Ruling gives bypass around filibuster
WASHINGTON — Democrats might not have the votes to gut the filibuster, but they were just handed the procedural keys to a workaround of the Senate’s delay tactic.
With a ruling Monday that Democrats can reuse this year’s budget blueprint at least once to employ the fast-track reconciliation process, Democrats can conceivably advance multiple spending and tax packages this year without a single Republican vote as long as they hold their 50 members together. It is a means of weakening the filibuster without having to take the politically charged vote to do so.
Democrats insist that they have made no decisions about how to use the tool.
But whatever strategy they employ, it is clear that the decision by the Senate parliamentarian to agree with Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader, that a 47-yearold budget provision could be used more than once in a fiscal year widens President Joe
Biden’s path to enacting his emerging infrastructure plan by shielding it from a filibuster if need be.
“I always would prefer to do legislation in a bipartisan way, but we have to get big, bold things done,” Schumer said in an interview. “And so we need to have as many options as possible if Republicans continue to obstruct.”
The filibuster — which takes 60 votes to overcome — remains an obstacle for many of the cutting-edge policies Democrats would like to enact, such as a sweeping campaign finance and voting rights measure as well as new gun laws. But if stymied by Republicans on measures that they can protect under reconciliation — which applies to policy changes that directly affect federal spending and revenues — Democrats will now have more opportunities to move ahead on their own if they choose.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader, said Democrats were being driven to twist the process by their inability to win Republican support for their plans and the fear that they will lose the majority next year.
“This is a party that is going hard left, and they are audacious, and they are ambitious, and they will bend the rules and break the rules and rewrite the rules and do everything they can to get what they want as fast as they can,” McConnell said in an interview.
Given the vast ideological differences between the two parties, many progressives have been urging Democrats to use their bare majority to take steps to weaken, if not eliminate, the filibuster so that Democrats can overwhelm Republican resistance. But a handful of Democrats — notably Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — have resisted. They argue that by requiring a supermajority, the filibuster forces bipartisan compromise, and that upending it would destroy the fabric of the Senate and its history of protecting the rights of the minority party.
But reconciliation is another matter entirely. Since the enactment of the 1974 Budget Act, both parties have used the maneuver to push a variety of tax cuts and social programs into law, often over the unified opposition of the minority party.
The process would further strengthen the hand of centrist Democrats to shape legislation, given that the party would be unable to afford any defections. Manchin, for instance, held up action on Biden’s pandemic aid plan last month because he was dissatisfied with the unemployment benefits and Democrats could not pass the measure without his vote.
Democrats were reluctant to discuss how they would employ their new power. One senior Democratic official described the ruling as an extra arrow in the majority leader’s quiver, but most likely not a cure-all to Republican resistance on a broad range of issues. The official said that options such as weakening the filibuster remain in play.