in place. That’s why so many Democrats want to put an end to the filibustering of legislation. With the Democrats holding 50 Senate seats plus the vice presidency, the possibility of ending the filibuster exists. But even one holdout Dem would »

Dodd-Frank Repeal Illustrates Why It’s Time to Get Rid of the Filibuster

Featured image Yesterday the House of Representatives passed legislation to repeal Dodd-Frank on a 233-to-186 vote, with all Democrats voting to retain the failed law. It is important to understand that Dodd-Frank was an ill-conceived disaster. It has driven community banks out of business because they can’t afford the red tape, thereby increasing the market shares of a handful of mega-banks. It has hurt small business, which relies on community banks for »

McConnell to finish what Schumer started

Featured image Josh Holmes fills in the history leading to the imminent confirmation of Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in the Politico Magazine column “McConnell is finishing what Schumer started.” Holmes’s column traces the judicial filibuster wars to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and pays tribute to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in playing his “long game” leading to what should be a happy ending tomorrow. This story has been out »

Klobuchar kludge meets the Gorsuch filibuster

Featured image Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar specializes in avoiding outspoken stands on important issues. She looks for opportunities to lead the way on trivialities calculated to garner broad public support, such as her crusade against the threat to life and limb posed by “The crisis of the detergent pod.” Senator Klobuchar is a reliable vote for the Democratic Party line, but she is quiet about it. She doesn’t want to upset anybody. »

Showdown on Mount Gorsuch

Featured image This past Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed that Judge Gorsuch would be confirmed to the Supreme Court this week. If put to a straight up or down vote, as he will be, Judge Gorsuch would win a majority for his confirmation. If Democrats rally 41 votes to support a filibuster — Senator McConnell didn’t expressly say, but it was implicit in his vow — Republicans would be put »

Not So Cool Hand Chuck

Featured image Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared on both FOX News Sunday and Meet the Press yesterday, mostly to address the prospective confirmation of Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Senator McConnell spoke “with the calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces” (to borrow Walter Blair’s misquotation of Mark Twain). He vowed that Judge Gorsuch would be confirmed and that Democrats would dictate the manner of his confirmation. McConnell noted »

The madness (or not) of the Dems

Featured image This past Thursday morning the Kansas City Star obtained audio of Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill “warn[ing] Democratic donors that blocking President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee could have dire consequences.” The Star’s Brian Lowry posted the audio (below, I hope) along with his article reporting on it. Articulating the kind of rational calculation I set out in “Will the Dems die on Mount Gorsuch?,” McCaskill told her supporters: “I’m »

Filibustering out

Featured image It’s almost funny to hear Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seek to convert the Democrats’ filibuster of a vote on Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court into a matter of high principle. Almost. Even if it’s not funny, however, he should be laughed off the stage. The filibuster is a fertile source of partisan hypocrisy. It’s time to finish it off, at least with respect to the Supreme Court. »

Bring Back the Filibuster!

Featured image George Will beat me to my idea for today’s Thought of the Morning with a column about the Senate filibuster based on a recent talk by Rep. Tom McClintock, who argued in Hillsdale’s Imprimis that what we should do is go back to the old way of doing filibusters. With all of the talk of ending the filibuster, at least for Supreme Court nominees, maybe we should instead talk of »