Tangle - Democrats try to abolish the filibuster.

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

Democrats say the threat to voting rights is a big enough deal that abolishing the filibuster for major legislation — or at least tweaking it temporarily to push through a voting rights bill — is a worthy cause. Last week, 48 out of 50 Senate Democrats voted to change the rules to push forward a voting rights bill. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Friday Democrats "made progress" on a voting rights bill and a filibuster rules change to pass it. But Sens. Joe Manchin and Kysten Sinema, two Democrats, still say they are opposed to changing the rules and pushing through a voting rights bill with zero Republican support.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be talking about filibuster reform. Obviously, we've covered this a few times in the past, but there have been some developments recently that I think are worth getting into. Before we jump into our main topic, though, I have one quick

announcement. Tangle is hiring a couple interns. We are looking for two part-time interns. One open position is to help with our social media channels and growing them and promoting Tangle. And the second position is for someone interested in helping to research, write, and craft our daily newsletter and podcast. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can write to me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C, at readtangle.com with the subject line Tangle Internship. There are links to the job descriptions in today's podcast description and in the newsletter. We're looking for college students, recent college graduates with an interest in politics, media, journalism, social media, writing, whatever.

Also accepting applications from any interested parties. But ideally, probably college students or recent graduates. This will be, you know, a part-time gig with a monthly stipend, that sort of thing. Anyway, if that sounds like something you might be interested, please reach out and let us know. All right, so real quick, we're going to jump into our quick hits for the day, and then we'll get into our main topic. First up, the S&P 500 has entered correction territory today as the stock market continues to drop. Number two, tax season opens today and the IRS is warning of a worker shortage

and major delays. Number three, in the event Russia invades Ukraine, the Biden administration is threatening a novel export control that would damage Russian industries. The State Department Number four, Britain's Supreme Court says Julian Assange can appeal the decision to extradite him to the United States. Number five, the U.S. Supreme Court said it will consider a challenge to race-conscious admission policies at Harvard a threat to affirmative action. A quick reminder, our Quick Hits section is created in partnership with Ground News, a website and app that rates the bias of news coverage and news outlets. The heated debate over voting reform in Congress is about to come to a conclusion. Senate Democrats are pushing for an overhaul in our nation's election system. As we reported earlier, President Biden left the Capitol today without the votes for the filibuster rule change, he needs to pass voting rights legislation.

Tonight, Senate Republicans blocked the bill on voting rights. That legislation combined two bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. That vote broke evenly along party lines, falling short of the 60 votes required. And just 30 minutes ago, the push to change filibuster rules also failed with two Democratic senators, Manchin and Sinema, as expected, holding out. So our main topic today is the filibuster. Again, we have done a deep dive on the filibuster's history last year. That's a subscriber's only post. We've also covered news about it a few different times. If you want a longer refresher,

you can check out one of those many articles. They are linked to in today's podcast description and in our newsletter. But briefly, we will give you a refresher. The Senate is the upper chamber of Congress, historically known for being collegial and sometimes called the world's greatest deliberative body. It functions on what is called unanimous consent. That means that if a single senator objects to something, the entire Senate has to stop and address that senator's concern, oftentimes with a vote. Imagine, for instance, that the Senate is voting to confirm a judge. 70 of the 100 US senators seem ready to vote for the judge, but one senator shares an objection and wants to continue the debate over the judge before they move to a vote confirmation. If that happens, the entire

Senate has to stop and have what's called a cloture vote, which is a vote to end the debate and move to a final vote. But here's the rub. It takes 60 votes to invoke cloture. Since the Senate is made up of 100 senators, for a long time that meant 41 senators could block the confirmation of a judge or a piece of legislation by refusing to move to the final vote. They would just endlessly call for more debate so no vote could happen. This is called a filibuster. So, what is happening now? Well, Democrats are talking about abolishing the filibuster. Ironically, one of the big things you can't filibuster in the Senate is a rules change to the filibuster.

