[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 54 (Tuesday, March 23, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1683-S1685]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               Filibuster

  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, talk continues to swirl about eliminating 
the legislative filibuster here in the U.S. Senate. The Democratic 
leader has threatened that if Republicans don't vote the way he wants 
them to vote on legislation, eliminating the filibuster will be on the 
table.
  In an interview where he issued his threat, the Democratic leader 
made it very clear that he is not inviting Republicans to work with 
Democrats on legislation. This isn't an invitation for both parties to 
sit down at the table and arrive at an agreement that both parties can 
support. No. This is an invitation for Republicans to support exactly 
what Democrats want or face the consequences.
  It is ironic that the Democratic leader would be taking that position 
today because this is what he was saying back in 2017 about the 
legislative filibuster. This is the Democratic leader saying the 
``legislative filibuster'' is ``the most important distinction between 
the Senate and the House. Let's find a way to further protect the 60-
vote rule for legislation.''
  So the Democratic leader was very supportive of this back in 2017, 
when they were using it extensively to try and stop or slow Republican 
legislation.
  The assistant Democratic leader, the Democratic whip, Senator Durbin 
from Illinois, said this in January 2018:

       I can tell you that would be the end of the Senate as it 
     was originally devised and created going back to our Founding 
     Fathers.

  ``[G]oing back to our Founding Fathers,'' referencing the legislative 
filibuster and how important it was historically here in the U.S. 
Senate.
  Well, about that same time, 2017, 61 Senators out of 100 here in the 
U.S. Senate--61 out of 100 Senators--signed a letter in which they 
supported retention of the legislative filibuster. In fact, it goes on 
to say:

       We are writing to urge you--

  And this is to the Senate leaders at the time, Senators McConnell and 
Schumer--

     to support our efforts to preserve existing rules, practices, 
     and traditions as they pertain to the right of Members to 
     engage in extended debate on legislation before the United 
     States Senate. Senators have expressed a variety of opinions 
     about the appropriateness of limiting debate when we are

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     considering judicial and executive branch nominations. 
     Regardless of our past disagreements on that issue, we are 
     united in our determination to preserve the ability of 
     Members to engage in extended debate when bills are on the 
     Senate floor.

  Sixty-one Senators, including over 30 Democrats, on record as 
recently as 2017 in support of the legislative filibuster--over 30 
Democratic Senators, including the Democratic leader and the Democratic 
whip.
  Well, what has changed? Because now they have done an abrupt 
reversal, a complete 180. I mean, they are spinning around so fast, it 
makes your eyes glaze over. What an incredible versatility of 
conviction they have demonstrated on this issue.
  And you think about the reason for it. What are they arguing? Well, 
they are saying the Republicans have been misusing the filibuster. That 
is a little bit ironic, given the fact that Republicans have been in 
the majority for the past 6 years. Republicans took the majority in 
January of 2015 and held it until January of 2021.
  So the past 6 years it has been the Democrats who were in the 
minority. They would be the ones exercising the legislative filibuster, 
and they used it extensively. They used it extensively last year to 
block legislation, repeatedly, over and over and over again.
  And Republicans, at the time, were under a lot of pressure to get rid 
of the legislative filibuster, including by the President of the United 
States, over and over and over, saying Republicans need to get rid of 
the legislative filibuster.
  Republicans, being consistent in thei position--the 61 Senators, 
Republicans who signed this letter, including me, have been consistent 
in our position, even when we were in the majority, even when the 
Democrats were using the filibuster to block legislation that we were 
trying to advance, that we needed to maintain the filibuster because it 
was important to the institution of the Senate, and it required 
bipartisan cooperation. It required a level of comity to get 
legislation passed, and it made sure that the minority was represented 
in legislative solutions that were produced by the U.S. Senate. We have 
been consistent in that position, even when it meant taking on our 
administration, our President--over, over, and over again.

