Mitch McConnell: Our country is strengthened by Senate’s safeguards, including filibuster
Once Kentucky’s largest newspaper published an opinion criticizing my defense of the Senate, I should have known this paper’s editorial board would follow behind. Even worse, the liberal writer chose to deal in fake history instead of actual facts. The Senate’s role is too important to not respond.
Our country is strengthened by the Senate’s stabilizing influence. The institution—and its 60-vote threshold to advance most legislation—safeguards entire pillars of law from snapping back and forth after every election. It also gives both sides a voice in the passage of most major bills.
That requirement, called the legislative filibuster, is the bedrock of the Senate. It’s also Kentucky’s veto that protects Nicholasville and Winchester from the radical notions advanced by blue-state coastal elites.
When Republicans were in charge, the filibuster for legislation enjoyed broad, bipartisan support. Even then-Senator Biden said in 2005 that killing it would be “an example of the arrogance of power.”
Democrats took control two months ago and couldn’t abandon their principles fast enough. Kentucky and its veto became an obstacle to their raw political power. Washington Democrats and this editorial writer offer the flimsiest excuses for why this centuries-old tradition cannot exist one second longer.
For example, some try to explain Democrats’ hypocrisy by saying Republicans abused the filibuster in recent years. That defies logic since Republicans just spent six years in the majority. It was Senate Democrats happily using the filibuster for everything from stalling defense spending to slamming the brakes on bipartisan COVID-19 relief. Although I got an earful from those in my party, including the sitting president, I refused on principle to break the rules to benefit us in the short term. The long-lasting damage would have far outweighed any fleeting victories.
Then there’s the obvious and coordinated assault on this rule that President Obama launched last summer. He and other prominent Democrats are distorting the filibuster’s roots with claims of racism and bigotry.
Historians say different. As fact-checkers have explained, handing “Pinocchios” to Democrats, the filibuster long predates the civil rights debates. It’s been used on all kinds of issues throughout history, from infrastructure and banking in the 1800s to coronavirus relief just last year. Even scholars who support changing the filibuster admit that “civil rights measures have not constituted even a majority of the measures that have been the targets of filibusters.”
If Democrats believed their own rhetoric, why did they use this supposedly racist relic constantly throughout the Trump era? Less than a year ago, Democrats used the filibuster to kill Senator Tim Scott’s police reform legislation that would have put body cameras on cops and made lynching a federal crime. Where was the “Jim Crow relic” talk then?
If Senate Democrats follow through on their nuclear threat, they’ll keep tightening their grip on power. Their top priority is HR 1, a complete partisan rewrite of every state’s election laws. This absurdity would turn the bipartisan Federal Election Commission into a Democrat-stacked body. It’d erode Kentucky’s Voter ID law and mandate nearly unrestricted same-day voter registration. Deeply unpopular election procedures like taxpayer-funded campaigns and ballot harvesting, where campaign operatives hand in big piles of others’ ballots, would become mandatory from coast to coast.
From there, it’d be off to the races. Washington Democrats dream of statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, packing the federal courts, doubling down on the War on Coal with the Green New Deal, and even weakening our borders.
If Kentuckians lose our seat at the table, we’ll find ourselves on the menu.
Senate Democrats must take their finger off the nuclear trigger and come back from the brink. A scorched-earth Senate would grind the institution and the federal government to a halt. As soon as the shoe is on the other foot, a Republican Congress would unwind the entire liberal wish-list. And our country would be denied its strengthening and stabilizing Senate.
Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, is the Senate Republican Leader. Of the four congressional leaders, he is the only one not from New York or California.