So, with 50 Democrats on board and the Vice President's tie-breaking vote, Democrats could change the filibuster if they all got on board. In fact, they've been kicking around the idea for more than a year. We published a piece on this very topic on January 27th of 2021, nearly a year ago today. The changes wouldn't be without precedent. That hypothetical I laid out in the beginning about judges, well, it's no longer a reality. In 2013, Democrats eliminated the 60-vote threshold on most judicial nominees. In 2017, Republicans did the same with the Supreme Court nominees. Throughout history, the specifics of how a filibuster works have

changed repeatedly, but the filibuster rule on major legislation has remained intact. Now, Democrats say the threat to voting rights is a big enough deal that abolishing the filibuster from major legislation, or at least tweaking it temporarily to push through a voting rights bill, is a worthy cause. Last week, 48 out of 50 Senate Democrats voted to change the rules to push forward a voting rights bill. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Friday that Democrats had, quote, made progress on a voting rights bill and a filibuster rules change to pass it. But Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two centrist Democrats, still say they are opposed to changing

the rules and pushing through a voting rights bill with zero Republican support. Democrats are continuing to explore a few options. One, they would reenact the talking filibuster, which requires senators to actually take the floor and speak, often for hours at a time, in order to halt the bill. Or, two, they would alter the rules to somehow be exempt for voting rights-specific legislation, arguing that preserving democracy should supersede any Senate rules and be above obstruction. Below, we'll take a look at what the right and left are saying, and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the right is saying. The right says Democrats will regret ending the filibuster,

especially given looming Republican power in Congress. They argue that it's about nationalizing elections, an idea that undercuts the Constitution, and they warn that 48 Democrats voting to abolish the filibuster is already a huge threat to the future of the Senate. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the recent vote is a sign of radical change in the Senate. Washington Wisdom once held that while Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were the public faces of Democratic reluctance to breaking the Senate filibuster, others in the caucus quietly supported the duo. But on Wednesday night, 48 out of 50 Senate Democrats voted to use the nuclear option in an attempt to overturn election laws in most states, the board said.

the nuclear option in an attempt to overturn election laws in most states, the board said. That means the partisan abolition of the Senate's 60-vote requirement for most legislation is no longer an abstraction. It's an institutional Democratic Party position, a trigger that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has committed to pull as soon as he has 50 votes and a co-partisan vice president. They lost 48 to 52, but the paucity of Democratic dissenters is astonishing given recent Senate history. Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from California, went along after defending the filibuster well into the new Congress. Chris Coons, the Delaware senator who cultivates a bipartisan reputation, also voted to destroy the filibuster. In 2017, he led a coalition of 32 Democrats declaring they are united in their

determination to maintain it. 29 GOP senators also signed Mr. Kuhn's letter. That's right, while only two Democrats still backed the filibuster under Mr. Biden, more than half of the Republican caucus supported it as a guardrail on their own majority under Donald Trump. Hugh Hewitt said if Senator Schumer succeeds in altering the filibuster, he'd be among the best Democratic allies the Republican Party has ever had. But if the filibuster is somehow revised or amended, the GOP majorities that look certain to emerge in both chambers after November will combine with whoever the GOP nominates in 2024 to create a unified field of Republican power in January of 2025, Hewitt wrote.

Expect the new Republican president to use the new rules to move quickly to enact long-overdue reforms. First on my list would be a comprehensive measure that obliges school districts receiving federal funds to end public employee unions in schools. Extreme environmentalists already worry that long-overdue updates to the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act are coming, in part because those reforms will reduce their long-running accumulations of so-called stakeholder power in decisions far removed from conservation. If the country is to get moving again, amending these laws will be a critical first step, he said. Defense spending, entitlement reform, and reductions in the federal workforce will all get a big lift in 2025 using simple majorities in both

houses. In the Washington Post, former Vice President Mike Pence said January 6th was a tragedy, but responding to it by abolishing the filibuster would be too. In the years since that fateful day, states across the country have enacted measures to try to restore confidence in the integrity of our elections while ensuring access to voting for every American. Georgia, Arizona, and Texas have led the way with common sense reforms such as requiring verifiable identification on absentee ballots and using cameras to record ballot processing. Despite this steady progress of state-based reforms, now come President Biden and Senate Democrats with plans to use the memory of January 6th to attempt another federal power grab over our state elections and drive a wedge further into our divided nation. Their plan to end the filibuster to allow Democrats to pass a bill nationalizing our elections would offend the founders' intention that states conduct elections just as much as what some of our most ardent supporters would have had me do one year ago. The notion that Congress would break the filibuster

rule to pass a law equaling a wholesale takeover of elections by the federal government is inconsistent with our nation's history and an affront to our constitution's structure. All right, that's it for what the right is saying. This is what the left is saying. The left argues that preserving democracy is worth navigating the filibuster for a voting rights bill. They argue that the filibuster is already doomed and it's only a matter of who will gain the most from it. They call out hypocrisy from Republicans who warn of preserving tradition. In The Atlantic, David Litt said the filibuster is already doomed. After all, during the Trump era, Republicans didn't just pass massive upper income tax cuts via budget reconciliation, which requires a simple majority vote. They also ended the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations,