  So the Democrats' argument now is that we have to get rid of the 
legislative filibuster because Republicans have been misusing it. How 
was that even possible? We were in the majority. The legislative 
filibuster is a tool used by the minority. It was used by the Democrats 
over and over and over again the past 6 years, but their argument now 
is that the Senate is not functioning, the Senate is not producing 
legislation? Really?
  Last year, Republicans were in the majority. We passed out of the 
Senate five coronavirus relief bills with huge bipartisan majorities--
huge bipartisan majorities--responding to the greatest crisis facing 
this country, both health crisis and economic crisis.
  We responded to it in a bipartisan way, honoring the rules and the 
traditions of the Senate, which were created by the Founders to make 
the Senate a place unique in all the world, where the rights of the 
minority are honored, which required cooperation and working together 
to get results.
  And we produced results, in spite of the fact that Democrats 
consistently filibustered legislation. Now, there were certain pieces 
of legislation we didn't get passed. We didn't pass policing reform. 
Senator Tim Scott offered a piece of legislation that included all 
kinds of provisions that would have addressed that important issue for 
our country, and the Democrats filibustered it, over and over and over 
again. So we didn't get the 60 votes to get policing reform across the 
finish line.
  But it is incredibly ironic. I mean, hypocrisy is not something that 
is unknown in politics, but hypocrisy on this level is unprecedented. 
The Democratic leader, the Democratic whip, and over 30 Democratic 
Senators have said as recently as 2 years ago, 3 years ago, that we 
need to preserve the legislative filibuster because it is true to the 
tradition of the Senate and what the Founders intended in terms of the 
role that the Senate was supposed to play in our democracy.
  And here we are, 2 or 3 years later, not because the Republicans had 
been misusing the filibuster, because the Republicans have been in the 
majority. We have been fending off the use of the filibuster by 
Democrats. They had no problems with the filibuster when they were 
using it as a tool at their disposal to block Republican initiatives.
  The first CARES bill they filibustered multiple times, and it forced 
us to sit down with them and forge a compromise that, in the end, got 
96 out of 100 votes in the U.S. Senate. But now the shoe is on the 
other foot. They are in the majority, and they have got all these 
things they want to get done, all this pent-up agenda.
  I would argue that what is happening here is all the outside groups, 
all the leftwing groups that have all these things they want to get 
done, all of a sudden have concluded that notwithstanding their use of 
the filibuster to block Republicans from accomplishing their agenda for 
the past 6 years, now that the shoe is on the other foot, we are in the 
majority and we have got power, we are going to do away with over 200 
years of history--200 years of history that was put in place by the 
Founders to require the U.S. Senate to be different than the House of 
Representatives.
  The House of Representatives does everything by simple majority. They 
have a Rules Committee. I served for three terms there. They have a 
Rules Committee that prescribes, basically, what legislation can come 
to the floor, what amendments are made in order, how much time is 
allowed for debate on each amendment. Everything is very structured. It 
is very organized. It is all done by democratic rule--majority rule, 
simple majority rule.
  The Senate was created to operate differently by the Founders. And 
here we are having a debate about whether we are going to honor that 
tradition, that heritage, that legacy, that vision the Founders had 
when it came to how the U.S. Senate should operate.
  Earlier this month, one Democratic Senator suggested that we should 
get rid of the filibuster because it is ``undemocratic.'' Undemocratic. 
In other words, it prevents the majority from doing everything it wants 
to do. But, as I said on the floor last week, letting the majority do 
everything it wants to is not what the Founders had in mind. The 
Founders recognized it wasn't just Kings who could be tyrants; they 
knew majorities could be tyrants, too, and that a majority, if 
unchecked, could trample the rights of the minority. So the Founders 
combined majority rule with both representation and constitutional 
protection for the minority. They established safeguards--checks and 
balances--throughout our government to keep the government in check and 
ensure that the rights of the minority were protected, and one of those 
safeguards was the Senate.
  In the House of Representatives, as I said, majority rule is 
emphasized, and the Founders could have left it at that. They could 
have stuck with a single legislative body, but they didn't. Why? 
Because they were worried about the possibility of tyrannical 
majorities in the House endangering the rights of the minority.
  The author of Federalist No. 62 notes:

       A senate, as a second branch of the legislative assembly, 
     distinct from, and dividing the power with, a first, must be 
     in all cases a salutary check on the government. It doubles 
     the security to the people, by requiring the concurrence of 
     two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy. . . 
     . Secondly. The necessity of a senate is not less indicated 
     by the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to 
     yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to 
     be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and 
     pernicious resolutions.

  That is from Federalist No. 62.
  So the Founders created the Senate as a check on the House of 
Representatives. They made the Senate smaller and Senators' terms of 
office longer, with the intention of creating a more stable, more 
thoughtful, and more deliberative legislative body to check ill-
considered or intemperate legislation and attempts to curtail minority 
rights.
  As time has gone on, the legislative filibuster has become perhaps 
the key way the Senate protects minority rights. The filibuster ensures 
that the minority party has a voice in the Senate. It forces 
compromise. It forces bipartisanship.
  Even in the now rare case when a majority party has a filibuster-
proof majority in the Senate, the filibuster still

