OPINION:
Addressing the Democratic National Committee’s meeting on Sept. 10, 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris boasted about how, as Senate president, she had broken John Adams’ record of casting the most tiebreaking votes in a single term.
A month earlier, she had broken a tie vote supporting the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act — which actually had the opposite effect, further fueling inflation. Ms. Harris also cast the tiebreaker for an even more expensive boondoggle, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, on Feb. 5, 2021 — two weeks after taking office.
She continued: “I cannot wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights. I cannot wait!”
Two years later, in a Sept. 24 interview during her unsuccessful bid for the presidency, Ms. Harris averred that the Senate should abolish the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote threshold for most contentious bills to pass.
“I’ve been very clear. I think we should eliminate the filibuster for [Roe v. Wade], and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” she told Wisconsin Public Radio.
(Never mind that Ms. Harris raised no similar objections to not letting every person make the decision concerning COVID-19 vaccinations.)
Had voters on Nov. 5 handed Democrats control of the House, Senate and presidency, they almost certainly would have felt empowered to resurrect the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would go beyond “codifying Roe v. Wade” into federal law.
According to the liberal Vox, the measure “would not only restore the pre-Dobbs status quo, but dismantle a slew of state restrictions on abortion.” (So much for the notion of federalism as envisioned by the founders.)
The Women’s Health Protection Act twice passed a Democratic-controlled House but was thwarted by a filibuster.
But Ms. Harris’ remarks on codifying Roe were predicated on the premise that not only would she win the presidency, but that her fellow Democrats would retain control of the Senate and retake the House, and that Vice President Tim Walz would break a tie vote if necessary.
In August, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, hinted at plans to abolish the filibuster in a presumptive Democratic-controlled 119th Congress if outgoing independent Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who wisely opposed its abolition, had both been replaced by Democrats who would march in lockstep.
According to NBC News, Mr. Schumer told Politico on Aug. 19 that two bills he would try to pass in the absence of the filibuster were the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The latter would strip virtually all election-related authority from the states, handing it to unelected federal bureaucrats. (Again, so much for federalism.)
Mr. Schumer said there would be “consensus in my caucus to try and do that,” calling the two measures “very, very important.” Of course they are: They want Democratic Party rule in perpetuity.
To that same end, abolishing the filibuster would have enabled Democrats to grant amnesty and a path to citizenship — along with voting rights — to an estimated 20 million immigrants in the country illegally.
Then there’s the Equality Act, which would have added sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under federal civil rights law. It would have given the back of the hand to Americans who hold traditional beliefs about biological sex and marriage and would have kicked Title IX and girls’ and women’s athletics to the curb.
But Ms. Harris lost in a landslide. The House remained in Republican hands. Senate Democrats lost four seats and, with them, the majority. Mr. Schumer will be demoted to Senate minority leader, and the Democrats’ loathsome legislation is on ice for at least four years.
So now, with the script flipped, Mr. Schumer and his fellow Senate Democrats have a sudden newfound respect for the filibuster. It’s worth noting here that when they themselves were most recently in the minority, they unashamedly — albeit hypocritically — embraced the use of the filibuster to block the Republicans’ agenda, by one tally, 327 times in 2020 alone.
What they say amounts to “that was then, this is now.”
If there were a Mount Rushmore for chutzpah, Mr. Schumer’s face would be on it. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York noted sarcastically that Mr. Schumer is shamelessly urging Republicans not to do to Democrats what they were planning to do to the GOP.
“To my Republican colleagues, I offer a word of caution in good faith,” he said on the Senate floor on Nov. 12, presumably with a straight face.
“Take care not to misread the will of the people, and do not abandon the need for bipartisanship. After winning an election, the temptation may be to go to the extreme. We’ve seen that happen over the decades, and it has consistently backfired on the party in power. So, instead of going to the extremes, I remind my colleagues that this body is most effective when it’s bipartisan. If we want the next four years in the Senate to be as productive as the last four, the only way that will happen is through bipartisan cooperation.”
Republicans won’t attempt to repeal the filibuster because they know that Senate majorities are fleeting and that they will need it again when they are in the minority. That’s because the filibuster is the only real procedural tool the minority party has at its disposal to thwart legislation it opposes.
But the first time Senate Democrats filibuster legislation pushed by President-elect Donald Trump, the new majority Senate Republicans should not just call them out on their brazen hypocrisy but perhaps call their bluff with a proposal to repeal the filibuster and get them on record defending it and opposing its abolition.
• Peter Parisi is a former editor with The Washington Times.
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