The Patriot Post® · Dems Strategize to Eliminate Senate Filibuster

Last week, House Democrats passed, on a strict party-line vote, HR 1, the radical election “reforming” legislation they dubiously named the “For the People Act.” Our Douglas Andrews said it “couldn’t be any more dangerous to the notion of free and fair elections,” and veteran analyst John Fund called it “the worst piece of legislation I have ever seen in my 40 years reporting from Washington.”

That sentiment certainly isn’t wrong, but this isn’t the only hyper-partisan and extreme bill Democrats have put forward in recent memory. In reality, House Democrats, guided by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have strategically thrown any semblance of bipartisanship out the window in order to press hard on advancing their radical agenda. Note the number of recent partisan bills passed by the House on strict party-lines, which, we’d note, means by the narrowest majority since the 1940s. Those bills include such “unifying” things as the “Equality Act” and the $1.9 trillion boondoggle known as the “American Rescue Plan Act” signed by Joe Biden yesterday, as well as two recent “gun control” measures, one of which Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) says would create “a gun registry to track guns of the American people,” just to name a few.

There is a strategy behind the House Democrats’ extreme partisanship — elimination of the Senate filibuster. As The Washington Times reports, “House Democrats are inundating the Senate with a series of partisan bills on issues such as expanding mail-in voting, terminating qualified immunity for police and phasing out fossil fuels, partly in hopes of pressuring holdout Senate Democrats to eliminate the filibuster.”

With the Democrats holding the majority in a 50-50 Senate via Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote, passing such extreme measures would require the elimination of the filibuster and its 60-vote threshold to advance legislation. Thus far, two Democrat senators, Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), stand in opposition to eliminating the filibuster. Therefore, the play by House Democrats is to send the Senate a long list of extreme partisan bills with the aim of creating the false narrative of obstructionist Republicans preventing progress, and then pressuring both Manchin and Sinema to give up their resistance to “needed” change.

Case in point were the recent comments from Democrat Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA). “Democrats — the White House, the Senate, and the House — have to recognize that then we’re going to have to reform the filibuster, because we have to be able to deliver,” she contended. “We had black, brown, indigenous, working poor people who came out and voted for us. And now we have to show that it’s going to make a difference that we’re not going to get caught up in the tyranny of the minority that exists in the Senate.”

For radical leftist Democrats, bipartisanship has now become the problem rather than a feature of our governmental system. In other words, they want to eliminate the very checks and balances the Founders installed to help prevent tyranny.