By
As 2022 got underway, most Senate Democrats were determined to take steps to protect voting rights. The party settled on legislation called the Freedom to Vote Act, which was crafted as a compromise measure designed to garner at least some Republican support.
Those efforts, of course, didn’t work, and literally zero GOP members backed the bill. But on this issue, Democratic leaders were not content to simply lick their wounds and move on. Instead, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his leadership tried to execute the so-called “nuclear option,” which would’ve allowed the majority to pass the legislation by a simple majority vote.
In other words, Senate Democratic leaders were prepared to blow a giant hole in the chamber’s filibuster rule.
The effort ultimately fell short, though it came surprisingly close to succeeding: The party needed every member of the Senate Democratic conference to support the initiative, but they fell two votes short: West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema voted with the GOP minority to leave the existing filibuster intact.
All of this came to mind anew yesterday. Politico reported:
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to retire at the end of the year makes at least one thing very clear: The filibuster is in big trouble. Two of its staunchest defenders in the Democratic Caucus, Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), are now leaving. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell stepping down as GOP leader won’t do anything to shore up the Senate’s 60-vote requirement on most legislation.
The report quoted Sen. Elizabeth Warren saying, “It’s time to get rid of the filibuster. The filibuster has been anti-Democratic and has done a whole lot more harm than good. If [Republicans] have legislation they wanted to pass. And the filibuster stood in the way? The filibuster would be toast. It’s total politics.”
For the record, I have a hunch the Massachusetts Democrat said the filibuster “has been anti-democratic” (lower-case “d”), not “anti-Democratic” (upper-case “d”).
Regardless, the broader point is what matters. In the not-too-distant past, the future of the filibuster rule appeared secure, and that’s clearly no longer the case.
As regular readers might recall, it was nearly seven years ago when most of the Senate Democratic conference signed a joint, bipartisan statement in support of preserving the legislative filibuster for the indefinite future. At the time, there were some in the party who endorsed scrapping the existing rule, but it was a relatively fringe position in Democratic politics.
Not anymore. Several prominent Democratic senators who signed onto the 2017 joint statement — including Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Mark Warner of Virginia — have since reevaluated their positions and called for institutional reforms.
They’ve been joined by newer senators who are eager to overhaul how the chamber functions, and they’re likely to find new colleagues fairly soon who believe the current filibuster rule is “a tool of obstruction” and “needs to go.”
In case this isn’t obvious, if there’s a Republican majority in the Senate, proponents of filibuster abuses can probably breathe a little easier: GOP support for dramatic reforms is weak for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that Republican senators’ top priorities — confirming judges and approving tax breaks for the wealthy — can already be done by majority rule.
What’s more, it’s also worth noting for context that while Democrats currently have a narrow advantage in the upper chamber, the GOP is feeling very confident about its chances of flipping control of the chamber later this year.
But the larger point is worth remembering: The next time there’s a Democratic majority, after this year, filibuster reformers have reason to be optimistic.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.