FILI-BUST-IT, CHUCK!
Liberals push Schumer to change Senate rules, pass elex reform
WASHINGTON — If Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wants to stop a wave of new racist voting laws — or pass any more of President Biden’s agenda — he must nuke the old-school Senate filibuster rule that protected race-based laws in America for generations, progressive groups are demanding in a new push aimed at the Senate majority leader.
Starting Friday, nearly 150 organizations from around the country are signing onto a letter being delivered to the New York Democrat saying that he needs to end the filibuster and pass sweeping election law reforms that have passed the House.
The reforms, contained in the For the People Act, would overhaul everything from election financing and gerrymandering rules to laws governing how states must conduct their balloting. The last part is crucial, says the letter, which the Daily News obtained before its public release.
“The filibuster has a long history of being used to block voting rights, civil rights, and democracy-protecting bills like the For the People Act. In fact, for most of Senate history, this was the filibuster’s primary purpose,” said the letter, organized by the group Fix Our Senate. “The filibuster prevented the passage of over 200 anti-lynching bills over the years.”
It cites hundreds of new bills — and laws like new voting restrictions passed in Georgia — advancing in dozens of states that voting rights activists say would deliberately disenfranchise Black and Brown voters.
The For the People Act would short-circuit many of them, but in the Senate, any single lawmaker can block almost any bill unless 60 of the 100 senators vote to move ahead. All Senate Republicans oppose the measure, and would surely filibuster it, using a rule that advocates note is infamously linked to Southern senators who used it to block civil rights progress for more than 100 years.
Democrats are especially concerned now because Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, used the tactic to stymie much of then-President Barack Obama’s agenda.
With the current Senate split 50-50, there is little chance Democrats can advance priorities that are popular but have become increasingly partisan in Congress, such as improving voting rights, curbing gun violence and confronting climate change.
“Senate Democrats will soon face a choice: Protect our democracy and pass the For the People Act, or protect the filibuster — an outdated and abused ‘Jim Crow relic’ that deserves to be tossed into the dustbin of history,” the letter to Schumer says.
The push comes just two days after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said in a Washington Post opinion piece that he would never go along with changing Senate rules to overcome GOP obstacles.
“There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster,” Manchin wrote. “The time has come to end these political games, and to usher [in] a new era of bipartisanship.”
Schumer (photo) would need every Democrat to back the rule change. One signer on the letter, however, thought most West Virginians don’t really care about or understand the filibuster, and would prefer good laws to pass.
“They understand and experience in their own lives whether or not government is adequately taking on the problems that they face,” said Stand Up America’s Christina Harvey, who was raised in Manchin’s state. “The Senate simply cannot do that with the filibuster intact.”
Eli Zupnick, a longtime Senate aide who now works for Fix Our Senate, predicted Republicans will give Manchin — and fellow filibuster backer Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — reason to change his mind by repeating McConnell’s blockades of the early Obama years.
“He’s gonna try to work with Republicans,” Zupnick said. “If he can find 10 Republicans to sign on to meaningful democracy reforms, voting rights protections and campaign finance reform, then great, but he’s not going to . ... Then it becomes a very different situation.”
Democrats, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House for the first time since 2010, also face political peril if they let Republicans blockade their agenda, the advocates said.
“Democrats will be held accountable for the next two years, as they should — that was the lesson we learned in 2009 and 2010,” Zupnick said. “It’s the lesson that McConnell learned in 2009, 2010.”
Schumer said before the Easter break that he would bring the For the People Act up for a vote in the Senate, likely this month or in May. “Everything is on the table ... bold action is imperative.”