Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is promising that if Harris is elected president and the numbers in the House and Senate are favorable, they will eliminate the Senate filibuster for a singular altruistic purpose — to enshrine Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. They ignore polling that suggests there are other issues at the top of Americans’ daily concerns.
The putative Harris administration would try again to eliminate the filibuster just one more time to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., blocked that effort in 2021 but will not be in office in 2025. And then, depending on their whim, they might also make Puerto Rico a state. Then the District of Columbia. Then they would for sure call it quits and go back to the 60-vote rule. Well, maybe they would first take a look at passing single payer healthcare and, of course, use 51 votes to pass a noncontroversial wealth tax, stack the Supreme Court under the guise of judicial reform, gut the Second Amendment, pass broad amnesty or grant citizenship for more than 15 million people who they illegally welcomed to the country. But that’s probably it. Absolute normalcy after that.
No serious person who understands the Senate filibuster or the term “gridlock” could think for one second that a Democrat president, House, and Senate would exercise sufficient restraint to pull up short of funding their most radical pet projects and passing legislation they know could never garner 60 votes. If your ideas are too radical to garner 60 votes, just lower the bar and get what you want. Who would be the voice of reason against that — Sen. Bernie Sanders? Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer? Sen. Elizabeth Warren?
Regardless of how many times Democrat candidates tell us that they are protecting democracy, they are not doing anything of the sort. Democracy is mob rule, one more vote than the other team. The filibuster is not contained in the Constitution but instead is the logical outgrowth of the long-developed Senate rule-making process. For a bill to be filibuster-proof, it required the support of 67 senators until a rule change reduced that number to 60 in 1975. Legislative processes are not designed so one party or the other, with 51 votes, can trade radical swings in our country’s laws and policies. They are designed for the opposite result, to force legislation down the middle and away from both ideological extremes.
Our Constitution and Senate and House rules are written to compel legislators, who work for the people, to stand eye-to-eye, communicate, and compromise for the greater good. The 60 votes serve as an effective buffer against radicalism. Harris and her party have utter disdain for that rule book.
Abortion and Elections
After recognizing that the country is split on various abortion issues, Harris states that her team will simply eliminate the filibuster to win on that issue. She says so in a flippant way as though this is not controversial and would not be more broadly impactful. The reality is that most Americans favor restrictions on abortion. While it is not true that the standard U.S. Democrat voter supports unrestricted abortion up to the moment of birth, it is clear that Harris’ position on these issues is not in the mainstream and is extraordinarily far to the left. She and her team conclude that they can take such a hotly disputed issue and cram their preferences down the country’s throat — and feel no repercussions when leadership in the Senate swings the other direction.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Act will never garner 60 votes in part because it is loaded with policies that would make it easier to cheat in elections. It could garner 51 and, in doing so, would eliminate voter ID requirements nationwide and make ballot harvesting legal in 50 states. This would create the opportunity for the Democrats to legally stuff ballot boxes, go door to door to collect ballots, and for plenty of illegal votes to be counted. It would create, not eliminate, uncertainty and, worse, would turn over state authority to run elections to unelected federal bureaucrats.
Illegal Immigration
Most of the Democrat retreads in the proposed Harris administration suggest that the solution for the immigration crisis they exploded is to simply grant amnesty, or a short path to citizenship, to 20 million illegal immigrants — including the roughly 500,000 with criminal records in their home countries. Puerto Rico, half of which rejects the idea of becoming a state, would become our 51st state. D.C. would be 52nd. This would give the Democrats four more Senate seats that, when combined with eliminating the filibuster, would render Republican Senate representation effectively meaningless. Single payer healthcare, wealth taxes, and other pet projects would bring up the rear.
Playing for Keeps
Many commentators have wrongly compared this circumstance to the Dems’ decision to eliminate the filibuster for the purpose of breaking the logjam to confirm then-President Barack Obama’s appointed federal judges. When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did that, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell promised him that his rule change would come back to haunt him. The Dems confirmed dozens of Obama’s appointed judges with 51 votes. A few short years later, in the face of hypocritical screams that he was destroying democracy, McConnell used the same procedure to seat judicial appointees of then-President Donald Trump, including three Supreme Court justices the leftists loathe. What Harris is proposing today is decidedly worse.
The Dems are not promising to eliminate the filibuster to break a few ties, with the understanding that there will likely be future turnabout and their worst Republican policy nightmares will come true. This time they are playing for keeps.
If they can broadly eliminate the filibuster, buy four more senators, make millions of illegal aliens citizens with a 51-senator vote, rig our voting system processes, and rejigger the Supreme Court to create a roster of 13 mostly leftist justices, then they can entirely stop speaking to the Republican side of the aisle because they will have a permanent filibuster-proof Senate majority. And the Republicans will never have enough voters to reinstate legislative bumpers for both sides. It is not that Democrats have evaluated the likely conservative counter-offensive and determined that the risk is a good one. They perceive no risk. With all these sweeping changes, they can do whatever they want until the end of time with no practical oversight or influence of the people. The only two things holding them back are a Harris victory in November and a conscience they sorely lack. We will be a functional leftist autocracy.
Our country has run thus far on the concept that we the people elect our lawmakers to represent us like grownups in a serious setting for the purpose of passing laws that benefit as many Americans as possible. The elimination of the filibuster, especially for the reasons stated by Harris, would strip almost a perfect half the country of any meaningful federal representation — even a Republican president and House would be neutered. No serious person can think that, armed with a rigged durable majority and a 51-vote rule, the Harris Dems would not run wild.
Conservatives will survive the next four years regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. The question is who wants to live in a place in which only a single point of view is mandated from the top of government down by people who have proven themselves to be too ineffective to lead under the rules that have existed for generations? Who will support a Republican Party that sees all of this partisan rule breaking coming and does nothing to stop it? This presidential election is a referendum on both parties, neither of which seems able to look to the future to understand its gravity.