Several Senate Democrats are joining Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in her call to end the filibuster in order to pass legislation that would federalize abortion and wipe out pro-life state laws.
Nuking the filibuster would drop the 60 required votes to pass legislation in the U.S. Senate to just 51 votes, a move some Democrats told the Hill may be “worth the risk” should they maintain control of the Senate and gain control of the House and presidency in 2025.
While some Senate Democrats are wary of what Republicans could achieve without the filibuster if they were to eventually gain back control, they said lowering the threshold would enable the codification of “abortion rights” and “other key legislative priorities,” the report published on Sunday states.
“There’s real risk anytime there’s debate about rules and procedures in the Senate. It becomes very bitter,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) told the outlet. “So yes, there is risk.”
“The other problem is there’s risk in having a Senate that’s more dedicated to rules and procedures than it is to getting things done,” Welch continued. “It’s very dangerous for the Senate as an institution to simply not address extraordinarily important issues like reproductive freedom, like voting rights.”
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) agreed on potential long-term problems with scrapping the filibuster but emphasized that Democrats have no choice because the current setup is hampering their ability to enact their agenda.
“As far as I’m concerned, we should be discussing the rules going forward. We’re now in a dystopian situation in the Senate where we do very little, if any, legislating,” Durbin said.
Vice President Harris brought the filibuster debate to the forefront again after she called for its end during an appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio on last week to supposedly restore Roe v. Wade.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris said. “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.”
Her call to end the filibuster is the furthest she has gone in her pledge to federalize abortion if she is elected in November. Harris has repeatedly said she would sign legislation to restore Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court overturned in 2022, and has made killing unborn babies in abortions central to her campaign. She has repeatedly refused to cite abortion restrictions she would support and falsely claimed that abortions do not happen later in pregnancy.
Harris has previously called to end the filibuster but for a different reason. During her 2020 presidential campaign, she said she would back ending the filibuster to pass the radical Green New Deal, which is essentially a far-left socialist wishlist.
National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Chairman Steve Daines (R-MT) warned in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News in July that the Democrats have “radical” power-grabbing plans for the United States, which include ending the filibuster if they hold the majority in the upper chamber of Congress.
Daines specifically warned that ending the filibuster would allow Democrats to ram through their radical agenda, including packing the U.S. Supreme Court to 13 justices instead of nine, making Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico states to add four Democrat U.S. senators to the Senate, and conducting a federal takeover of election operations everywhere in the country.
“The consequences of losing right now are profound because, if we don’t take back the majority and the Democrats are in charge, they will blow up the filibuster,” Daines told Breitbart News D.C. Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle.
Daines continued:
That means D.C. and Puerto Rico are now states. That means four Democrat senators in perpetuity. They will also move the Supreme Court from nine to 13 Justices. They will pack the court. And last, they will pass one of their favorite bills — the left — and that’s the federal takeover of all the elections. Our Founding Fathers feared concentration of power.
That’s one of the things about the separation of powers both in terms of the three branches of government but also the separation of powers between the federal government and the states, the principles of federalism. This bill would remove any voter ID laws that states have passed. It would be all mail-in ballots. They would have cutoffs on Tuesday night on election night at maybe 8:00 p.m. and have a long tail of maybe two weeks to get all the ballots in. You can see, we lose complete control of elections, and the left does irreparable harm to this country with a power grab that would make it very difficult to ever get a center-right government elected in Washington again.
As Boyle reported, the only thing that stopped Democrats from ending the filibuster in the last two Congresses is that two senators, who now claim to be independents and have since left the Democratic Party, refused to go along with this strategy. He wrote:
Those two senators, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, are both not running for reelection this cycle. Despite leaving the Democrat Party, they did not join the Republicans and still caucus with Democrats. But, since both are leaving the U.S. Senate, Daines warns that if Democrats hold the majority, there will be no dissenting voices left inside the Democrat Party to stop them from going through with their radical power grab plans. Daines points to a written plan from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate in California this year, who explicitly made these goals clear in what Schiff calls the interest of protecting “democracy.”
Daines said that since Sinema and Manchin have both announced their retirements, “there are no more Democrats that are going to stand to protect the filibuster.”
“…[W]hich means it’s a simple 50-vote-plus-one threshold to put these radical changes into our laws, including — imagine the Second Amendment and the gun-grabbing legislation they would pass with just 51 votes,” Daines said.
“By the way, don’t believe me: Go read what Adam Schiff has written. It’s a sad report, but Adam Schiff is probably going to be the next U.S. senator from California,” he continued. “He telegraphed this in writing earlier this year. So, that’s their strategy. We cannot let them succeed, and that’s why we have to get at least 51 Republicans in the United States Senate in January of 2025.”
Democrats’ path to power is not so clean cut, the Hill reported, noting that its forecast with Decision Desk HQ shows Republicans having a 70 percent chance of winning back the Senate majority. Even so, many are encouraged by the fact that Sens. Sinema and Manchin will not be there to thwart their goal of altering the filibuster, the report reads.
“We would have Roe v. Wade as law of the land, comprehensive immigration reform, better gun safety laws,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “And we’d just be warming up.”