Schumer Vows Senate Rules Change Vote For Voting Rights Bills By MLK Day

Oh, it’s on. The Hill reports, Schumer vows Senate rules change vote by Jan. 17 if GOP blocks voting rights:

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Monday that he will force a vote by Jan. 17 on changing the Senate’s rules if Republicans again block voting rights legislation.

“The fight for the ballot is as old as the Republic. Over the coming weeks, the Senate will once again consider how to perfect this union and confront the historic challenges facing our democracy,” Schumer wrote in a “Dear Colleagues” letter sent to the Senate Democratic Caucus.

“We hope our Republican colleagues change course and work with us. But if they do not, the Senate will debate and consider changes to Senate rules on or before January 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to protect the foundation of our democracy: free and fair elections,” he added.

Republicans have used the 60-vote legislative filibuster to block voting rights and election reforms bills over the past year, arguing that they are a federal overreach. But Schumer, in a separate letter to the caucus last month, vowed to bring up voting legislation and force a debate on changing the filibuster.

Schumer’s new timeline, outlined in Monday’s letter, comes as the Senate is returning to Washington this week after leaving in mid-December without a deal on the path forward for voting rights legislation.

Democrats view voting rights and legislation to overhaul elections and campaign finance as crucial as GOP-led states debate and enact new voting rules. And in a signal of an argument likely to be echoed by Democrats this week, Schumer used his Monday letter to the caucus to link voting rights legislation to the quickly approaching anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

“Make no mistake about it: this week Senate Democrats will make clear that what happened on January 6th and the one-sided, partisan actions being taken by Republican-led state legislatures across the country are directly linked, and we can and must take strong action to stop this anti-democratic march,” Schumer wrote in the letter.

“Let me be clear: January 6th was a symptom of a broader illness — an effort to delegitimize our election process, and the Senate must advance systemic democracy reforms to repair our republic or else the events of that day will not be an aberration — they will be the new norm,” he added.

Schumer’s timeline puts new pressure on long-running negotiations within the caucus about potential changes to come to a conclusion.

Democrats haven’t settled on a plan but are discussing a range of ideas, including creating a carveout from the filibuster for voting rights legislation, implementing a talking filibuster that would let bills pass with a simple majority or moving from requiring 60 “yes” votes to sustain a filibuster to requiring 41 “no” votes to sustain it.

But to change the rules without GOP support, which they aren’t expected to get, Schumer would need total unity from all 50 of his members [the nuclear option] — something he doesn’t yet have.

Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have both reiterated recently that they support the 60-vote hurdle and both have appeared cool to the idea of a carveout that would exempt certain bills but leave the filibuster intact for others.

Note: Former California Senator Barbara Boxer tells MSNBC that she does not think Sen. Schumer would have sent this “Dear Colleague” letter with a deadline for MLK Day if he does not have some agreement from the “Manchinema” obstructionist beast to some changes to the Senate filibuster rule, possibly a return to the talking filibuster which would require the minority to hold the floor in continuous debate.

A group within the Senate Democratic Caucus, including Sens. Angus King (I-Maine), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.), have been in talks with Manchin and met with Sinema before the holiday break. Those talks continued over the weeks-long recess and are expected to continue this week.

There’s growing support within the caucus for changes to the 60-vote legislative filibuster, including Tester backing a talking filibuster and Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who is up for reelection this year, supporting lowering the threshold for voting rights legislation.

President Biden also told ABC News’s David Muir in a recent interview that he would support fundamental changes to Senate rules in order to pass election reform legislation.

“The only thing standing between getting voting rights legislation passed and not getting passed is the filibuster, I support making an exception on voting rights of the filibuster,” Biden said.

Schumer has vowed for months, when asked about filibuster reform, that all options were “on the table” for getting voting rights legislation passed through the Senate.

He leaned in further during his Monday letter, arguing that the Senate rules had been “hijacked to guarantee obstruction.”

Excerpt from his letter:

The Senate was designed to protect the political rights of the minority in the chamber, through the promise of debate and the opportunity to amend. But over the years, those rights have been warped and contorted to obstruct and embarrass the will of majority – something our Founders explicitly opposed. The constitution specified what measures demanded a supermajority – including impeachment or the ratification of treaties. But they explicitly rejected supermajority requirements for legislation, having learned firsthand of such a requirement’s defects under the Articles of Confederation. The weaponization of rules once meant to short-circuit obstruction have been hijacked to guarantee obstruction.

