On Wednesday, the US Senate voted 52-48 against changing the rules of debate, keeping the filibuster procedure intact and ultimately killing any chance of passing voting rights reform.
Predictably, every Senate Republican voted against changing the rules, which currently ensure that while Democrats technically control a majority of both chambers, they are unable to pass a bill with a simple majority. Instead, they need to come up with 60 votes—the number needed to end a filibuster. That’s because Republicans have decided to use the filibuster (once a rare and exceptional debate tool) to kill every single bill Democrats bring up.
Also predictably, Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema voted with the Republicans.
Sinema gave a speech recently about how the filibuster has to remain in place because it’s a pathway to “problem-solving and bipartisanship,” and that eliminating or reforming it would “worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country.”
On Wednesday, Manchin gave his own speech in which he said similar things—that the filibuster is a necessary part of congressional debate and that changing the rules would be “the easy way out” and would only sow further division. Like his Republican colleagues, he’s repeatedly accused Democrats of only wanting to eliminate the filibuster in order to make sure they get their own way moving forward on all sorts of issues. As they see it, changing the rules would be changing what the filibuster was meant to do and would allow power-hungry Dems to act as legislative tyrants.
Manchin even had a big sign printed up, reading “The United States Senate has NEVER been able to end debate with a simple majority.”
Except just because he had an aide blow that message up and slap it on some poster board, that doesn’t make it true.
This is profoundly disingenuous. From the founding until the 20th century, every vote on regular bills in the Senate was majority rule. Period. The Senate had plenty of ways to end debate, some of which required less than a majority- like the Chair cutting off a rambling senator. https://t.co/3wuHMo2kGs
— Adam Jentleson 🎈 (@AJentleson) January 19, 2022
We’ve discussed here before what the filibuster was designed to do and how Republicans have weaponized it to facilitate their racist and otherwise oppressive agendas.
But to say that the majority party has always had to overcome the filibuster in order to pass a bill is a ridiculous rewriting of history.
Both Manchin and Sinema have repeatedly said they support voting rights. But both have made it clear that they don’t value voting rights as much as they value “norms”—which aren’t actually norms at all but sets of rules Republicans have twisted to keep themselves in power (and their pockets lined by lobbyists) even after voters made them the minority party.
Journalists, stop calling the failure to pass the voting rights bill a “major setback” for Democrats. It is a major setback for DEMOCRACY. The right to vote is not a partisan issue. Stop framing it as such and legitimizing anti-voter efforts.
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 20, 2022
(image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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