[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 7 (Tuesday, January 11, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S135-S139]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Filibuster
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, my friend Senator Schumer, and some of my
Democratic friends would like to change one of the enduring
institutions of this institution. They want to get rid of the
filibuster--and I call it the 60-vote threshold.
And a reasonable person might ask: Well, why not? Institutions change
all the time. Change is the law of life. I will tell you why not. I
want you to hear these words of wisdom:
We are on the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional
crisis--
Getting rid of the filibuster.
the checks and balances which have been at the core of this
Republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option--
Getting rid of the filibuster.
the checks and balances which say if you get 51 percent of
the vote you do not get your way 100 percent of the time--
If you get 51 percent of the vote, you do not get your way 100
percent of the time in the U.S. Senate--
that is what we call abuse of power. There is, unfortunately,
a whiff of extremism in the air.
Those are words of wisdom by Senator Chuck Schumer, May 18, 2005.
If we change the 60-vote threshold, if we change this institution
which is part of the institution of the U.S. Senate, it will gut this
body like a fish--like a fish. And everybody in this body knows that if
that is accomplished, our institution will look like a scene out of
``Mad Max.''
America is a--God, what a wonderful place. It is a big, wide, open,
diverse, sometimes dysfunctional, oftentimes imperfect, but good
country with good people in it. And I want to emphasize the diversity
part. What constitutes the good life in my State may not constitute the
good life in Connecticut or in California or in Florida or in Maine.
[[Page S136]]
And that is one of the reasons that we have and have had the
institution of the 60-vote threshold. If you are going to make a law
that is going to impact the entirety of this big, wide, open, diverse
country, then you ought to have 60 votes because if you only have 51
votes, 51 percent of the vote does not get your way 100 percent of the
time.
It has worked for a long time.
Now, I don't want to sound like I am lecturing, because I get it. I
get it. I get that my Democratic friends and some of my Republican
friends, who, frankly, are probably thinking about this--but I get that
my Democratic friends want to--that they want to serve their President.
We all want to serve our President. But you especially want to serve
your President when the President is of your own party.
I remember when President Trump--now like President Biden--said:
Change the filibuster. Get rid of it. I can't get my bills passed.
We said no. And by ``we,'' I mean Republicans and Democrats. Here is
the letter right here. It was led by Senator Collins, a Republican, and
Senator Chris Coons. I signed it. We said no.
Now President Biden wants to do the same thing. That is what
Presidents do. They try to pass their bills. So I get it.
To my Democratic colleagues and any Republican colleagues who are
thinking about voting for Senator Schumer's change of heart, I want to
tell them: I get it too. I get it. I know the frustration. I have felt
it. I have talked about it on this floor before.
You know, we all come up here for one reason: to make this country
better. And we are ready to go to work, and we want to debate, and we
want to decide. We didn't come up here for delay. We didn't come up
here for stultification. So I get it. I get the frustration. But you
don't satisfy those aims by not following these words of wisdom by
Senator Schumer.
Now, once passions have cooled, I don't want my words to be construed
as an assertion that everything about our body is perfect. There are
changes, once passions have cooled and the filibuster is intact, the
60-vote threshold is intact--I use ``60-vote threshold'' because
``filibuster'' to some has negative connotations, and it is a positive
rule, not a negative rule. But once passions have cooled, there are a
lot of questions that we need to sit down and talk about, and if my
Democratic friends want to talk about them, I will be there. Call the
meeting. I will pounce on it like a ninja.
I mean, there are questions that we need to be asking ourselves about
this body; how we can make it better. Do we give our majority leader
too much authority? It is not personal. Do we give our minority leader
too much authority? It is not personal, but that is a fair question.
Every Member of this body knows about the diminution of our committee
system. Why do we even have committees anymore, for God's sake? I mean,
you go work your committee, and you get a bill out, and it is a
bipartisan bill, and you are feeling all toasty and ready to go, and
you learn pretty quick around this place that doesn't matter. It is
probably dead as fried chicken if the majority leader doesn't want to
bring it up. And that is true whether the majority leader is Republican
or Democrat. We need to have an honest conversation about the
diminution of the committee process.
Our amendment rules. My God, there is not a single Member of this
body who really understands those rules. I mean, if you ask--pick 10
Senators at random and say: Tell me the truth, now. Do you understand
the rules of the Senate about how to offer an amendment? Nine out of
ten will tell you no, and the tenth is lying. We ought to have an
amendment process that looks like somebody designed it on purpose, and
we don't. We ought to talk about that.
