Who Ya Gonna Call? Filibusters!
Why Nuking the Filibuster is the Most Dangerous of All of Kamala's Objectives
The filibuster is one of the least understood parts of an increasing opaque and convoluted government. While it takes its name from the prolonged speeches given to stall a bill in Congress, it really is a ruling for the Senate, stating that a matter needs a super-majority or 60 out of 100 votes to pass. Get rid of the filibuster, and the Senate needs just 51 votes (simple majority) to pass.
Right now, Senators are permitted to talk as long as they want about any subject they select unless three-fifths (that’s 60% or 60 out of the 100 Senators) vote the same way on the matter. So the filibuster isn’t really so much about long speeches as it is about the number of votes needed to pass something through the Senate. Right now, it’s 60 votes, meaning nothing gets through the Senate without some bipartisan cooperation. Without the filibuster, whatever party holds the majority in the Senate can pretty much do whatever it wants and ride roughshod over the other party.
The filibuster is not in the Constitution one way or the other. It’s a “rule” that the Senate itself adopted, not an enshrined Constitutional provision. Known as the “soul of the Senate,” the idea of the filibuster is to avoid one-party control of the Senate, even in cases where a party has the thinnest of majorities.
The so-called “nuclear option” is the rule that says 51 Senators can overturn the filibuster. Go nuclear on the filibuster and the Senate can do what it wants with just 51 votes.
The filibuster has no long and glorious history. It was first used in 1837, but fell into neglect until the turn of the millennium. In our current hyper-partisan political climate, the filibuster is like dumping a bucket of cold water on political hotheads. It prevents the minority party from just having to sit there on their hands while the majority party takes the wheel.
Nobody’s favorite presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is yapping about wanting to end the filibuster so she can “codify Roe,” meaning she wants to put in place a law that would make abortion unrestricted throughout the United States.
The recent Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) says that abortion is a state and not a federal matter; states alone decide their own abortion laws. Contrary to the dimwitted interns who fuel Kamala’s social media accounts with debunked and politically inane tweets, abortion has not been overturned in the United States. States decide on their own abortion laws with the result that different states may come up with different laws. Dobbs overturned Roe, which said states had no say in abortion. Roe declared that states could not make abortion law. So Roe did not make abortion illegal at all—look around, virtually unrestricted abortion is still (sadly) legal in many states, such as California, Illinois, and New York. But for all her squawking that abortion has been made illegal, what Harris wants is a way to say the federal government can prohibit states from restricting abortion.
But for Kamala, it’s a domino game, of which abortion is the first domino.
Let’s play this out. If Harris gets rid of the filibuster and then codifies Roe, SCOTUS will step in and re-affirm Dobbs.
Harris will use this as a wedge to push through legislation that sets term limits on SCOTUS— ditching inconvenient long-serving Conservative justices. Not mentioning any names, but one of them has the initials “Clarence Thomas”
Harris can then “pack the court” by adding a few more justices to SCOTUS—we currently have nine justices but this is not Constitutionally limited. Harris could add another 10 or 15 justices if she wanted, although she would likely settle on two or three more. Guess their political leanings! Harris will make sure SCOTUS has an overwhelmingly extreme-leftist majority
Harris would then likely want Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico to become states, adding two totally Democrat states to the Union. This puts more Democrat Representatives in the House and, even more significantly, would add 4 Democrat Senators to the Senate
Harris will allow massively more illegal immigration. This isn’t because she likes migrants. Migrants strategically settled count in the census when Congressional districts are set up. A well-crafted resettlement plan will allow for more Democrat Representatives in Congress
Not only that, registering illegals and non-citizens to vote is a clever strategy as long as there is no voter ID. The point is not to get illegals to vote, the point is to get them registered. Once a name, address, and other identifiers are on the voting rolls, any old ballot assigned to that name will count. In other words, in order to cheat, Democrats want to have lots and lots of illegals on the voter rolls so that they can flood the system with fake ballots that “match up” to those illegals
Harris would then have free rein to do whatever she wanted. No policy would be too petty or too communistic. Tax unrealized capital gains? She already said she liked that. Raise the income tax rate? She’s all for that. Send more money to Ukraine and less help to Israel? That would be swell, too. Congress would be her obedient lapdog
For this plan to work, Kamala Harris would have to be elected and she’d need a Democrat-run Congress (House and Senate). But in our two-party system that’s not impossible; in fact, it’s happened before. And if she used Democrat advantages to buttress a series of crazy decisions—like adding more states, packing SCOTUS and getting rid of pesky justices who do not do her bidding—she (or whoever is telling her what to do) would have virtually dictatorial powers long into the future. Talk about being an existential threat to democracy!
Senator Joe Manchin (I, WV) used to be a Democrat but turned independent when the Democrat party took its hard left turn. He’s an unusual figure, because he has been willing to work across the aisle on many important national issues. Manchin regards the filibuster as the brakes on the U.S. legislative system, meaning that no law can fly through the Senate willy-nilly without much debate or discussion.
As a long-time defender of the filibuster, former-Democrat Manchin said he could not endorse Harris for President, since he thinks destroying the filibuster holds the potential to destroy America. Those are pretty big words and it’s provable—unlike the often recited trope that Trump is a “threat to democracy.” The real threat to our country is a nation led by a communist President with a compliant legislature and a big rubber stamp.
