Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) on Sunday reiterated his support for reforming the filibuster, days after President Biden came out in support of a “talking filibuster” to make the procedure more painful to carry out for the Senate minority.
The time for reform is now. I understand the respect for the ‘old traditions’ of the Senate, but we are out of time to fix this country. Senators need to stand up and say there is something more important than those traditions.
In addition, from a purely political standpoint, once Americans see what can be done with robust use of well-crafted laws, the GOP will sink more deeply into the mire of irrelevance. Which is where they belong.
In Parliament the government whip is responsible in making sure their party members conform to the leaderships policies and voting on any given piece of legislation.
I take it that in US politics that isn’t the case. If it were then the Mancins of the party would be less vocal in their opposition to change.
So I ask…
What power does Durban have to persuade the conservative element in the Dems to move forward?
The filibuster is a vehicle for the majority party to lie, by campaigning on big promises they have no intention or possibility of keeping. Republicans in the Senate, and frankly in the House as well, lied to their base for years about repealing the Affordable Care Act. They campaigned on it and raised funds off it, knowing full well it would never pass with 60 Senate votes. And none of them really wanted to be the ones taking away their constituents’ health insurance. When it finally came time to do the deed via reconciliation, they didn’t even have 51 Republican votes!
Well how is the GQP base supposed to feel when they turned out in record numbers, gained control of all 3 branches of government, and the big promise STILL wasn’t kept? Filibuster abuse is as responsible for inciting the Jan 6 coup attempt as a lot of other factors.
Look, it’s really simple. The American people (or at least democrats) vote for Senators on the basis of their policy positions and the expectation they will act assertively to enact those policies, and decidedly not for them to give precedence to some archaic rules of the Senate or illusions of collegiality.
If you believe in your policies and in your ideas, why wouldn’t you move to enact them when you have the ability and the power to do so? It just makes no sense to me.
And don’t dare speak about collegiality when the other team stole your SCOTUS nominee and rammed through judges and tax cuts without a single democratic vote.
I don’t really see it as painful, it’s more accountability. You want to stop something from going forward, then you’re going to have to stand up, and state why. And if it forces Republican, or Democratic senators to explain and that’s “painful” then so be it.