[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 11 (Tuesday, January 18, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S233-S234]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               FILIBUSTER

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, late last week, our Democratic 
colleagues briefly paused their quest to destroy the Senate's 60-vote 
threshold just long enough to use the 60-vote threshold themselves to 
block a bill.
  Republicans supported sanctioning the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline that 
would give Russia even more leverage to bully Europe. Most of our 
Democratic colleagues bowed to the furious lobbying from the Biden 
administration to protect Putin's pipeline. There were 55 votes to pass 
the bill that our friends, like Ukrainian President Zelensky, 
desperately wanted passed, but Democrats blocked it by denying 60.
  Now, many of these same colleagues have spent weeks thundering--
literally thundering--that the Senate's 60-vote threshold is an 
offensive tool of obstruction, a Jim Crow relic, declaring that simple 
majorities should always get their way. Ah, but late last week, they 
literally wielded the 60-vote threshold themselves--a useful reminder 
of just how fake--fake--the hysteria has been.
  We already knew Washington Democrats didn't have any principled 
opposition to Senate rules. Democrats repeatedly filibustered the CARES 
Act in March of 2020, while insisting on changes. Democrats 
filibustered and killed Senator Tim Scott's police reform bill.
  You only have to go back a few years to read vigorous defenses of the 
filibuster from our Democratic colleagues and their allies.
  The Democratic whip, Senator Durbin, put it this way:

       We need to protect the right of debate in the Senate, 
     preserve checks and balances so that no one party can do 
     whatever it wants. We need to preserve the voice of the 
     minority in America.

  Dick Durbin.
  The Democratic leader himself said in 2017 that we need to ``find a 
way to build a firewall around the legislative filibuster''--build a 
firewall around the legislative filibuster.
  Then, in a letter that same year by 32 Senate Democrats, our 
colleagues demanded--demanded--that the 60-vote threshold stay right 
where it was.
  Until the last couple of years, Senators on both sides have 
understood the Senate is not here to rubberstamp massive changes by 
thin majorities. This institution exists to do exactly the opposite--to 
make sure major laws receive major buy-in and have major staying power, 
and, historically, Democratic allies outside this Chamber have 
recognized this as well.
  Let's go back about 15 years ago when Republicans controlled the 
Senate. A leftwing organization called The Leadership Conference on 
Civil and Human Rights published a lengthy statement defending--
defending--the filibuster, including--listen to this--its relationship 
to civil rights.
  Here is what they had to say when Republicans were in the majority 
here in the Senate:

       On behalf of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the 
     nation's oldest, largest, and most diverse civil and human 
     rights coalition, with more than 180 member organizations, we 
     urge you to oppose--

  oppose--

     any efforts to eliminate the 216-year-old filibuster in the 
     United States Senate.

  That is a coalition of 180 member organizations called The Civil and 
Human Rights Coalition.
  They went on.

       The elimination of the rights of the minority as embodied 
     by the filibuster is contrary to the founding fathers' vision 
     of the Senate as a body of equals designed to protect against 
     the tyranny of the majority.

  This statement continued.

       The civil rights community has recognized and accepted the 
     value--

  The value--

     of the filibuster even when it frustrated efforts to advance 
     civil rights legislative goals. During the 1950's and 1960's, 
     countless civil rights bills were filibustered. The Civil 
     Rights Act of 1964 was not passed until it survived 75 days 
     of the longest filibuster in history and the Senate voted 71-
     29 to end debate and finally passed the bill. This 
     legislation was enacted because of long, hard work

[[Page S234]]

     to build support across partisan, ideological, and regional 
     lines. We worked to bring Americans together--not to push 
     them farther apart.

  They concluded:

       We never demanded the end of the system of checks and 
     balances. In the end, we won the battle by changing votes and 
     not--

  Not--

     by breaking the rules.

