When West Virginia’s Joe Manchin closed the door on eliminating the legislative filibuster this week, promising not to “weaken or eliminate” the 60-vote threshold, he “dashed” the “dreams” of Democrats, according to The New York Times.
Hypocrisy is nothing new in Washington, but it takes a preternatural shamelessness to have participated in over 300 filibusters, as Democrats did in the past few years, and then one day turn around and treat the procedure as an odious racist relic that threatens “democracy.”
But this is an emergency, norm-breakers will tell you. Isn’t it always? Senator Jacky Rosen, after a quick reversal of position, told The Washington Post that she would nuke the procedure only “in the case of protecting democracy.” Of course, if we adopted the Democrats’ evolving standard of “voting rights,” then we’d be forced to treat every election before 2020’s free-for-all as illegitimate.
If Democrats truly believe that voter-integrity laws in Georgia or Texas are unconstitutional and a threat to democracy, they should take those states to court, where these issues could be adjudicated, rather than trying to upend the system in a power grab.
“We do need to start testing this idea that the filibuster promotes bipartisanship,” Senator Chris Murphy told the Times. “I would hope that everyone is open to having their theories proved wrong if they don’t have evidence to prove their theories right.” It’s not a theory. The fact that the filibuster has, for now, put an end to unilateral partisan efforts in passing generational reforms only highlights the value of the filibuster. Democrats are now compelled to find Republican votes if they want to remake the nation’s laws.
Or not. Doing nothing is tacit bipartisan compromise as well. Sometimes the ideological chasm is unbridgeable, and a gridlock becomes the healthy, organic state of a sharply divided government. That’s why we have states. What Democrats want is the unfettered ability to compel those states to live under “reform” bills passed by the slimmest majorities in the shortest of windows. What Murphy wants is for the voters of Connecticut, who have strict gun-control laws, to overturn the will of voters in Texas, who do not.
Allowing reforms to be instituted without a national consensus isn’t only potentially authoritarian — as it is in the case of the Democrats’ anti-filibuster battering ram, “For the People Act”— but it also generates instability. Each time a new party takes power, they will either reverse course or pass their own set of comprehensive reform bills that half the country doesn’t want. The legislative filibuster is doing exactly what it should be — preserving a semblance of federalist governance. Now, I don’t know if Manchin is taking a principled stand or a politically expedient one, and it doesn’t really matter. Without question, he’s taken the consistent position.
A recent Morning Consult poll found that, overall, voters supported the filibuster by a 21-percentage-point margin “when it was framed as an existing mechanism.” But when given a choice of supporting a simple 51-vote majority or a 60-vote threshold, they favored the former by seven points. So, it’s clear that many voters have no clue why the filibuster exists or even what it does. Which is why Democrats have been able to effectively demagogue the issue.
As with nearly all objects of left-wing animosity, the filibuster, a counter-majoritarian mechanism used in various ways in almost every liberal nation, has been transformed into a tool of “white supremacy.” This accusation is meant to chill debate and to slander, by implication, anyone who supports it.
Well, anyone who supports it now. Democrats not only liberally employed the filibuster, but also they championed it. And not just during Jim Crow days, but during the Bush and Trump administrations. And the anger thrown at Manchin this week is being leveled by the very same people who would have a collective emotional meltdown had Republicans broken long-standing norms and unilaterally rammed through partisan “reforms” during the Trump years.
And Republicans could have done it. As NBC’s Sahil Kapur helpfully noted recently, Donald Trump, who now says eliminating the filibuster would be “catastrophic for the Republican Party,” asked them to do it. What reporters rarely note, however, is that former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Majority Whip Dick Durbin, and 32 Democratic senators who signed a letter in 2017 imploring Mitch McConnell to preserve the “existing rules, practices, and traditions” that remain bulwarks against majoritarian bullying are also all cynical partisan hypocrites.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and the author of the book “First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History With the Gun.” To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
What does one expect from the communist Democrats. The communist Democrats do not want a Democratic Republic, they want a totalitarian Country.
WITH THEM in charge..
The Left’s Chutzpah Knows No Bounds
The definition of “chutzpah.” It’s someone killing his parents and then falling on the mercy of the court on account of his being an orphan. Or the old Marx Brothers query, “are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”
As for The democrat Party’s fantasy that it’s the Republicans who are obsessed with race, maybe they should be reminded of who’s pushing Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, rubbing salt into racial wounds daily, and promoting the fiction that the greatest threat to the republic is “white supremacy.”
These Dishonorable liberal Democrat phony crusades have little or nothing to do with protecting the sensitivities of Black Americans and everything to do with the Democrats setting themselves up as their saviors. Their practice of patronizing groups cannot yield to the facts that the Democrat Party has a long history of racial discrimination. For their cause is not defending the oppressed or the offended but about making themselves look wonderful with their latest destructive political Con.
The “Socialist Democrat Party State” political officers, Gestapo, Woke and Cancel Culture are just getting started. You will obey, be loyal and support the “Socialist Democrat Party State” or you will be classified as
“Enemies of the State”.
The Republicans and the citizens who still believe in the constitution have been saved by Senator, Joe Manchain , The Marxist have been defeated by one of their own party, but first of all, by a American who still believed in the ” two party system and the constitution..
Get rid of Pelosi and the Democratic party will change.
IMO just getting rid of her, won’t change it that much…. WE NEED TO GET RID OF THEM all!
No it won’t.
Can you imagine the frustration that Queen Nancy Pelosi must be heading up under right now since she couldn’t get Senator Joe Manchain to vote with the dictates of the Queen and stood up for the citizens who he represented, and the constitution instead, oh, how sad, the Queen just be today!
My corrections, “Can you imagine the frustration that Queen Nancy Pelosi must be ( note, the word here is, dearing, not HEADIng as it appears here….,our
I’d have loved being a fly on the wall in her office, when she went back to it, and had a good cry/rant session..
President Joe Biden to hear the Marxist Democrat Party was going to save the world to hear Joe Biden’s Handlers tell anyone who would listen to Joe Biden read it off a real- Prompted Mark Twin said this about Joe Biden, the leftist politician, ” politicians and Diapers must be changed often and for the same reason . “
It should read, ” … Read it off a Tela-Prompter.. “
Its just like their idea of packing the court or anything else they dream up—it depends on whether or not it benefits the Leftist agenda and whether or not it puts power in their hands that they can abuse as they wish.
The Leftist democrats now that the Democrats have Joe Biden in the oval office as their president, reminds me of a sign that I once seen in a used Car salesman s office. President Joe Biden- “A Week ago, I couldn’t even SPELL SALESMAN, Now, I ARE ONE!!
LOL.. i’ve seen signs like that before.
I ALSO recall the Democrats INSISTING that protecting the “rights” of the minority, meant THEIR “rights”, when they were in the minority of a split Senate! They DEMANDED “power sharing” (which the STUPID/ SQUISHY Republicans agreed to)! NOW, of course, THAT doesn’t matter (because Democrats are in the majority).
So true.. WHEN THEY were the minority it was all about “BUT we must not become a tyranny of the majority”.. BUT WHEN THEY ARE THE majority, they RUB that in our faces.
Voting and making sure that the votes are properly counted and reviewed for duplicates, dead people voting, illegal invaders voting, etc so the same thing as before does not occur.
Members of both parties decry the Filibuster when impedes their agenda, but only rare exceptions admit the danger of doing so. The salient question is, is there a pattern to who opens these Pandora’s Boxes first, seizing short-term power at the cost of long-term harm to the country’s political system and societal fabric? I think we all know the answer to that one.