Just when Americans thought Democrats had run out of unpopular ideas to campaign on, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) dusted off an idea that, two years ago, he couldn’t even get his own party to support. In a press gaggle in Chicago, the New Yorker dropped more than a few bombshells — but none bigger than his renewed call to end the filibuster, an extreme idea that would radically remake the Senate as we know it. “We want to protect choice,” Schumer insisted of abortion — and apparently, a naked power grab is the only way to do it.
In the last several years, both parties have thought about ending the filibuster — and wisely decided against it.
Burning down 200-year-old rules so that the majority party can ram through policies with a simple majority may sound like a good idea — until the shoe is on the other foot. In the past, when this idea has come up, common sense has always prevailed. After all, what the Founding Fathers intended wasn’t for the Senate to be given over to the passions of either party, but to work toward bipartisanship and consensus — a seemingly lost art in the hyper-partisan environment of modern D.C.
When this debate bubbled up in 2022, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) warned that it would be a “slippery slope” to every radical idea Democrats have championed over the last decade. “And that’s the danger of it. What you don’t want is major policy changes,” Johnson insisted, “basically [making the Senate] like a ping-pong ball, going from one extreme to the other back and forth every two years. That’d be incredibly damaging for our democracy. So again, one of the functions the Senate performs is [a] cooling off period where you really should deliberate, debate, and discuss major pieces of legislation and that the 60-vote threshold, which people referred to as the filibuster, requires consensus building. And that’s a good thing.”
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Democrats seemed to appreciate that restraint when they were in the minority — even going so far as to sign a letter urging Republicans not to abolish the filibuster. Back then, there wasn’t a real risk, because conservatives recognized how important collaboration was to our democracy. Now, those same Democrats are threatening to do the very thing they asked conservatives in 2017 to avoid.
Subverting the Senate would require a majority vote, something Schumer seems confident the Democrats could achieve. “We got it up to 48,” he said of his 2022 effort, “but of course, [Independent Arizona Senator Krysten] Sinema and [West Virginia Democrat Joe] Manchin voted no; that’s why we couldn’t change the rules. Well, they’re both gone,” Schumer told reporters during the Democratic convention. “Ruben Gallego is for it, and we have 51. So even losing Manchin, we still have 50.”
It’s also, as many point out, a pretty brazen statement from Schumer, given that his party would not only have to maintain its wafer-thin majority but expand it. As Axios warned Tuesday after multiple conversations with party insiders, “there were more than two Democrats privately opposed to the filibuster carve-out in 2022.” They’re referring to Sinema and Manchin, who both held the line when Schumer tried this stunt before, refusing to radically remake the Senate just so the Left could push through sweeping changes to U.S. voting laws.
Lowering the 60-vote threshold is the lazy way out of legislating, they believed. In a surprisingly courageous speech on the Senate floor, Sinema chided Democrats, arguing that the whole conversation “is a poor substitute for what I believe could have been and should have been a thoughtful public debate at any time over the past year.” Killing a rule that forces senators to compromise and work together doesn’t solve “the disease of division,” she emphasized. “Today marks the longest time in history that the Senate has been equally divided. The House of Representatives is nearly equally divided as well. … Our mandate, it seems evident to me, [is to] work together and get stuff done for America.”
Asked what he might try to jam through the Senate without a filibuster this week, the New York leader pointed to two hugely controversial pieces of legislation: the Freedom To Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, both of which are essentially federal takeovers of the election system that will gut free speech and erase a lot of voting safeguards in the process. Under these policies, Democrats could loosen election integrity laws on popular initiatives like voter IDs, voting days, and election verification processes — making manipulating elections or even changing their outcomes easier than ever.
And while Schumer only named those bills, there’s absolutely no way he would restrain himself or his party once the 60-vote threshold was abolished. Conservatives and freedom-loving Americans have long feared what the Left would do without the filibuster on dangerous policies like the Equality Act (which would destroy religious freedom and open the doors to transgenderism across sports, schools, bathrooms, locker rooms, dorm policies, hiring practices, and more) or the Women’s Health Protection Act that would bulldoze hundreds of states’ pro-life laws, legalize abortion to the moment of birth — and force taxpayers to fund them.
This doomsday for democracy would allow Democrats, who don’t have the votes otherwise, to hijack the entire legislative process. As experts like J. Christian Adams have explained, it would put the Founders’ dream on the verge of complete extinction. “The Senate was designed to slow down legislation…” he explained. “Otherwise, Washington would be even more out of control than it is.” It’s the speed bump in the Senate that forces the majority to work with the minority to tone down far-reaching legislation like Schumer’s.
Yet the majority leader knows if he can drag his federal takeover of elections over the finish line, then he’s one step closer to a one-party system that controls the states and every lever of government.
“The only thing Democrats like more than breaking the rules is changing them,” Family Research Council’s senior director of Government Affairs, Quena Gonzalez, told The Washington Stand. “Unable to rely on an activist Supreme Court to legislate his leftist agenda, and unsuccessful (so far) in convincing the American people to let him stack the court, Chuck Schumer is now apparently ready to sacrifice the Senate’s most prized and distinctive custom.”
“He’s about to crack America’s so-called cooling saucer,” Gonzalez cautioned, “But at least he warned us of his intentions before the election on the altar of political expediency.” As for what this has to do with the presidential race, Gonzalez says: plenty. “Kamala Harris is running away from her record and refuses to release a policy agenda, so we can at least be grateful that Senate Democrats are telling us exactly how they’ll appease Molech if they retain power in the Senate in November: pass abortion until birth at any cost, even if it means killing the filibuster.”
Harris’s party will stop at nothing. “Leader Schumer is ready to break Senate custom, change Senate rules, and take the Senate one giant step closer to being just another 50% plus-one legislative chamber, thereby depriving the country of a very important check on majority power. Let’s hope he fails,” Gonzalez insisted. “And let us pray that voters don’t hand him the power to succeed.”
LifeNews Note: Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.
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