A growing number of House and Senate Democrats are calling on the new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to reject Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) request to respect the decades-old filibuster rule, which protects the Senate from partisan control of the majority.
He added, “This isn’t complicated. Simply reaffirming that Democrats won’t break the rules should not be a heavy lift.”
“Chuck Schumer is the majority leader and he should be treated like majority leader. We can get [expletive] done around here and we ought to be focused on getting stuff done,” Tester said. “If we don’t, the inmates are going to be running this ship.”
“It would be exactly the wrong way to begin,” Blumenthal said. “We need to have the kind of position of strength that will enable us to get stuff done.”
“For this 117th Congress, the American people chose an evenly-split Senate: Fifty Republicans and fifty Democrats. With the election of Vice President Harris, that means the Democratic leader will act as Majority Leader,” he said.
A filibuster to prevent a Senate vote on a bill can only be broken by a cloture vote, which requires a supermajority of 60 votes to allow the Senate to act on the pending bill.
McConnell said there is precedent, from an evenly split Senate 20 years ago, of Democrats and Republicans honoring the filibuster.
“Now, I’ve been heartened to hear my colleagues say he wants the same rules from 2000 to apply today. Because certainly 20 years ago, there was no talk—none whatsoever—of tearing down longstanding minority rights on legislation.”
With Americans now represented by an evenly-split Senate, the two Senate leaders have been in talks to reach an agreement on how to keep the upper house running, with McConnell pushing for the 60 vote supermajority to be kept.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) quoted from a speech by Biden when he served as a senatori, in which the new president advocated for keeping the filibuster.
McConnell also reminded his colleagues that Biden had previously advocated to defend the legislative filibuster. He also pointed out that less than four years ago, 27 current Democratic senators and Vice President Kamala Harris signed a letter insisting that the rule should not be eliminated.
“Democrats themselves just spent six years using it liberally to block bills from Senator Tim Scott’s police reform to coronavirus relief,” the minority leader said.