Eli Zupnick is a spokesperson for Fix Our Senate, a coalition of more than 70 organizations aiming to ensure that progressive measures aren't blocked by the filibuster in Congress, and former communications director for US Sen. Patty Murray. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN) Last December, President Joe Biden attended a rally in Georgia ahead of the state's Senate runoff election and invoked the late Georgia Rep. John Lewis. "Remember the final words left to us by your late Congressman," Biden said. "The vote is the most powerful, nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it."
Almost a month later, voters in Georgia elected Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, giving Democrats control of both chambers of Congress. The very next day, insurrectionists who believed former President Donald Trump's incessant lies about a "stolen" 2020 presidential election attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn our democratic process. Since then, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have taken their cues from Trump and pushed for laws that make it more difficult for citizens to vote after record turnout in the 2020 election delivered victories for Democrats.
Rep. John Lewis was right, and President Biden was prescient to quote him; our right to vote, and our democracy itself, is not guaranteed. And if nothing is done to address the recent attacks on two key foundations of democracy -- the right to vote and the peaceful transition of power -- then our democracy stands at great risk.
There have been two notable attempts to bolster our democracy after the January 6 insurrection. The For the People Act, which would undo the recent attacks on voting rights and prevent states from playing partisan games with their election laws, passed the House earlier this year and is headed to the Senate floor. While Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said "failure is not an option," Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has reportedly made it a priority to defeat the bill.
The House also passed a bill to launch an independent commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6, but Senate Republicans blocked it Friday with a 54 to 35 vote after using the filibuster for the first time this year. Despite saying in February that Trump was "practically and morally responsible" for the attack on the Capitol, McConnell pressured his Republican colleagues and asked them to vote against the commission as "a personal favor" to him.
ajcpullcom on May 28th, 2021 at 22:33 UTC »
It’s uncanny how the filibuster seems to kill only Democratic legislation, no matter which party controls the Senate.
Adventurous_Salt on May 28th, 2021 at 22:14 UTC »
The filibuster is beyond stupid. There is no logic in allowing a minority of elected officials to have a veto on any legislation - doubly so with the extreme imbalance of the senate due to all the empty states getting 2 senators each.
American government, and the general discussion around it, seems obsessed with ensuring that there's always some way to obstruct legislation. I have no idea why people seem so invested in ensuring that there's always a tool to make sure that governments can't govern. Let majorities rule, if they do dumb things, vote them out; the current system just ensures that almost nothing can ever be legislated. American government is effectively atrophying due to the inability to act on anything even mildly unacceptable to the most extreme Republicans.
In Canada we don't have a filibuster, somehow the country is still functional. I'd wager that very few other democracies around the world have anything analogous to the modern senate filibuster, and they seem to function. The filibuster is 100%, by every metric, terrible for democracy.
standard-issue-man on May 28th, 2021 at 22:02 UTC »
We were so worried about a tyranny of the majority we ended up with a tyranny of the minority.