  These were leftwing activists writing less than 20 years ago.
  So let's spell this out. Democrats want the American people to 
believe the filibuster was not a Jim Crow relic in 2005; it was not 
even a Jim Crow relic in 2020; just miraculously became a Jim Crow 
relic in 2021; briefly stopped being a Jim Crow relic last Thursday, 
but it is now back to being a Jim Crow relic this week.
  Now, to be clear, the partisan election takeover bills that Democrats 
want to ram through this week are not--not--in any way successors of 
the civil rights legislation from the mid-20th century. It has been, is 
today, and will remain illegal to discriminate against voters anywhere 
in America because of their race--period. That is the law now.
  Targeting Americans' online speech and sending government money to 
political campaigns is not about civil rights. It is about tilting the 
playing field. Weakening wildly popular voter ID laws and making it 
harder to produce accurate voter rolls is not about making voting 
easier; it is about making cheating easier. Changing the laws so that 
our partisan Attorney General can rewrite voting laws without even 
having to win in court is not about promoting justice; it is about 
short-circuiting justice. This is about one party wanting the power to 
unilaterally rewrite the rule book of American elections.
  Now, interestingly, the Biden administration staff has gone out of 
its way lately to highlight my--my--long, strong record on real civil 
rights and real voting rights. The President's Press Secretary 
explained that I have ``a pretty strong record of supporting voting 
rights.'' She is right about that. And that is exactly why I have no 
patience--none--for the unrelated partisan takeover that some Democrats 
are trying to rebrand with that banner.
  The Democratic leader argues that his proposed elections takeover and 
his efforts to break the Senate are last resorts because of new State 
laws that passed in 2021. He says it is irrelevant that 2020 saw record 
turnout and--listen to this--94 percent said voting was easy because 
this debate is exclusively about what happened in 2021. But Democrats 
have been pushing these same policy charges in the same Chicken Little 
rhetoric since 2019, a year and a half before 2020 election, which 
Democrats now call a high-turnout success.
  The Democratic leader gave an interview claiming that evil 
Republicans were trying to attack voting and disenfranchise people. Of 
course, when Democrats went on to win the White House, the 2020 
election went from presumptively illegitimate to exemplary and 
unquestionable overnight. Around the same time, mid-2019, Senator 
Schumer began floating a nuclear attack on Senate rules. It is 
completely untethered from the elections issue. He just thought 
breaking the rules would make for a livelier stint as majority leader.

  Washington Democrats have wanted the power to rewrite the rules for 
political speech and election laws long, long before the events that 
are supposed to justify it, and the Democratic leader's effort to break 
the Senate long predates the latest pretext.
  We have strong disagreements about the substance of these bills, but, 
even more broadly, we see decreasing trust in our democracy among both 
political sides. We have a sitting President of the United States 
shouting that U.S. Senators are on the side of Bull Connor and 
Jefferson Davis for refusing to shatter the Senate.
  Was the Senate created to make these kinds of factional fevers worse 
or to help break the fevers? Does the Senate exist to help narrow 
majorities double down on divisions or to force broad coalitions to 
build bridges?
  This fake hysteria does not prove the Senate is obsolete. It proves 
the Senate is as necessary as ever.
  Republicans have supported this limitation on the majority's power 
both when we have been in the minority, which these rules protect, and 
when we have been the majority, which they inconvenience.
  And last week, some of our colleagues across the aisle reconfirmed 
that they have the courage and the principle to keep their word and to 
protect the institution as well. But too many of our colleagues across 
the aisle still want to respond to a 50-50 Senate with a rule-breaking 
power grab.
  Voting to break this institution will not be a free vote or a 
harmless action, even if their effort fails. An unprincipled attempt at 
grabbing power is not harmless just because it fails. Voting to break 
the Senate is not cost-free just because a bipartisan majority of your 
colleagues have the wisdom to stop you. It is amazing that our 
colleagues are this in thrall to radical activists.
  We have inflation, a pandemic, rampant violent crime, a border 
crisis, and possibly a war on the European continent. But rather than 
work on any of that, Senate Democrats want to march their own legacies 
with a reckless--reckless--procedural vote they know will fail. A 
faction this desperate for unlimited short-term power is a faction that 
must be denied it.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Hirono). The Senator from Washington.

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