President Biden wobbled on the filibuster, but he didn’t fall down

If you were looking for clarity about President Biden’s position on the Senate filibuster — liberal Democrats’ No. 1 Enemy at the moment — you didn’t get it at Thursday’s news conference, Biden’s first as president.

Biden was a vocal supporter of the filibuster rule when he was a lawmaker. Since then, he’s become more elusive, often avoiding comment on the issue during the campaign or hedging his bets.

On Thursday he was all over the map.

The president started by saying he’d like to return to the way things were done when he was first elected to the Senate “120 years ago” — a joke delivered in such a deadpan manner, Twitter lit up with Republicans pouncing on what they thought was a gaffe. Biden went on to explain that the filibuster used to visit the upper chamber far less frequently — between 1917 and 1971, the Senate averaged about one motion to cut off debate per year, Biden said; in 2020 alone, there were 118 cloture motions.

“It’s being abused in a gigantic way,” he said, stating the obvious.

In the year Biden cited, it was Democrats deploying the filibuster in a largely vain effort to block Republican actions — mainly on nominations, where the threshold to kill a filibuster is only 51 votes. Fewer than a dozen filibusters actually succeeded last year.

And that may explain why Republicans aren’t so hot and bothered by the filibuster. If your main goal while in power is to confirm judges while cutting tax rates and slashing entitlements (which is done through budget bills that cannot be filibustered), and to play defense against new governmental programs when you’re out of power (which typically would be subject to a filibuster), there isn’t much reason to change a system that has little to no effect on your agenda.

So what’s Biden’s preferred solution? As of Thursday it was a return to the “talking filibuster,” when opponents of a bill could only hold the Senate floor by giving endless speeches. “People got tired of talking and tired of collapsing,” Biden said. “We were able to break the filibuster, get a quorum and vote. So I strongly support moving in that direction.”

In reality, though, the talking filibuster bears little resemblance to the cinematic version in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” — or in Biden’s depiction of last century’s Senate. Under Senate rules, senators cannot vote until every member who wants to debate gets his or her chance, up to two times per legislative day. A handful of senators can’t sustain a filibuster for long, but 41 or more united in opposition can keep the talkfest going forever.

Perhaps recognizing how little his proposed solution would actually solve, Biden went on to say that he was keeping an open mind “about dealing with certain things that are just elemental to the functioning of our democracy, like the right to vote, like the basic right to vote.” Some Democrats have suggested that just as the Senate has set a 51-vote threshold for ending debate on presidential nominees, it should do so for selected types of legislation — such as voting- and civil-rights measures.

And then the president went considerably further, saying, “If we have to, if there’s complete lockdown and chaos as a consequence of the filibuster, then we’ll have to go beyond what I’m talking about.” Later, he said he agreed with President Obama’s characterization of the filibuster as a relic of the Jim Crow era — a proverbial shot across the bow.

Before anti-filibuster forces get too excited, though, Biden gave plenty of hints that he’s still looking for a middle ground — something that preserves the filibuster, but returns it to the bin of rarely used tools. For instance, he insisted that, “There’s a lot we can do while we’re talking about what we’re gonna do about the filibuster.”

Later, explaining why he wouldn’t just seek to abolish the filibuster as a legacy of segregation, he said, “Successful electoral politics is the art of the possible. Let’s figure out how we can get this done and move the direction of significantly changing the abuse of even the filibuster rule, first. … Let’s deal with the abuse first.”

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins sought to pin him down, asking, “It sounds like you’re moving closer to eliminating the filibuster. Is that correct?

“I answered your question,” he replied.

But no, he didn’t.

Jon Healey is the Los Angeles Times’ deputy editorial page editor.

©2021 Los Angeles

Times

The long history of voter suppression in Florida is a bloody one. In 1920, approximately 50 Blacks were slaughtered and the homes of 20 others were burned to the ground after violence erupted in the Central Florida town of Ocoee. The blood-spilling began after a single Black man attempted to exercise his right to vote. It was the largest electionrelated massacre in the 20th century.

Unfortunately, long after the Civil Rights Movement of the last century, long after laws better protected minorities’ voting rights — and even after Barack Obama twice carried Florida as a presidential candidate — the drive to suppress the vote has not ended.

And so it came as no surprise when Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced that despite his lauding of the 2020 election in Florida as flawless, he was pushing for a major crackdown to make voting more difficult. Parroting the line of his mentor, Donald Trump, DeSantis relied on unfounded arguments about voter fraud, while proposing a measure that would restrict voting access to populations that historically lean Democratic — and perhaps more egregiously, those that have endured a protracted and grim history of voter suppression.

Recently, several of my colleagues in the Florida Senate voted to advance Senate Bill 90, which would eliminate secure drop-off boxes for absentee ballots and require already registered voters to re-enroll more frequently for absentee ballots, among other changes. An alarming reverberation of the Georgia Legislature’s recent moves to limit early voting, and of the Republican Party’s broader reaction to the 2020 presidential and U.S. Senate races, this bill stands to impede countless citizens who want to exercise their lawful right to vote. This will affect millions of Florida voters in the 2022 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections.

Should this bill be signed into law (a likely outcome) it will augur the latest chapter in a centuries-old tug-of-war around voter disenfranchisement, particularly for Black communities. This setback comes on the heels of Florida’s 2018 passage of Amendment 4 — widely lauded for providing an avenue for formerly incarcerated Floridians, who’ve paid their literal and figurative dues, to vote. While this ballot amendment granted the franchise to returning citizens of various races, ethnicities and political stripes, the exclusion it sought to rectify was very much rooted in the systemic ostracism of Black voters.

Following Reconstruction, poll taxes, ballot-box stuffing and lynchings were among the favored tactics to suppress the Black vote in Florida, mirroring other Southern states in unleashing fear as a powerful deterrent to reaching that elusive promise of “all men are created equal.”

SB90 may be more subtle, but no less targeted in ensuring that elected officials get to choose their voters, not the other way around.

The sanctity of free and fair elections was evident to civil-rights pioneers like Florida’s own Harry T. Moore, the first NAACP official to be assassinated for his activism. Moore labored diligently throughout the 1940s to register Black voters, but recognized that numbers alone could not restore fairness to tipped scales. He compounded this granular approach with a systemic one, filing lawsuits challenging white primaries that excluded Black and Hispanic Americans from thendominant Democratic primaries in the South.

Although we stand almost 80 years removed from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned white primaries and almost 60 years from the Voting Rights Act, the passage of time has not been met by the elimination of prejudice.

In the Florida Legislature, a measure I’m sponsoring ensuring that the descendants of the Ocoee Massacre receive reparations, likely in the form of scholarships, is moving closer to passage.

The bill follows one that I successfully passed last year, ensuring that the lessons of Ocoee are written into students’ textbooks and taught in public schools throughout the state.

As a Democratic senator and a Black man, I may not be able to stop the voter suppression Republican lawmakers will ram through this year to maintain their grip on power. But I can look to a coming generation, armed with the powerful lessons of Florida’s past, to break it.

State Sen. Randolph Bracy represents Florida’s 11th District, in Central Florida, which includes Orlando.