Various Senate Democrats want to return the ‘talking filibuster’
On Thursday,Senator Elizabeth Warren said in an interview with Axios that the legislative filibuster requiring 60 votes from within the Senate to close a debate on the bill is racist.
“The filibuster has deep roots in racism, and it mustn’t be permitted to serve that function, or to make a veto for the minority,” senior Democratic senator who is from Massachusetts said. “In a democracy, it’s majority rules.”
Warren has been determined put an end to the legislative filibuster. She has suggested eliminating it entirely within the past.
The a silent filibuster — allows a minority of 41 or more senators to forestall a bill from going to a final vote by voting against it in what’s called a “cloture” vote. Various Democrats, even including President Biden, are now backing a talking filibuster.
The “talking filibuster” was last seriously articulated by Sen. Jeff Merkley in 2012. It would allow 41 senators to stop a final vote by talking incessantly, around-the-clock, on the Senate floor. But once those senators stop talking, the edge for a cloture vote is lowered to 51.
Warren’s argument that the filibuster is racist is popular with many leftists, who say it’s a relic of the Jim Crow era meant to stymie civil rights bills. Others just say that it stops the Senate from usurping major legislation that it should be able to pass.
The filibuster’s supporters, however, say it’s a part of what makes the Senate a novel body therein it encourages compromise and prevents a majority from running roughshod over a minority to pass bad bills.
“James Madison said the Senate’s job was to provide a ‘complicated check’ against ‘improper acts of legislation,'” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. R-Ky., said earlier this year. “We ensure that laws earn enough buy-in to receive the lasting consent of the governed. We stop bad ideas, improve good ideas, and keep laws from swinging wildly with every election.”
He added: “Our friend Lamar Alexander put it this way in his farewell speech: The Senate exists to produce ‘broad agreements on controversial issues that become laws most of us have voted for and that a diverse country will accept.’”
The just recently retired Alexander represented Tennessee within the Senate for eighteen years.
McConnell just this week has claimed that the GOP would turn the Senate into a “100-car pileup” with “nothing moving” if Democrats interfere with the filibuster.
But Warren noted to Axios that the filibuster isn’t a constitutional part of the Senate but merely a model it can choose to break.
“The founders debated whether to require a supermajority in either House of Congress, and decided that government would function more effectively if both the Senate and the House worked by simple majority,” she said. “When they didn’t want a simple majority, for example in an impeachment, they said so specifically. The filibuster is a later creation that was designed to give the South the ability to veto any effective civil rights legislation or anti lynching legislation.”