Mitch McConnell: Democrats Would 'Permanently Disfigure' Senate by Scrapping Filibuster
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on the Senate floor on Monday that Democrats’ talk of scrapping the filibuster would “permanently disfigure” Congress’s upper chamber.
McConnell said, “This threat to permanently disfigure, to disfigure the Senate, has been the latest growing drumbeat in the modern Democratic Party’s war against our governing institutions.”
McConnell’s comments arise as several Senate Democrats have pushed to remove the Senate filibuster if former Vice President Joe Biden were to become the 46th president.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) reportedly started pushing Senate Democrats to abandon the Senate filibuster.
“I will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administration’s initiatives blocked at every turn,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said in June.
He added that he would “try really hard to find a path forward that doesn’t require removing what’s left of the structural guardrails, but if there’s a Biden administration, it will be “inheriting a mess” requiring “urgent and effective action.”
Former President Barack Obama used his eulogy at the funeral of Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) to call for Democrats to scrap the Senate filibuster.
“And if all this takes is ending the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do,” Obama said in July. The former president also called on Democrats to pass a renewed Voting Rights Act.
The Senate requires 60 votes to pass through the legislative filibuster; abolishing the procedural motion would allow Democrats to pass legislation such as the Green New Deal with a simple 51-vote majority in the Senate.
McConnell said that Democrats exhibited “Grade A hypocrisy” after they used the filibuster to block Republican police reform and coronavirus aid.
The Senate Majority Leader has promised to be a “firewall” if they hold the Senate majority after the November elections.
“Today’s Democrats have lost patience with playing by the rules and want to wage war on the rulebook itself,” he added.