We ought to talk about the fact that this body--it didn't happen just
yesterday--has ceded an enormous amount of our power, under a
Madisonian system of separation of powers, to the executive branch and
to the administrative staff.
After this is over, if any of my Democratic friends want to have that
talk and see if we can't come up with a way to improve this body and
ask some hard questions, I will be there happily, and I hope we can
make progress. But to my colleagues, I say: Please, please, don't do
this.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.
Mrs. FISCHER. Mr. President, President Biden wants to pass a new New
Deal. In fact, in some ways, the reckless spending the President is
pushing for actually dwarfs the New Deal. But Joe Biden is not FDR, and
we are not living in the Great Depression. The New Deal passed the
House and the Senate on the back of huge Democratic supermajorities.
Today, Americans have elected a 50-50 Senate and a razor-thin
Democratic majority in the House. The American people voted for
bipartisanship and compromise in the U.S. Congress, not a blanket
mandate for progressives to reorganize American life as they see fit.
But some Democrats in Congress seem to think they did.
Because they haven't reached out to Republicans to work together on
important issues, they haven't been able to pass their Build Back
Better plan, so they have turned their attention to another kind of
Federal Government overreach: overhauling the way our country runs
elections. Their argument is that lawmakers in red States are trying to
make it harder for people to vote, and so it is necessary for
Washington Democrats to take over election administration in all 50
States.
One important point: The first part of that is simply not true. The
right to vote is not under assault. According to Pew Research, 94
percent of Americans believe that voting is easy. In my home State of
Nebraska, we achieved a record 76 percent voter turnout in the 2020
election, in the middle of a pandemic, because of all the different
ways that my State made it easier for Nebraskans to vote, including
expanded early voting and no-excuse absentee voting. But Democrats
still want to pass a Federal takeover of elections.
Because the rules don't allow them to pass every single law they
would like to in a 50-50 Senate, many of my Democrat colleagues are
flip-flopping to oppose the filibuster. President Biden, who defended
the filibuster during his nearly 40 years in the Senate, now wants a
special carve-out for Democrats' election takeover. But who says it is
going to stop there? The majority leader said in 2005, when Democrats
were in the minority, that doing away with the filibuster would ``wash
away 200 years of history'' and mean ``doomsday for democracy.'' Today,
no one is pushing harder to end it than he is. And Democrats were
perfectly happy to use the filibuster hundreds of times during the 4
years of the Trump Presidency, when the majority leader was the
minority leader and Republicans had even larger majorities in Congress.
This isn't some debate about some arcane Senate rule. This is about
protecting the rights of the minority in our democracy. This is about
providing stability and certainty to our people. If the majority is
able to constantly push through their views and policy every few years,
drastic swings in policy will take place. Tax policy, social policy,
health policy, foreign policy, defense policy--the laws of the United
States will start just to whip back and forth, following where the
power lies in this Chamber, and those shifts will weaken our Nation
both here at home and abroad.
In 2017, the senior Senator from Maine and the junior Senator from
Delaware led a bipartisan letter urging Senate leadership to preserve
the 60-vote threshold for legislation.
While I appreciate their efforts, I did not sign that letter. I was
concerned that many Democrats only signed it because they were afraid
the GOP--that Republicans were going to end the filibuster. I believed
that many of my Democratic colleagues would soon turn against the
letter's own arguments and they would go back on their word. I believed
that because a few years earlier, I had listened to reasons they gave
for changing the executive filibuster for Presidential nominations when
they
[[Page S137]]
were in the majority, and I had then watched them reverse those
positions when they were back in the minority. I felt they would flip
again for political reasons as soon as they returned to the majority.
Of the 61 Senators who did sign that letter, 30 were Democrats, 28
are still in office, and I am sorry to say that they have proved me
right. But when Republicans were in the majority, we said we wouldn't
abolish the legislative filibuster, and we have kept our word.
The truth is that some of my Democratic colleagues want to remake the
American system only in their own image, not considering the views of
about half of our citizens. To do that, they have to take an ax to the
filibuster. But I urge them to think about the consequences their
actions may have.
Without the filibuster, any Senate majority would be free to ignore
the other side to pass their own agenda. Bipartisanship? Well, it would
become a relic of the past. I know that Democrats don't want that to
happen. I don't want it to happen, either, and that is why I have
consistently supported the Senate filibuster no matter who is in power.