installing the most conservative high court majority in generations. That court is now poised to accomplish a wish list of Republican legislative priorities, overturning Roe v. Wade, expanding gun rights, and hamstringing the government's ability to issue regulations, among others, without having to find 60 votes for a single piece of legislation. If Republicans regain the Senate, Democrats can filibuster conservative legislation, he said, but that won't matter much if filibuster-proof judges issue conservative rulings that have essentially the same effect. The full impact of the court's rightward turn has yet to be felt, but it's possible that, thanks to these judges, the Senate's rules are less a wall than a valve, facilitating conservative policies while blocking progressive ones. A real campaign to defend the filibuster

would include restoring the 60-vote threshold for confirmations, and to her credit, Sinema has suggested that she would be in favor of doing just that. But so far, just as she has failed to persuade many Democrats to join her in preserving the 60-vote threshold, she's failed to persuade many Republicans to join her in trying to strengthen it. In the Los Angeles Times, Jackie Colm said the legacy of the filibuster is getting uglier. That the voting rights legislation is controversial reflects how radical the Republican Party has become, Colm's wrote. Five times after the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965, Republicans voted with Democrats to reauthorize and strengthen it. Five Republican presidents, all except Donald Trump, signed the bills. 17 current Republican senators supported the most recent reauthorization, in 2006 when the Senate passed it unanimously.

But Republican support has evaporated. In 2013, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court all but gutted enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Since then, and especially since Trump's big lie claim that he was defrauded of re-election, red states have rushed to pass laws restricting access to voting, more in 2021 than any time in the past decade, Combs said. But there is no bipartisanship in today's Senate, which, more broadly, is all the more reason to eliminate the filibuster for the sake of democracy. Manchin says the threat of a filibuster encourages the parties to compromise, yet the voting rights bill was his compromise and he could find just one Republican supporter.

Because of the filibuster rule, he needed 10. The senator also gets the history wrong, telling reporters that the filibuster has been the tradition of the Senate from its start. Wrong. Filibusters date to the mid-1800s and for more than a century were mostly used to thwart anti-slavery, anti-lynching, and civil rights bills. Some tradition. Eugene Robinson said Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican from Kentucky, is up for hypocrite of the year. If McConnell wants to blame someone for destroying whatever bipartisan hands-across-the-aisle comedy the Senate might have once had, he need only look in the mirror. In his years as Majority Leader, McConnell flagrantly broke Senate tradition, and his own word, to achieve the political outcomes he wanted, Robinson said. Most notably, look at the fact that Attorney General Merrick Garland should not be running

the Justice Department. He should be sitting on the Supreme Court, and would be if McConnell actually believed his own pious pronouncements about how the Senate is supposed to work. On the specious grounds that the nomination had come too close to a presidential election, there were eight months left before voters went to the polls, McConnell refused to even grant Garland a hearing, let alone a vote. Surely then, McConnell's too-close-to-an-election rule had to apply when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, since less than two months remained before a presidential vote. But McConnell, in a fashion that can only be called shameless, pushed the right are saying, and that brings us to my take.

So I'm not sure I've ever really been more torn about an issue. Every time Tangle covers the filibuster, I have to admit that I've waffled and don't know where I land or announce that I've changed my position. Once again, I'm left tied in knots. The first and most critical thing here is that the Senate is already dysfunctional to the point of absurdity. Traditionalists who lament this change and still proclaim it the greatest deliberative body of the world, should be identified as nothing short of delusional or self-aggrandizing. Remember, what Republicans are currently using the filibuster to do is prevent debate on legislation. Not the passage of it, but the actual debate. They are outright avoiding an argument and a vote, the very job we pay them to do. McConnell and company are also as shameless as

Robinson says they are. Senate tradition does not involve refusing to vote on the Supreme Court nominee for eight months or promising to make presidents of another party a failure or threatening to grind Congress to a complete halt when you don't get what you want, all of which McConnell has done very publicly. He's a pious traditionalist when it serves him and an unrelenting partisan hypocrite when it doesn't. He's also not the only hypocrite here. Senator Tom Cotton, the Republican from Arkansas, illustrated this in compelling fashion by delivering a riveting speech in defense of the filibuster to the Senate last week, only to reveal at the end that it was a word-for-word speech from Senator Chuck Schumer, who had delivered it to the Senate just a few years ago. Schumer, of course, is now the Democrat leading the cause to end the filibuster. Democrats should know this,

