Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced Monday the Senate will vote to blow up the legislative filibuster to pass a federal takeover of state elections.
Summary
Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic Leader, announced plans to vote on filibuster changes by January 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in a letter to his colleagues.
- The Senate filibuster rule requires 60 votes to advance non-budgetary legislation. Schumer hopes to change the rules on a 51-50 party-line vote to allow election-related bills to pass with a simple majority of 51 Senators. Vice President Harris would break the tie.
- Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) had previously announced their opposition to unilaterally changing Senate rules on a partisan basis. President Joe Biden previously opposed changing filibuster rules, but recently changed his position.
- The “election reform” bill known as the Freedom to Vote Act would require states offer mail-in voting, mandate two weeks of early voting nationwide, and restore voting rights to convicted felons among other measures.
- The second bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, would restore the “pre-clearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court rules these provisions unconstitutional in 2013. These provisions allow the federal government to oversee election rules in states or localities with a history of discrimination.
- Senate filibuster rules have been revised twice in the past decade. First, the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) invoked the so-called “nuclear option” in 2013 to allow lower court and executive branch nominations to pass with 51 votes.
- The second change came in 2017 under then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). The Senate lowered the threshold to 51 votes for Supreme Court nominations to end the first partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nomination. The legislative filibuster has remained unchanged since 1975.
- New York magazine asks whether what it calls a “doomed voting rights push” will really help Joe Biden avoid a midterm wipeout.
- According to CNN, Joe Manchin’s support of both voting rights legislation and the filibuster is inconsistent. The “West Virginia Democrat, by continuing to support the filibuster, himself serves as sponsor and gravedigger alike” of elections legislation.
- The Washington Post says that not only are both election bills necessary, they “might not be enough” to stop the “very real” “threats to democracy.”
- National Review devotes their front page to “Chuck Schumer’s January 6 cynicism,” and plans to use the anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot to pressure Manchin and Sinema into caving on the filibuster and supporting their “elections power grab.”
- Bret Baier of Fox News discussed Democrats’ election legislation and the prospects for rest of their legislative agenda with his All-Star Panel podcast team. Their consensus: be skeptical of anything that doesn’t have Joe Manchin’s support.
- The fellas on Ruthless podcast (Josh Holmes, Michael Duncan and Comfortably Smug) take on Democrats’ “efforts to rig elections in their favor” in their typical irreverent style.
Author’s Take
Schumer explicitly cited the upcoming anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot and Martin Luther King Day to justify his norm-busting actions. Implicitly, according to Schumer, anyone who opposes their federal takeover is both an insurrectionist and a racist.
Does it matter that their elections agenda is virtually unchanged from January 5, 2021? No. Does it matter that this legislation does nothing to reform the Electoral Count Act that governs how presidential elections are certified? No.
It’s clear Schumer will use whatever tool at his disposal to achieve this, including using an attack on our seat of government as a political prop.
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© Dominic Moore, 2022
