Today's Democratic Left operates in five gears: opportunism, psychological projection, hypocrisy, class warfare, and racial arson.
The current effort to crash the ship of state into the mighty rock of the filibuster has engaged at least four of these.
The Biden administration, its comrades on Capitol Hill, and their loyal muscle in the dinosaur media do whatever it takes to achieve, maintain, and expand power and tighten their control over the American people.
They seize every chance and shift gears with lightning speed, from one battle to the next.
When President Joe Biden's $4.73 trillion Build Bankruptcy Better plan sank it into a deep coma last month, thanks to the opposition of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., did not give his colleagues a few days to regroup, strategize, or even catch their breath.
Instead, Schumer immediately announced that the Senate would pivot to "voting rights," namely H.R. 5746, the 719-page Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act — AKA, the "Vote Fraud Instruction Manual of 2022."
One must admire, or at least grudgingly respect, the Democrat Left's rat-like talent for seizing opportunities, scurrying about behind the scenes, and relentlessly gnawing their way toward their objectives.
When do these people eat, sleep, or bear children? I don't know, either.
In order to nationalize state-and-local elections, as this unconstitutional bill would do, Democrats need to destroy the filibuster. They do not have the 60 votes required to end debate and proceed to the Ayes and Noes.
Schumer hopes to accomplish this with the 50 votes in his caucus and Vice President Kamala Harris splitting a tie when 50 unified Republican senators oppose this measure, as expected.
This tactic exposes the unbridled hypocrisy that keeps Democrats moving forward.
As they line up this week to denounce the filibuster as a gigantic human-rights violation, they used that same legislative technique to sink Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and his proposed sanctions on the Russo-German Nord Stream II pipeline — just last week.
As Fox Business Network host Elizabeth MacDonald explained, Democrats used the filibuster 328 times in 2019-2020. They have deployed it 657 times since 2009. Republicans during that span filibustered on just 609 occasions.
In 2020, Democrats filibustered to stop COVID-19 assistance (twice), sandbag the police reform measure of Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and sabotage ICE's efforts to collaborate with sanctuary cities.
When Republicans attempted to exclude judicial nominations from the filibuster in 2005 (the so-called "nuclear option"), Schumer impersonated a mushroom cloud.
He blasted Republicans: "They want, because they can’t get their way on every judge, to change the rules in midstream, to wash away 200 years of history. They want to make this country into a banana republic where, if you don’t get your way, you change the rules."
Now, of course, Schumer is trying to change the rules in midstream — almost exactly halfway through the 117th Congress.
"President Bush didn’t win by a landslide," Schumer said in 2003. "This Senate is not 62 to 38, or 70 to 30. This country is narrowly divided, and that means when laws are made, they move to the middle."
Back then, the Senate was almost evenly split: 51 Republicans led the chamber, while 48 Democrats and one independent caucused in the minority.
So, what changed?
The Senate that Schumer heads features 50 Republicans, plus 48 Democrats and two independents who caucus together. Vice President Harris' tie-splitting votes give Democrats the thinnest possible majority. And yet, under circumstances nearly identical to those that Schumer faced in 2003, he does not want to "move to the middle."
Now, Schumer favorably invokes the name of a Democrat former senator from West Virginia and one-time Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan to justify his born-again hatred for the same filibuster that he loved so deeply in the past.
As Schumer told MSNBC's Joy Reid, "even a paragon who believed in the Senate rules, Robert C. Byrd, changed nine times, and he said, I think I have his quote accurately here: 'When circumstances change, the rules have to change.'"
Schumer is plotting this parliamentary tactic's demise with plenty of his fellow filibuster hypocrites. Twenty-five current Democrat senators and Kamala Harris signed a bipartisan letter on April 7, 2017. It declared, " . . . we are united in our determination to preserve the ability of Members to engage in extended debate when bills are on the Senate floor." These 25 now are poised to flip-flop from "Yaaaay!" to "Booooo!" on the filibuster.
My National Review colleague Tobias Hoonhout curated multiple examples of Senate Democrats capsizing their principles on this issue:
- "We should not be doing anything to mess with the strength of the filibuster. It’s one of the distinguishing factors of this body," New Jersey's Cory Booker said in January 2019. Last March, he said, "for the sake of our vulnerable populations . . . the filibuster has to be reformed."
- "If you don’t have 60 votes yet, it just means you haven’t done enough advocacy, and you need to work a lot harder,” New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand explained in January 2019. “I’m of the view that we should eliminate the filibuster, despite all the risks," she declared in January 2021.
- "60 votes easier to get than 51. Ignoring the other party creates rushed garbage legislation. When you do 60, it’s a compromise," Hawaii's semi-literate Brian Schatz grunted via Twitter in November 2017. Last February, he squawked: "It’s time to trash the Jim Crow filibuster."
Schatz's statement naturally shifts the Democrats into their highest and fastest gear: Racial arson.
Democrats are rarely more comfortable than when they scream "Race!" For them, it's easier than singing in the shower.
"The filibuster was created so that slave owners could hold power over our government," Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., remarked via Twitter last March — with just a dash of fourth gear — class warfare — for good measure.
This misinformation earned Markey Three Pinocchios from The Washington Post. The paper judged Markey's comment an "ahistorical attack" and added: "Lawmakers dedicated to preserving slavery or segregation may have exploited the filibuster for their own purposes, but they did not create it. Markey earns Three Pinocchios."
Biden has smeared GOP election-integrity efforts as "Jim Crow 2.0."
He also notoriously unloaded the racial matches and gasoline last week in Atlanta. Regarding those who differ with him on the filibuster and his blessed "voting rights" bill, Biden compared them to racist Southern Democrats George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis.
Gov. George Wallace, D-Ala., stood in a doorway in June 1963 to block black students eager to integrate the University of Alabama. In May 1963, Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilus "Bull" Connor (D - Birmingham, Ala.) attacked peaceful civil rights protesters with police dogs and fire hoses. Confederate President Jefferson Davis owned slaves and led the South in the Civil War.
So, according to Biden, if you favor the filibuster and oppose his "voting rights" measure/fraud cookbook, then you are just like those Olympic-class bigots.
Racial flamethrower Rep. Maxine Waters, D - Calif., went further. She named those she accuses of racism. "They don’t care about minorities."
Waters said this of Democratic Sens. Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, "They don’t care about Blacks. They don’t care about people in their own districts [sic] who they’re going to deny their voting rights and undermine their voting rights."
Notwithstanding Aunt Maxine's venom, Sens. Manchin and Sinema deserve great credit for defending the filibuster and preserving this democratic institution.
Democrats also should check the pool for water before diving in.
They should remember the consequences of ditching the filibuster when the just-departed Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., was majority leader, so they could elevate Leftist judges onto the D.C. Circuit Court.
After Democrats obliterated that restraint, Republicans captured the Senate and then capitalized on the far lower threshold to confirm judges (50 votes plus the VP's tie breaker, rather than 60 senators). The eventual result: Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, constitutionalist conservatives all. And each appointed by President Donald J. Trump.
Thank you, Harry Reid.
If Schumer musters the votes to enfeeble the filibuster and forward the "Vote Fraud Instruction Manual of 2022" to President Biden's desk, the Democratic Left will savor a short-term, albeit significant, headrush. But the day might come, as soon as one year hence, when a GOP Senate will speed legislation through with new-found ease.
If that happens, the Republican Right will say: "Thank you, Chuck Schumer!"
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. Aaron Cichon contributed research to this opinion piece. Read Deroy Murdock's Reports — More Here.
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