but somehow they don't yet, that the filibuster is not their problem. They had only a 50-vote threshold to pass their reconciliation legislation, and they couldn't do it. They might have 50 votes to pass their voting rights legislation, but that is anything but clear, and it's irrelevant until they end the filibuster rules, which they also don't have 50 votes to do. All the crowing in the world about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema doesn't change the fact that those could both be, and perhaps in the near future will be, Republican-held seats. Democrats are lucky to have them, however much they want to blame them for being bulwarks against their agenda now. What I can't get my head around is how Democrats have convinced themselves abolishing the filibuster would be good for them. I think it would be a cataclysmic disaster for progressive causes they

claim to care about. The central argument is that if Democrats don't act, statewide Republican legislation will curtail voting rights and will prevent Democrats from winning future elections by suppressing minority voters who make up much of their base. But Democrats lost to Donald Trump in 2016 without any of the legislation they say is motivating them now. The problem for their future prospects of power runs a lot deeper than voter suppression. Besides, even if they were to push through a nationalization of mail-in voting, which I support, same-day registration, which I support, online voter registration, which I oppose, a weakened standard for voter ID laws, which I'm torn on,

and 15 days of early voting, which I support, Republicans would simply undo it the next time they had a 50-vote majority and a vice president in the White House. And trust me, Democrats passing a voting rights bill is not going to keep Republicans from winning future elections. You can take that to the bank. So, what happens then? What happens if Trump wins in 2024 with a split Senate, the Supreme Court, and no filibuster?

Democrats will watch as billions go to a border wall, environmental protections get thrown out, abortion is made illegal nationally, the regulatory state gets torn to pieces, the Affordable Care Act would be torn down or cut, Planned Parenthood would be defunded, Social Security and Medicare would be reformed or privatized, and for four years Republicans would confirm every open judicial seat at the federal level and in the Supreme Court that they wanted. And that's just the obvious stuff they would do. Again, the difficult part here is I do believe Republicans at the state level are threatening democracy with restrictive, illegitimate, and nonsensical voting laws meant to preserve their power or give more power to partisan hacks. I also think the Senate is already dysfunctional, and Republicans will at least consider abolishing the filibuster the next time they're in the majority, too. And I think it's shameful that conservatives have abandoned the Voting Rights Act, while I see a lot of upside to many of Democrats' voting rights proposals. All of that is true. All of the arguments about the voting rights bills are true.

I believe the left side on that. And, perhaps, the filibuster is already dead. Maybe it's just a matter of who will finish the job. But, if I were a Democratic senator, I wouldn't want it on my record. And I imagine the ones who do will end up regretting it immensely in the very near future. All right, so that's my take on today's issue. That brings us to our reader question, which we are skipping today because our main topic took up a lot of space, but a quick reminder, if you want to write in and ask a question in the newsletter, you can do that just by emailing me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C at readtangle.com, or just replying to a newsletter goes straight to my inbox.

All right, so that brings us to our story that matters for today. What constitutes being fully vaccinated? That question is percolating through the Centers for Disease Control and other businesses as the prevalence and importance of booster shots continues to rise. So far, the CDC is resisting changing its definition of fully vaccinated to include a booster shot, but some businesses and colleges aren't waiting for them and have already updated their own definitions. Complicating matters further, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla suggested this week that an annual COVID-19 vaccine would be preferable over a frequent booster shot. Axios has the story. There's a link to it in today's newsletter. All right, that brings us to our numbers section. 161 is the number of carve-outs created to the

filibuster between 1969 and 2014. 67 is the supermajority threshold for many Senate actions until 1975 when it was lowered to 60 votes. Approximately 34% is the percentage of Americans who approve of the filibuster when it is described as a procedure used in the Senate to block a bill from being put to a vote until a supermajority of 60 senators agree to end debate. 34% is the percentage of Americans who disapprove of the filibuster when it's described in that way. That's 34 against 34. 33% is the percentage of Americans who say they have no opinion when they hear that description. All right, finally, our have a nice day story. I really love this one. I don't know

about you, but I have been getting a lot of spam calls recently. Usually, though, the spammers are hoping to hit the jackpot by targeting an elderly individual and convincing them to hand over some kind of sensitive information like online logins to their banking accounts or money or some other info. When one of these scammers recently got a 73-year-old grandmother on the phone, they thought they'd hit the jackpot. They told her it was their grandson calling and he needed $8,000 to post bail for a drunken driving charge. but Jean, a Long Island woman, knew that her grandson wasn't yet old enough to drive. Instead, she played along, luring the scammers into a trap

where they were arrested by the Nassau County Police Department. The Washington Post has all the details in today's newsletter. All right, everybody, that is it for our podcast today. As always, if you want to support our work you can give us a five-star rating spread the word to friends click any of the links in the episode description to become a monthly supporter or a subscriber to tangle in the meantime we hope to see you tomorrow have a good one. for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time.