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forces the majority party to take into account the views of its more 
moderate or middle-of-the-road Members, thus ensuring that more 
Americans are represented in legislation.
  People tend to focus on the fact that the filibuster protects the 
country from any one party's most extreme legislation, but the truth 
is--the truth is--the filibuster is probably the biggest reason that 
any bill in the Senate is ever bipartisan. Routine spending bills, farm 
bills, Defense authorization bills--the main reason many of these bills 
are ever bipartisan, outside of divided government, is because the 
filibuster forces the parties to compromise. Don't believe me? Just 
look at how the House has handled these bills in recent years.
  Democrats were eager to take advantage of the filibuster's protection 
for minority rights when they were in the minority, but now that they 
are in the majority, they don't want anything standing in their way. 
They don't want to have compromise. They don't want to have to consider 
the Americans who didn't vote for a Democratic agenda. They want to do 
whatever they want, whenever they want it.
  Democrats' disregard for minority rights would be troubling even if 
they had a substantial majority in the Senate. The voice of the 
minority deserves to be heard even when the minority is substantially 
outnumbered. But it is particularly outrageous that Democrats are so 
determined to sweep away protections from minority rights when they 
barely--barely--have a majority in the Senate and certainly don't have 
a mandate. In fact, Democrats don't have a real majority at all; only a 
technical one. The Senate is divided 50 to 50. The only reason 
Democrats have a deciding vote in the Senate is because the Vice 
President is a Democrat. In the House, Democrats' majority narrowed 
substantially in the November election.
  Now, as for the Presidency, while certainly a Democrat won the 
election, it is worth noting that the only candidate who could win the 
Democratic primary was a man historically regarded as a moderate. Even 
among Democrats, Democrats' far-left liberal candidates did not fare so 
well.
  If there was any mandate in the election, it was a mandate for 
moderation. It was a mandate for compromise, for pulling the country 
together. But Democrats are running away from unity and bipartisanship 
as fast as they can. They are determined to leverage their weak victory 
into the implementation of a partisan, far-left agenda.
  There are two bills that have driven the conversation around 
eliminating the filibuster in recent weeks. They are H.R. 1, an 
election bill, and H.R. 5, the so-called Equality Act.
  The first bill is a truly outrageous power grab, an attempt to 
federalize election law and eliminate protections for election 
integrity. Democrats have discarded years of important bipartisan work 
on election security and integrity in order to permanently boost 
Democrats' chances of winning majorities. The second, the so-called 
Equality Act, is an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment that 
would substantially restrict the rights of Americans to live by their 
faith. These are the bills that Democrats think should be shoved 
through by the narrowest of majorities.
  There have been suggestions that eliminating the filibuster is the 
cure for partisanship and gridlock in the Senate. Well, it might be the 
cure for gridlock in the sense that the majority could steamroll 
through whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, but you don't cure 
partisanship by making it easier for the majority to be partisan.
  Eliminating the filibuster isn't going to eliminate partisanship; it 
is going to heighten it. Take away the filibuster, and the majority 
party has zero reason--zero--to take into account the views of the 
minority. What eliminating the filibuster will do is ensure that one 
party has no voice at all in the U.S. Senate, no matter how many 
Americans that party represents.
  A couple of weeks ago, we got a preview of what life would look like 
in a filibuster-less Senate when Democrats passed their so-called COVID 
bill under the simple-majority rules of reconciliation There wasn't a 
lot of gridlock since reconciliation allowed Senate Democrats to force 
their bill through, but there was plenty of partisanship. Democrats 
made it very clear that while Republicans were welcome to vote for 
their bill, Republican ideas were not welcome at the table.

  Democrats knew that they didn't need Republicans to pass their 
legislation, which empowered them to completely reject Republican input 
in drafting the bill and to load the bill with Democratic priorities, 
from a bailout for union pensions, to a State slush fund heavily 
weighted in favor of blue States, to the omission of longstanding 
Federal restrictions on using taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions. It 
was quite a contrast to the five bipartisan COVID bills passed under 
the filibuster rule in a Republican-led Senate, which were focused on 
fighting the virus rather than shoving through partisan priorities.
  While their recent narrow majority has seemingly erased all memory of 
their minority status over the last few years, I encourage my 
Democratic colleagues to remember just how much they valued the 
legislative filibuster during their time in the minority and how 
bitterly they regretted eliminating the judicial filibuster once 
President Trump became the beneficiary.
  While Democrats might like to think that their time in power will 
last forever, it is a truth of American politics that sooner or later, 
no matter how powerful your majority, you end up in the minority again. 
I encourage my colleagues to think about that time when they will be in 
the minority again and to ask themselves whether they really want to 
eliminate their voices and the voices of their constituents in future 
policy battles.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Padilla). The Senator from Alabama.