I urge my colleagues to think beyond the passions of the moment and
to do what is best for this country in the long term: Leave the
filibuster in place. Democrats may want to use it again as soon as next
year.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
Mr. YOUNG. Mr. President, in a letter written in 1789, Thomas
Jefferson declared that the ``earth belongs to the living, not the
dead.'' Relationships between generations, he explained, are but that
of a distant set of independent nations.
Mr. President, I don't know how many of my Democratic colleagues
still admire Mr. Jefferson, but they are certainly taking his words to
heart. There is little concern on one side of this Chamber about the
impact of our actions beyond our own time here. There is a belief that
the importance of this hour's partisan ambitions outweighs the value of
centuries-old institutions.
Abandoning the 60-vote threshold in order to seize control of
America's elections isn't simply shortsighted, it is clueless. It is
the exact opposite of what the people who sent us here want.
Back home in Indiana, I hear from anxious Hoosiers because these are
anxious times. I know what is on their minds--rising inflation, the
cost of putting food on their table and gas in their tanks. I hear from
them about paying to heat their homes. Many are struggling to pay next
month's rent.
They are tired of and still worried about a pandemic that President
Biden promised to shut down, and they are angry. Many are angry about a
southern border that this President has left wide open.
In the middle of all this--an affordability crisis, an ongoing
pandemic, a broken border--changing the Senate rules to nationalize
Indiana's elections, to repeal popular voter ID laws, to use tax
dollars to fund political campaigns are not high among Hoosier
priorities or the priorities of the American people.
Do you know what is, though? Congress coming together, finding
compromise, actually addressing, in a collective way, our shared
national challenges. It is one of the most widely ignored messages of
the last election. Every one of my colleagues should take note. If
America wanted a radical, extreme, partisan set of changes put forward,
they wouldn't have evenly divided the U.S. Senate. Believe it or not,
they want us to collaborate, and we have shown them we are capable of
doing that.
Let me remind my colleagues, we formed a united front against China
when it comes to competitiveness and trade policy. We helped American
workers and small businesses hurt by the pandemic. We gave our troops a
pay raise. Now, these and so many other achievements are really
important. They are achievements that will benefit Americans now and in
the years to come. We need to do more working together.
Now, look, I have been around here long enough. I understand that my
Democratic colleagues are frustrated. I say to my colleagues, you have
had less success with your reckless multitrillion-dollar social
spending bill than you would like. I understand that. Your proposal to
federalize and politicize American elections has been a tough sell. I
understand that.
As a result, America's democracy, we are told, is in peril, and the
only way to save it is to kill the 60-vote threshold. But the 60-vote
threshold is not the source of our Nation's dysfunction. I say to my
colleagues, your Democratic radical agenda is driving much of the
angst, the anxiety, and the frustration among the American people. The
so-called legislative filibuster is not a threat to our democracy;
ending it is.
My advice is to rethink your priorities. If you want to end gridlock,
do the difficult work of actually building coalitions of support:
introduce bills to be referred to the committees of jurisdiction that
Republicans can actually vote for, allow for an open amendment process
as we did with the China bill.
Now, this is the entire point of the 60-vote threshold. It is a
forcing mechanism, during fraught times like these, that gives the
minority a say in the process. It forces majorities to find ways to
compromise. It incentivizes bipartisan collaboration among Senators
representing diverse parts of our Nation with differing values,
differing priorities. Americans want us to go through this hard work of
finding common ground, of reconciling our differences. That is our job.
And, yes, it is an obstacle to simple majority rule. It is an obstacle
to one party--either party--razing our institutions by the slimmest of
margins. But need I remind my colleagues, this is not a direct
democracy, this is a republican--small ``r''--form of government.
Frustrating as it may be, the filibuster, in its way, is a source of
and sometimes the source of order and even unity in Congress.
Now, if you think our current political division is troubling,
colleagues, torch the filibuster, foist your unpopular partisan
priorities on all Americans, and then check the health of our
democracy. Pour gasoline on this raging fire. Don't be shocked by its
sorry state after you do so.
I will close with a familiar caveat. Majorities, no matter their
size, never endure. Looked at in the light of human history, all of us,
even the most long-tenured, are here for a little more than a hiccup in
time. Yes, what one party sows today, the other will of course reap
tomorrow. Clearing the path for every grandly ambitious Democratic
priority aimed at reshaping our country would only clear the way for a
future Republican effort to repeal and replace it with one of our own,
with even greater scale.
Beyond this, though, as much as I admire Thomas Jefferson, I do not
believe that the Earth belongs only to the living. No. Citizens place
both their trust and their destiny in a set of shared institutions. In
America, this forms a compact that stretches across centuries and
generations. It includes those in the grave and those yet unborn. And
for the moment, we--Republicans, Democrats, Independents--we are its
custodians.
