Washington — This week we saw events and stories from around the country highlighting the growing momentum to fix the Senate and eliminate the filibuster as a tool that McConnell can use to continue his gridlock and obstruction in the Senate next year.
On Wednesday, Sens. Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren joined the Fix Our Senate coalition on a livestream to talk about the broken Senate and the need to fix it if we want to make any progress on the major issues confronting our nation – from the climate crisis, gun safety, immigration, health care, civil rights, and so much more.
Fix Our Senate and our coalition partners understand the stakes of allowing the corruption and gridlock of McConnell’s broken Senate to continue into 2021. If Americans decide Mitch McConnell should not be in charge of the Senate in November, then Mitch McConnell should not be in charge of the Senate – and that means eliminating the filibuster and taking away his ability to veto anything and everything from the minority.
Here are a few highlights of the coverage the filibuster has gotten this week:
Vox’s Ezra Klein: The Definitive Case Against the Filibuster: “If Joe Biden wins the White House, and Democrats take back the Senate, there is one decision that will loom over every other..That decision? Whether...to eliminate the modern filibuster, and make governance possible again. Virtually everything Democrats have sworn to do...hinges on this question. If Democrats decide — and it is crucial to say that it would be a decision, a choice — to leave the 60-vote threshold in place, that entire agenda, and far more beyond it, is dead.”
More from Ezra Klein: “I have spent my career covering policymaking in Washington. And my conclusion is this: The most important policy question, by far, is whether the Senate remains a 60-vote institution.”
The New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu: The Anti-Filibuster Armies Are Mounting Up : “As former President Obama made clear in his eulogy for Representative John Lewis in July, the Senate’s procedures and America’s political institutions, broadly speaking, have also played a role in stymieing racial progress. And racial justice activists are beginning to make that case for reform explicitly.”
The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin: Harry Reid on the Senate, the Supreme Court, and a Time for Major Change: “The decision by Senate Republicans to jam through the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett in the final days before the election—when they refused even to hold hearings on the nomination of Merrick Garland, in 2016—has brought the dysfunction and the hypocrisy of the Senate to wide public notice”
"‘I think the time has come for the filibuster to go, and it’s going to go. It’s not a question of whether but when,’ Reid told me. ‘There is no legislation passed. There are no amendments voted on. You can’t have a legislature that requires sixty per cent. It’s outlived its usefulness.’"
The New York Times’ Sydney Ember and Astead Herndon: End the Filibuster? Pack the Court? The Left Is Pushing Biden: “A consummate Washington institutionalist who served in the Senate for nearly four decades, Mr. Biden to this day often speaks in fond and wistful terms about Senate customs of yore. From a policy standpoint he has largely rejected calls to eliminate the filibuster, only recently signaling some openness to doing so, or to expand the Supreme Court.”
"In perhaps the most striking shift, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a centrist and one of the few Democratic senators to represent a state that Mr. Trump won in 2016, said last week that he would be open to eliminating the 60-vote threshold in the Senate — backing away from the position he held just a year ago…‘I didn’t come here to not do anything. I came here to get things accomplished...I think the filibuster’s very important, and I think it makes for better legislation, and I still believe that. I still support the filibuster, but, like I said, we’ll see what happens with the other side. Who knows what’s going to happen?’”
New York’s Jonathan Chait: Either Biden Will Kill the Filibuster, or the Filibuster Will Kill Him: “Every incentive faced by every Republican will be to oppose the Biden agenda in its entirety…Republicans would surely pretend to negotiate with Biden. This was the method they used to run out the clock on Obama’s legislative majority...The ploy was to string them along, bleed out the calendar, allow public frustration at the process to eat away at the Democrats’ popularity, making it harder for them to vote for anything in the end. To allow the exact same Republican leader to fool them with the exact same trick would be the proverbial definition of insanity.
"Ultimately the only thing that can pass is what Democrats can find 50 votes for. It won’t be the Bernie agenda, or even the Biden agenda. The 50th Democratic vote will be well to the right of Biden’s aggressive platform. But it will be something. The 60th vote will be for nothing at all.”