One of the most hotly debated political issues of our time, here in the United States, is something that’s not a law, not a regulation, not an executive order, but simply a traditional rule of the United States Senate. It’s a rule that has been argued over for years, a rule that would take only a simple Senate majority vote to erase, a rule that has already been whittled away at for various purposes and applications.
I write, of course, of the filibuster, and in this midterm election year, the fighting over this old tradition is sure to grow hotter still.
Democrats are claiming to be of mixed thoughts on the matter.
The Center Square spoke with Juliana Stratton and Jamie Davis, Democrats running for U.S. Senate in Illinois and Louisiana, respectively, about their plans for legislation if elected into the upper chamber.
Stratton said she supports eliminating the filibuster. She pointed to ensuring the right to abortion, voting rights protections and a federal assault weapons ban as issues a Democratic U.S. Senate would address it if it eliminated the filibuster.
“There’s so many issues that we’ve been able to tackle here in Illinois and get done that have been held up in Washington, D.C.,” Stratton told The Center Square. “I want to see us be able to move past that.”
Stratton’s counterpart in LA is making saner noises:
However, other Democrats do not believe it is appropriate to end the filibuster if the party takes power in the chamber. Jamie Davis, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Louisiana, said ending the filibuster is not the right solution to serve the American people.
“We need a government that is able to negotiate and communicate and be able to come to an agreement like the way the Constitution was made,” Davis told The Center Square. “I’m so sick of Washington playing politics”
But how far will she get? How far will Jamie Davis go when a new Senate Majority Leader, be that the geriatric and master chef Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) or someone younger and more forceful, tells him, “if you want any legislation you think of to come to a vote, you’d better back us on this.”
The Democrats are good at one thing: Sticking together. Collectivism, after all, is kind of their thing. And let’s be honest: This is part of the Democrats' platform now. Look at just those few things that candidate Juliana Stratton mentioned: Abortion, which was properly sent back to the individual states by the Supreme Court; “voting rights protections,” by which we can safely assume she means “fraud protections,” as Democrats propose to outlaw voter-ID measures and any measures to clean up voter rolls; and a “federal assault weapons ban,” no doubt written by Democrat agitators whose understanding of firearms is about at the level of a garden slug’s understanding of macroeconomics.
That’s what we are facing.
Here’s the thing, and I’m going to tell you: If the Democrats take the Senate in November, and it’s not at all certain they won’t. The filibuster will be gone. Kaput. Shot. Eliminated, the first time they can get a simple majority to vote, and while the one possible holdout, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), may vote no, there are no other moderate Democrats – a term which is rapidly becoming an oxymoron – who will join him.
No, if the Democrats get in, the filibuster will get chucked out. And then, boy howdy, it’s going to be Katy-bar-the-door, and every piece of random left-wing nutbaggery that the Democrats can come up with will pass, by a simple majority vote. And you don’t even want to imagine what they might be like if a Democrat wins the White House, and that’s going to happen, inevitably, sooner or later, much as we’d like to think it won’t.
President Trump, since he resumed office, has been shouting for the need to remove the filibuster to ram through a Republican agenda. Last year, on that topic, I wrote:
Those of you who have been reading my work for some time know that I've always been against doing away with the Senate's last safeguard against outright mob rule. I'm beginning to come around to the idea that it's inevitable, and as Macbeth said, "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly." President Trump is right about that; the current mob of Democrats, should they regain control of the Senate, will do this immediately. Better the Republicans take that advantage and press it for all they can.
None of this bodes well for the long-term survival of the country. None of this bodes well for the United States' remaining vestiges of republican government. But maybe it's time to deal with the near term, or we may not get a longer term.
And therein lies the problem. We don’t know what the midterms will bring. We do know that our window has passed to save the SAVE America Act, which would have gone a long way to secure our elections. There will be a lame duck session after the elections; that, if the GOP loses control of the Senate, will be our last chance for a while.
So, once again, get out there and vote. If you can bank your vote early, do so. If you have to get up early on Election day, do so. If you have to be dragged down a gravel road behind your neighbor’s truck to get to the polling place, do so. If you have to fight a grizzly bear while wearing a bacon tracksuit to get in to cast your vote – do so.
