It has been maddening to watch Congressional Republicans and the Trump White House approve a temporary budget that gives Democrats everything they wanted while including basically nothing conservatives voted for in November. However, we got one slight glimmer of hope when Donald Trump tweeted that he recognizes the source of the problem: the absurd, constitutionally-baseless requirement that legislation gets 60 votes to stop a filibuster and pass the Senate.
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Alas, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wasted no time responding to president. The Hill reports that the Kentucky Republican has flatly declared that eliminating the filibuster “will not happen”:
“There is an overwhelming majority on a bipartisan basis not interested in changing the way the Senate operates on the legislative calendar” on legislation, McConnell said during a weekly press conference […]
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But McConnell — who pledged last month to keep the filibuster — said the move would “fundamentally change the way the Senate has worked for a very long time. We’re not going to do that.”
Republicans currently have a 52-seat majority in the Senate, meaning under the current rules they need at least eight Democratic votes to move most legislation. If they went “nuclear” and changed the rules, they could pass legislation with 51 votes.
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Majority Whip John Cornyn and Finance Committee chair Orrin Hatch also affirmed that they want to keep the filibuster. Last month, the total number of senators who concur stood at 61, meaning there’s currently not enough support to enact a rule change.
In other words, Senate GOP leadership and enough senators to make a difference are admitting up front that Democrats still control the United States Senate. Elections don’t have consequences after all, and you can forget about any conservative reforms that can’t be done via executive order.
This is insane. The legislative filibuster was never part of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, and contrary to the historical ignorance of some politicians, our Founding Fathers expressly rejected the idea of requiring a supermajority to pass ordinary legislation.
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And as George Will has explained (you know McConnell’s out on a limb when he’s even more moderate on something than George Will), the current rules are a perversion of the filibuster’s original purpose.
Further, as I explained in January when McConnell affirmed that Senate rules matter more to him than saving preborn babies from abortionists, the filibuster doesn’t even restrain both parties equally anyway, as proven when Democrats used the reconciliation process to pass Obamacare with just 51 Senate votes.
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Make no mistake: if conservative voters, activists, politicians, and media don’t make abolishing the legislative filibuster their hill to die on, then the next four years will go down as the biggest wasted opportunity in American history — no new restrictions on abortion, no border wall, no E-Verify, no Right to Work Act, no abolition of federal agencies, no true Obamacare repeal, no deep spending cuts, no entitlement reforms, and none of the free-market healthcare reforms supposedly coming in the mythical “phase 3” of Paul Ryan’s repeal-and-replace scheme.
Further, if the GOP has no meaningful results to show the base in two years, they can forget about the midterms delivering them the remaining eight seats they need to beat the filibuster. And what happens in 2020 if executive actions are the only positive changes Trump himself can point to?
If Trump wants to save both his presidency and the revolution he kicked off, then now is the time to ramp up the pressure on McConnell and every other pro-filibuster Republican, and not relent until they either decide the promises they made to their voters matter more than meaningless drivel about the “uniqueness of the Senate,” or betrayed constituents have fueled primary challenges from principled conservative replacements.
Everything depends on it.