If we give in to temporary passions, if we tear our institutions to
shreds rather than work through them to serve the people, rewriting the
rules when we don't win the game, we are failing in our jobs. We are
breaking that compact.
So, as I said in my first speech on this floor, standing right over
there--and I will repeat it until my last speech--we are, above all
else, the custodians of the common good--the common good. Remember
that, colleagues, before you take a hammer to one of the Senate's
signature means of advancing it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.
Mr. BOOZMAN. Mr. President, I have had the privilege of serving
Arkansans in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives in both
the majority and minority. So I know how unmistakably important it is
to protect the rights of the minority in the interest of individual
States--especially those like Arkansas that are more rural and less
populated.
That is what our country's Founders had in mind when they designed
the
[[Page S138]]
Senate. The Senate is sometimes referred to as ``the world's greatest
deliberative body''--the key word being ``deliberative.''
It is not crafted to quickly approve or reject legislation passed by
the House as a mere formality. Instead, it offers equal representation
to each State and a procedural process that incentivizes and rewards
consensus.
Allowing individual Senators to secure and, just as importantly, stop
dramatic policy changes is what sets this body apart. The filibuster
provides each of us leverage that must be preserved.
Unfortunately, many of our colleagues on the other side have
succumbed to shortsighted political calculations and are endorsing
changing the Senate's rules in order to jam through their legislative
priorities.
However, the ability to prevent radical, swift, and far-reaching
changes that would surely sow confusion and uncertainty is invaluable.
As such, I intend to continue protecting the filibuster.
Our Democratic friends, with some exceptions, are now abandoning
their previous support for the filibuster, which, while in the
minority, they argued was indispensable and utilized with zeal to great
effect.
Even President Biden, who enjoyed a long career in the Senate and
exercised his right to stop or hamper legislation and nominees he had
concerns with, has decided his decades-long embrace of the filibuster
is no match for the loudest voices in his party demanding to discard
it.
The justifications all point in one direction: keeping power.
Today, the Biden administration and Senate Democrats believe a
supposed threat to our democracy requires abandoning the minority
party's ability to pump the brakes on the excesses of one-party control
in Washington.
Worse, the grave threat to the fabric of our society and experiment
in self-government they are touting amounts to nothing more than duly
elected State legislatures reining in some of the most overly
accommodating voting policies that were enacted during the COVID-19
pandemic: things like reasonable limits on absentee voting, commonsense
registration rules, and practical deadlines.
Instead, they want to bring the full weight of the Federal Government
down on States like Arkansas that have sought to protect election
integrity by instituting voter ID, blocking ballot harvesting, or
ensuring the accuracy of voter rolls.
These commonsense safeguards are not an existential threat to our
Nation, nor do they warrant breaking the Senate and being
unconstitutionally superseded.
It is concerning that most Members of the majority are now singing
quite a different tune when it comes to tinkering with longstanding
rules of the Senate to achieve partisan ends.
I think it is important to applaud our colleagues on the other side
of the aisle who remain committed to protecting the filibuster and, by
extension, the very integrity of this institution. They have come under
intense pressure. Yet I recognize and they recognize how important this
tool is, the harm that would come from abandoning or undermining it,
and that majorities in the Senate do not last forever.
Should the Senate go down this path, it would result in exceedingly
scorched Earth, where consensus is even harder to find and shifting
majorities implement drastic policy transformations when a President is
willing to rubberstamp whatever Congress approves.
I have opposed this ill-advised tactic in the face of opposition from
my own side of the aisle in the past and understand it is not always an
easy thing to do.
My colleagues and I will not acquiesce on this question, and I hope
the Senate can move on, in a bipartisan way, to addressing the
challenges that our country is facing and finding solutions that
actually help Americans facing real-world problems instead of spending
any more time on partisan threats that upend this body's traditions
that would ultimately diminish its unique and necessary place within a
government that is truly the envy of the world.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to join my
distinguished colleague from Arkansas. I agree with everything that he
has said about this latest power grab by the Democrats in the U.S.
Senate--of their effort to change the rules, to rig the rules, of
course, through an agenda which I see, as do so many Americans, as
radical and extreme and dangerous and scary. What the Democrats are
proposing right here is to muzzle the voices of half of the country.
