Democratic insiders are reportedly assembling a leftist coalition that aims to immediately eliminate the filibuster in order to ram through the party’s far-left agenda if Democrats win back the Senate and White House this fall.
“Veteran party operatives, activist groups and supportive senators are coordinating message and strategy to dial up the pressure to quickly end the 60-vote threshold early next year, fearing that preservation of the rule will enable Republicans to kill Joe Biden’s legislative agenda in its cradle,” NBC News reported. “The Senate can ‘nuke’ the filibuster with a simple majority vote, but it would set an irreversible precedent. The idea of doing so was never entertained in Obama’s presidency, and it will be a heavy lift to stitch together the 50 votes necessary to do so.”
Former President Barack Obama tried to claim over the summer that the filibuster was racist, calling it a “Jim Crow relic.”
However, when Obama was a senator, he opposed eliminating the filibuster, saying that the idea was “more about power than about fairness.”
“I believe some of my colleagues propose this rule change because they can get away with it rather than because they know it is good for our democracy,” Obama said. “If the right of free and open debate is taken away from the minority party and the millions of Americans who ask us to be their voice, I fear the partisan atmosphere in Washington will be poisoned to the point where no one will be able to agree on anything.”
“What [the American people] don’t expect is for one party, be it Republican or Democrat, to change the rules in the middle of the game so they can make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet,” Obama continued. “The American people want less partisanship in this town, but everyone in this Chamber knows that if the majority chooses to end the filibuster, if they choose to change the rules and put an end to democratic debate, then the fighting, the bitterness, and the gridlock will only get worse. I understand that Republicans are getting a lot of pressure to do this from factions outside the Chamber, but we need to rise above ‘the ends justify the means’ mentality because we are here to answer to the people — all of the people, not just the ones who are wearing our particular party label.”
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has said that he could “go down as one of the most progressive presidents in American history.”
McClatchy recently reported that Biden was significantly more far-left when compared to Hillary Clinton.
“Taken as a whole, Biden’s policy platform represents a significant shift from Clinton’s. On nearly every major issue, Biden has either exponentially increased the scope of what Clinton proposed or advocated for new ideas that most Democrats would have up until recently considered fringe,” McClatchy reported. “Biden’s current set of policy prescriptions would likely be considered radical if they had been proposed in any previous Democratic presidential primary.”