Save the Filibuster – And More

Americans must prevail on those in the Senate to live up to their oath, protect the integrity of our process, preserve the filibuster, leave states’ rights alone, and stop edging toward court-packing.

Killing the Senate’s filibuster “just once” – ending century-old protection against single-party dominance – is like saying you are just “a little pregnant.”  If you are, you are. If you kill the filibuster, it is over, deed is done, socialists win. That is why Americans must protect the filibuster.

Senate Democrats – urged by Biden – want to push the Socialist “Build Back Better” debacle, an unaffordable, unsupportable concentration of power, by 51 votes. Two Democratic Senators are stopping that perversion of power. 

To their credit, Senators Joe Manchin (-WVA) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are standing strong, despite personal attacks, political vilification, physical threats, homes surrounded, being tailed into toilets, and Democrat-driven harassment. They are proving integrity lives with courage.

Meantime, Senate and House Democrat leaders are turning up the heat on those two, plus all Republicans and most of the country, which disfavors abandoning this historic procedure. 

By holding onto this parliamentary tool, requiring a cloture vote of 60 for big legislation, Manchin, Sinema, and Senate Republicans honor our past and assure we are a nation of laws.

Every attempt to intimidate, corner, coerce, and get these two Democrats to cave, has been met with stronger attestations to their integrity, respect for the law, unwillingness to be coerced. 

Early 2022 will be the major test. Senate Majority Leader Schumer, and his partisan leadership team, have made clear that they aim to win, beat the holdouts, end the filibuster, and grab the power.

Schumer has indicated that even if not used for “Build Back Better,” he will try to end it to stack “voting rights” legislation, put a federal end to things like voter identification, then push mail-in ballots, with online, underage, felon registration, usurping states’ rights over electoral integrity.

Average Americans, especially those who prize process, stability, order, tradition, and predictability in legislative and electoral priority setting, should be siding with the Democrat holdouts and Republicans who – in past cycles – could have ended the filibuster but did not.

Just as Democrats talk of “packing” the Supreme Court with partisans to twist the judicial process for political ends, like holding onto a fiction that abortion is in the Constitution and Second Amendment rights are not, they threaten the filibusters process.

The truth is that democracy – making laws in a republic – is messy. What keeps the mess from getting out of control, turning into betrayal of public trust, violence, socialist, anti-constitutional mayhem, is a degree of reverence for due process, history’s lessons, and existing procedures.

Americans must prevail on those in the Senate to live up to their oath, protect the integrity of our process, preserve the filibuster, leave states’ rights alone, and stop edging toward court-packing.

If pressure on the two courageous holdout senators continues, complete with behind-the-scenes coercion, maybe it is time for the Republican leadership to offer both committee leadership posts, no preconditions, if they want to switch parties. That would save the filibuster, slow the run-a-muck train, and change Senate dynamics in a breathtaking way. Maybe it is time.