So why are they doing this? Well, it really has nothing to do with
the priorities that are the priorities of the folks from my home State
of Wyoming or from the previous speaker's home State of Arkansas or
from the next speaker's home State of West Virginia. Oh, no, it has
nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with the priorities that
the Gallup poll tells us are the concerns all around America: the
coronavirus and the crisis we face there; the crisis at the southern
border, where we are looking at almost 2 million illegal immigrants
coming into the United States; crime in the cities, with murders up
year after year and just amazingly up this year.
Then, of course, there are the raging fires of inflation, which are
cutting into people's paychecks so that money doesn't go as far. When
families in home States are looking at the fact that they are going to
be paying about $3,500 more next year than the last and the year before
that just to keep up, to maintain the quality of living, they have a
lot of concerns. What the Democrats are trying to do isn't even one of
them because the Democrats are trying to take a Federal takeover of
elections. That is what they are trying to pass. They want to cram
through a bill that they know otherwise would not pass.
So what is in the bill? Well, the Democrats want to do things like
ban voter identification. You know, in my home State of Wyoming and I
know in the previous speaker's State of Arkansas and the soon-to-be
speaker's State of West Virginia, we know that people believe, if you
want to get a ballot and if you want to vote, you should have to prove
you are who you say you are.
In the home State of the Presiding Officer and the former Presiding
Officer and in many States, if you want to go to a restaurant, you have
to show your papers to prove you were vaccinated or to go into a
building or to go to a sporting event. Yet the Democrats are proposing
that you shouldn't have to show anything to prove you even are who you
say you are in order to vote.
What about the incumbents who want to vote for this thing? Oh, did we
mention there are taxpayer dollars going to incumbent Members of
Congress to pay for their political campaigns? No wonder so many of the
Democrats have voted for this. It is money into their own pockets.
The Democrats want Washington, DC, to micromanage elections across
the country. They want to rig the rules of the Senate so they can enact
this unpopular bill to take over elections in America.
The American people aren't asking for this. This recent Gallup poll
that I alluded to asked people what they thought was the most important
issue facing the country. Voting laws didn't even crack the top 20. In
a list of 23, it came in as 23rd. It is the Democrats' No. 1 priority,
and it is the last priority of the American public. It wasn't even an
asterisk. It didn't even get 1 percent of the vote.
If the Democrats take over the Senate to take over elections and
break the rules of the Senate, there will be no stopping them from
passing the rest of this dangerous and extreme agenda.
Democrats know that there is an election coming in November. They can
read the polls. They know it is not looking good for them. They know
there is a very unpopular President in the White House. They know that
their numbers are sinking, that their ship is sinking, and that they
will soon be in the minority in both the House and the Senate.
Frankly, the election for the Democrats in the election after that
doesn't look so good either because it only took 1 year for the people
all across the country to recognize that the current President of the
United States, Joe Biden, is both overwhelmed and ineffective as the
President of the United States. There is no denying that.
[[Page S139]]
Changing the rules, as the Democrats are proposing to do, really is
their last chance to pass their leftwing, fringe ideas. It is the last
chance to pack the Supreme Court. The Democrats in this body introduced
legislation to pack the Supreme Court, to add four Democrats to the
Court. It is the last chance to add new States to the Union. It is the
last chance to give amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. It is
the last chance before Democrats lose control of the Congress.
So why do they want to change the rules? It is because their agenda
is so unpopular with the American people. They understand, as one
Democrat said to another, that we have got to do it now because it is
our last chance to force socialism on the American people whether they
want it or not.
Instead of changing the rules, the Democrats should change their
agenda. The Democrats should focus on what the American people say is
important to them. It is our constituents who determine what is
important to them. They are to communicate it to us. We are to
represent them.
What is important to them? Well, it is getting ahead of the
coronavirus, it is securing the border, and it is really to stop adding
fuel to the fire of inflation when paychecks can't keep up with the
costs of gas and groceries.
A Wall Street Journal story yesterday was about all of the Democrats
who signed a letter saying: money from New England, Members of this
body--they said energy costs are so high, the government should do
something about it. This is after Joe Biden kills the Keystone XL
Pipeline and stops oil and gas exploration, and their own home States
are blocking pipelines which could carry inexpensive energy to the
people who live there. Yet the Democrats want the government to do
more. The government has done enough damage already.
There are lots of ideas that could pass the Senate and the House and
be signed into law that would actually help the American people. Those
are the things the American people are asking for. The American people
are not asking for a blatant Democrat power grab to force through a
very liberal agenda. People don't want to be muzzled. They don't want
to have their voices silenced. They want real solutions. They don't
want the Democrats' radical agenda.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Markey). The Senator from Connecticut.