Kamala Harris is making one of the most dangerous proclamations in modern American politics.
On Tuesday, Harris made clear her most radical proposition. She was asked about killing the filibuster, and she replied:
I’ve been very clear, I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe, and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.
It’s not even clear whether Congress has the authority to do that. If you’re talking about an interstate crime, then perhaps. However, if you’re talking about an intrastate crime — which is, for example, what criminalizing late-term abortion in many states does — it’s not clear that the federal government has the authority to simply reinstate Roe v. Wade by fiat of Congress.
But that’s not the salient point. The salient point is that she wants to kill the filibuster.
For those who are unfamiliar with the legal jargon, the filibuster is, effectively, a 60-vote threshold to pass controversial legislation in Congress. There are some work-arounds; there are some financial work-arounds. For example, with a budget bill, a process called budget sequestration exists in which 51 votes can be used to trump the filibuster. But the filibuster tries to guarantee there is widespread agreement about a policy before it passes.
It made a big difference with Obamacare. The Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate thanks to a rigged race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman in Minnesota that achieved a 60th vote for them and allowed Obamacare to pass with 60 votes. The Democrats overcame the filibuster.
The filibuster has usually been applied to a wide variety of circumstances, and Democrats have played around with it. For a while, they used the filibuster against judicial nominees.
But that turned out not to be a good idea. So then they killed the filibuster for judicial nominees when it was on their side. That allowed Mitch McConnell to put in place a bunch of federal justices and federal judges who are on the conservative side of the aisle in terms of originalism.
The bottom line is this: The filibuster is the slow-down process available in Congress to maintain the constitutional idea there ought to be broad-scale agreement on major shifts in American policy that require 60 votes in order to move forward.
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The filibuster can be changed. It’s a rule, not a constitutional provision, but it has become somewhat of a last resort of bipartisanship in Congress. As the administrative state has grown, we’ve changed the constitutional rules, and the scope of the federal government has grown. There have been all sorts of checks and balances in the original constitutional structure against Congress moving rapidly in really broad ways; we have had a Congress of delegated powers. If you weren’t acting within the delegated powers, the states wouldn’t pay attention to you or the Supreme Court would strike it down.
And then over the course of the 20th century, the executive branch started to assume extraordinary functions that really belonged to the legislature. They would make massive moves through regulation.
Congress expanded its purview to include pretty much everything that “affected interstate commerce.” And the Supreme Court, backed by the Left, effectively decided it was going to allow Congress to usurp all of that authority. As the authority of the federal Congress increased, the filibuster became the brake on that process.
You could overcome it. There was an attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act and that failed. There have been many attempts to filibuster particular acts of Congress, and those filibusters have failed.
However, the general standard has been that for a big change in American public life, you had to at least overcome a filibuster; you had to show that the American people writ large have elected people who, broadly speaking, agreed with one another.
That has been a provision that has kept the United States in a state of semi-solidity with regard to its politics for a long time. Incrementalism is one of the effects of the filibuster. You have to move slower than you otherwise would. Otherwise, this government would look very much like the parliamentary government that you see in Europe, where if one side takes the majority, they simply put in place everything they want.
Then, the other side comes back in and puts in place everything they want, and policy swivels wildly from side to side.
The United States is not built for that. It was built for gridlock. The filibuster is an element of that gridlock. But Harris wanting to kill the filibuster with regard to Roe v. Wade basically means she wants to kill the filibuster with regard to everything.
If Democrats take the House, the Senate, and the presidency, and they kill the filibuster, America will end up with a permanent rigging of the American government on behalf of Democrats.
That is the goal. That is why this is so radical.
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I promise you, with 51 votes, Democrats will kill the filibuster, and then they will attempt to create two new states through congressional fiat. They’ll create a state of Washington, D.C., which will have two permanent Democratic senators, thus permanently shifting the balance of power in the Senate on behalf of Democrats. They’ll also presumably add Puerto Rico, which would also likely have two Democratic senators, as a state represented in the United States Senate.
Historically speaking, when states were added to the federal government, to the federal Senate, typically a state was added that was a Democrat state and one that was a Republican state. Alaska and Hawaii entered the union at about the same time because Alaska was a Democrat state and Hawaii was a Republican state. Now, of course, they have switched places.
But what Democrats want to do is add four seats to the Senate and thereby guarantee themselves a permanent working majority. And having killed the filibuster, they could then do whatever they want.
They could pack the Supreme Court. They could limit jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. They could run roughshod over all the checks and balances.
This has been a progressive Democratic goal since the beginning of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson openly talked about how the Constitution was basically a document written by befuddled, dead white men in order to stop the march of progress, when what was really needed was a powerful centralized government located in the presidency in order to ram through the change needed.
That’s what Democrats want. Democrats want to get rid of the checks and balances. That is their goal.
When people say that this election really, really matters, it wouldn’t matter so much if Democrats weren’t screwing around with the mechanisms of government itself.
If the rules of the game are permanently rigged in favor of one side, the Republic is over.
It sounds dull and dry when Harris says, “I’ll ditch the filibuster.” Tense, dull, and dry.
But it is not dull and dry.
If Democrats get rid of the Senate filibuster, if Democrats have a majority in the House and the Senate, and if Harris becomes the president, it means the end of the current functioning of the United States government and the entry into an imperial period of complete Democratic dominance.
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