We must ask ourselves: if the right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, then how can we in good conscience allow for a situation in which the Republican Party can debate and pass voter suppression laws at the State level with only a simple majority vote, but not allow the United States Senate to do the same?

We must adapt. The Senate must evolve, like it has many times before. The Senate was designed to evolve and has evolved many times in our history. As former Senator Robert Byrd famously said, Senate Rules “must be changed to reflect changed circumstances.” Put more plainly by Senator Byrd, “Congress is not obliged to be bound by the dead hand of the past.”

For our historically ignorant blog trolls, as well as the “Manchinema” obstructionist beast: The Founding Fathers Rejected Filibusters:

Supermajority rule “contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail….  a poison …one of those refinements which, in practice, has an effect the reverse of what is expected from it in theory…[It] substitutes the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.” – Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 22, December 14, 1787.

Writing 234 years ago, Alexander Hamilton cast supermajority rule as a poison causing a foreboding “weakness” in democracy — presciently describing America’s plight today.

[D]emocratic Party senators who support supermajority rule are rejecting the Founding Fathers to instead embrace a practice so invidious to democracy that they wrote it out of the Constitution. The filibuster is not a Senate tradition. Nor was the Senate itself conceived to revere minority rights and temper the passions of the House of Representatives.

Founding Fathers

As Hamilton explained at length in Federalist 22, real world evidence from 8 years of supermajority rule in the Articles of Confederation caused the Founding Fathers to reject the concept. The failed experiment taught a valuable lesson, the reason the Founding Fathers in 1787 presumptively embraced majority rule in the Constitution. (The few exceptions requiring supermajority votes, like expelling members or Presidential Impeachment, are explicitly specified.) The House retains majority rule to this day, but the Senate has abandoned that Constitutional mandate.

Majority Rule is the Senate Tradition

Majority rule is the Senate tradition crafted by the Founding Fathers. It prevailed for half a century until 1837, when senators discovered it had been deleted inadvertently from their rulebook decades earlier. In a routine 1805 procedures update, majority rule was accidentally dropped without senators being aware of the mistake for 32 years. Obstructionists soon began to exploit this accident with talkathons to thwart majority rule — including filibustering legislative efforts to restore majority rule.

Senate Not Designed to Revere Minority Rights

Historic lore is the Senate was conceived to ensure minority interests and those of smaller states.  That is incorrect. As a Brookings analysis explained, the Founding Fathers did not design the Senate “to be a slow-moving, deliberative body that cherished minority rights.”

Its design fulfilled a far more tawdry purpose. James Madison, primary author of the Constitution, explained on June 30, 1787 the stark colonial dynamic confronting delegates designing the Senate at the Constitutional convention this way:

The States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the U. States. It did not lie between the large & small States: It lay between the Northern & Southern.

Their design papered over the slavery question by largely providing Senate parity for slave states. And any minority rights being cherished by their creation belonged to slave owners. 

Restore Original Intent with Talking Filibusters

Just as it did during the Articles of Confederation era, supermajority rule has proven problematic — so enervating and disruptive that 161 loopholes to the filibuster were created between 1969 and 2014 — including for critical legislation like budgets, administration appointments and judicial appointments.

Note: Just last month, the Senate adopted another work-around to pass the debt ceiling increase to prevent Republicans from defaulting on the U.S. debt with a filibuster and causing an economic catastrophe out of partisan sabotage of the government in their ongoing insurrection.

The filibuster’s only conceivable virtue is to facilitate debate providing opportunity for a minority to sway opinion and forge compromises. That virtue is far less evident now with polarized legislators. Nonetheless, it is a credible standard for distinguishing obstructionism from an aspirational minority eager to sway opinion and accrete votes.

The test is whether an initial Senate minority can be sufficiently persuasive to soon swell to a majority. One option is to require a continuously speaking filibuster, but sustainable beyond some period (2-4 days) only if a minority has become a majority. This resembles the Harkin proposal. For convenience, filibusters could be scheduled during weekends. To avoid legislative logjams, parallel filibusters (Talk-a-Ramas) could be scheduled, using the original Supreme Court chamber and other Senate spaces.

Majority rule is the soul of popular democracy, the alternative of supermajority rule described by Hamilton as a “contemptible compromise of the public good… a system so radically vicious and unsound,” that it should be rejected. His advice would reestablish original Constitutional intent in returning to the initial Senate tradition of majority rule — a resurrection enabling Congress to begin rehabilitating the structural defects hobbling American democracy.

Restoration of the Senate to its original purpose is a Democratic Party goal. The destruction of American democracy is the Sedition Party goal.