Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, torched a legislative filibuster on Monday, arguing that filibustering is undermining democracy.
A filibuster is a legislator or legislators who keep making speeches, either for hours or days or even months, to prevent a vote, and once the Time limit is up, the legislation will be cancelled.
The filibuster has been used more than 160 times in the 230 years of the United States’ existence, 50 percent of them by Republicans during the four and a half years of Obama’s tenure, resulting in Obama’s inability to appoint Supreme Court justices and state justices. During the first two years of Obama’s term, the Democrats held the House and Senate, and they dismantled the judicial filibuster with the nuclear option, which mandated that the filibuster could not be used when passing appointments to the bench. But two years later the Democrats lost both houses and became the minority party, at which point they regretted it and wanted to use the judicial filibuster, and McConnell said: you proposed the rules yourselves, why don’t you follow them yourselves, don’t you keep your word? This judicial filibuster was not restored after all.
The judicial filibuster no longer exists, and what remains is the legislative filibuster. Proponents of repealing the legislative filibuster warn that Biden‘s campaign promises are effectively dead in the Senate, and that most legislation requires at least 60 votes to pass.
That’s not true; the vast majority of common bills require only a simple majority consent when voted on in the Senate. Except for extremely important bills such as impeachment and constitutional amendments, which require an absolute majority to pass, such as 2/3 or 3/5, only 51 votes are needed. This means that Democrats are guaranteed to pass a bill at the ballot stage after gaining 50 seats, except that it is not easy for Democrats to get even 50 unanimous Democratic votes for controversial bills.
Historically, both parties have been relatively cautious about using the nuclear option, opening the door only on personnel appointments. The reconciliation bill provides for bills on the budget to be free from filibuster, and the CPC viral bailout law passed last week falls into this category, so 51 votes would have passed.
The filibuster repeal must have 60 votes of senators agreeing to pass and requires the cooperation of nearly 10 Republican senators. Currently only 5-6 Republicans agree to repeal the filibuster, and two conservative members of the Democratic side have assured McConnell that they will never agree to repeal the filibuster rule. It is not easy for the Democrats to get the 60 votes for this rule change.
McConnell came out at this time and said, emphasizing that the Senate is now only half to half and that the Democrats are gaining a 1 vote advantage in the Senate by virtue of occupying the White House.”
To add to the background knowledge, in January’s unprecedented Joe State Senate by-election, the two Democratic senators surprisingly won over all the outliers and actually won. The Senate emerged in a 50:50 state, and with Vice President Harris’ one vote counted, the Democrats had 51 votes and became the majority party in the U.S. Senate.
McConnell warned, “Let me be blunt with all 99 of my colleagues and imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like.”
Breitbart News readers commented that McConnell’s remark made sense?
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