“The View” host Whoopi Goldberg could not hide her shock when guest co-host Lindsey Granger claimed that President Joe Biden could single-handedly end the Senate filibuster with an executive order.
The exchange came about during Wednesday’s broadcast of the ABC midday talk show, as the co-hosts continued to discuss the fallout from Monday evening’s unprecedented leak of an early opinion draft that indicated the Supreme Court might be preparing to overturn landmark abortion ruling Roe v. Wade.
The conversation began with the leak and the question of who would benefit most from the information making its way into public discourse — and Granger argued that it was working to distract Americans from President Biden’s “messaging problem.”
“We just talked about how Biden has a messaging problem and he’s failing miserably in the midterms,” Granger said, adding that she believed Biden’s downhill slide began with the widely-criticized withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“People loved him right before that, and it started to go downhill,” she said. “Biden is long on promises and short on delivery. Imagine you go to a restaurant, and they tout the best thing on the menu, and you order it and they say it’s sold out. That’s what Biden is doing for a lot of people, especially for black people.”
“Do you think Biden did it?” Goldberg asked.
“No, Biden can use his executive orders, he can use different powers, and that’s the same thing with this abortion issue, because he can do anything like end the filibuster,” Granger asserted then, going on to argue that Biden would not end the filibuster on his own because he knew that could hurt Democrats.
“Why doesn’t Biden want to end the filibuster in order to push this through?” she asked, answering herself: “Because Biden knows the filibuster has been used by Democrats 300 times over the last six years. Biden knows that Chuck Schumer is one of the people who used the filibuster the most, and he doesn’t want to lose his election seat in the midterms and not have anything to run on. A lot of people –”
“Can he end the filibuster by himself?” co-host Sunny Hostin asked, appearing confused.
“He can sign an executive order to end the filibuster. He actually can,” Granger insisted.
“Oh,” Hostin still appeared unsure, and the camera panned to Goldberg — who clearly was not buying Granger’s argument.
Me when Lindsey Granger said Biden could end the filibuster through executive order #TheView pic.twitter.com/GihYXVZIy2
— The Chat (@LiveOnTheChat) May 4, 2022
The show cut to a commercial break then, but the moment they went live again, Granger had to correct her statement.
“I want to clarify that Biden can’t single handedly executive order to end the filibuster, but what he can do is rally everybody in the Senate and rally everybody who supports him to get in line and make Kamala be the tie-breaking vote, and say, okay, the filibuster is now not a thing,” she said. “He doesn’t want to do that because it will affect them down the line in a negative way since they used it 300 times.”