Add to the list of what banning the filibuster would allow Harris and a Democrat Congress to do:
Ban fracking and offshore drilling
Open the border permanently and offer generous benefits to illegal immigrants, such as a multi-thousand dollar subsidy to make a house down payment
Grant broad amnesty to all illegal aliens and set up programs to import millions more migrants every single year
Eliminate or redefine the role of immigration agents
Ban guns and allow the government to enter your private property whenever they want to check and see if you have guns and if they are stored to the government’s liking
Set up a universal healthcare system, also known as Medicare for all, and eliminate private insurance options. It’s hard to imagine that unions who fight so hard for premium healthcare plans would endorse throwing this in the toilet for a poorly run government system. Maybe that’s why Kamala is struggling to win over union voters
Decriminalize drugs and drug dealing
Guarantee protections for biological men in women’s sports
Guarantee that biological men may use women’s spaces (bathrooms, locker rooms, safe houses, prisons) as long as they identify as women
Mandate certain types of medical care, such as compulsory vaccination programs (no more Informed Consent)
Default U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations (UN) in cases of global crisis and default U.S. sovereignty to the World Health Organization of the UN in specific case of a new pandemic
Institute government policies and restrictions on social media
Criminalize “disinformation” (any information that she doesn’t like)
Ban gasoline-powered vehicles
Impose taxes on anything and everything, including the unrealized capital gains
Enforce such punitive tax schemes on billionaire business people that business moves out of the United States
Force taxpayers to pick up all student loan debts
Force taxpayers to pay for all transsexual surgeries, including those on illegal immigrants and prisoners
Ban Christians from foster care and adoption
Monitor Christian religious organizations and institutions
Implement a national digital currency
Mandate critical race theory and gender studies in elementary schools
Impose racial quotas for government hiring, university education, bank loans, and everything else
Expand government radically—say by 10 fold—and allow bureaucrats to wield sweeping powers to implement regulations
Allow for draconian sentencing of political prisoners in violation of the 8th amendment, hold people for years without bail and without trial for misdemeanors (oh, we already have that—but she could codify it and mandate that all Republicans charged with political demonstrations be sentenced to gulag-like penalties)
Set up laws that penalize political opponents for speaking, advocating their ideas, demonstrating peacefully, or even assembling
Forbid parents or guardians from participating in school board meetings or influencing school policies
Decriminalize sex work
Ban gas ranges and plastic straws
Is she going to do all of that? Well, considering Kamala doesn’t have a good track record for doing anything at all, it’s doubtful. But many of these things are things she has already talked about and is on the record for wanting to implement. Imagine things she has not dared to articulate … like normalizing pedophilia, lowering the age of consent, implementing a social credit score, and forcing people to move to assigned 10-minute cities.
Recently, Hillary Clinton suggested that this nation might need to “re-educate” MAGA supporters. That means if you voted for Trump or in any way still like him, Hillary thinks you need to do some hard time in a concentration camp. Think that can’t happen? With no filibuster and a Democrat majority, it sure could. I’m not saying it would—I’m just saying they would have cleared out the underbrush on the road to concentration camps for Trump voters.
And concentration camps do happen. They do exist. One of the biggest risks we are running in this country is submerging ourselves into the mistaken notion that “it can’t happen here.” It sure could.
The good news is that this nightmare scenario would require a Harris victory in the 2024 election along with a compliant House of Representatives and a Democrat majority in the Senate. There is a good chance this won’t happen, but a good chance is not much comfort in a world gone haywire. Stranger and more terrible things have happened; history is full of them.
With regard to Harris at the moment, the Senate is the lynch pin. Harris was a Senator herself, she knows how the game is played. Because she’s a Democrat, she also knows how the game can be rigged.
At the moment, our Senate has 47 Democrats, 4 Independents (who are Democrats in Independent clothing), and 49 Republicans. Although Republicans are the technical majority, the 51 Democrats/Independents vote as a unit, so the Democrats holds the de facto majority. Democrats and Independents are fused in some kind of lunatic mind meld. It would be easier to get the forlorn Mr. Stephen Colbert to say something funny on late-night TV than it would be to get an Independent in the Senate to act independently.
Senate terms are six years and one-third of the Senate is up for election every two years. That means for 2024, the nation is voting on 34 Senate seats and those seats are mostly held by Democrats (23 out of 34). Right now, the election prediction maps believe that after the 2024 elections, the Republicans will take control of the Senate in 2024 by one to three seats (the prediction is 48 Democrats/Independents versus 51 Republicans).
The more blue seats Republicans flip in 2024, the safer the country is.
The President of the Senate is the Vice President, who gets to cast tie-breaking votes. The majority in the past two years was so razor-thin, Kamala is worn out patting herself on the back that she, as current President of the Senate, has cast the most tie-breaking votes in history. She says that like it’s some huge accomplishment that should earn her a monument in D.C. on par with the Lincoln Memorial. It means nothing other than Kamala was Vice President at a time when the Senate was tied 50-50 and a ton of egregious legislation was rammed through the Congress. But when you have no other accomplishments to run on, I guess it’s something. It’s sort of like being a kid in the car on a long road trip who can count the most red vehicles—sure, it’s true, but it doesn’t mean you’re Albert Einstein or Mahatma Gandhi.
If Trump wins the White House in 2024, J.D. Vance becomes President of the Senate and the official tie-breaker, giving Republicans even more ammunition. If Trump wins the White House and Republicans can take control of the House and Senate, we’ll live to fight another day. Like the authorities in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies who never quite manage to catch Captain Jack Sparrow, Kamala Harris can shake her fist at the heavens and moan, “Today is the day, I almost destroyed America!”
But it’s too close for comfort for my taste.
The grave danger in this now-announced plan is that Democrats have been well schooled by Nancy Pelosi into voting as a block. Watching Democrats vote in Congress is sort of like watching a goose-stepping Nazi parade—everyone is in perfect lockstep with grim faces and big black boots.
Congressional Democrats are one single amorphous unit. Democrats in the Senate and the House may shoot off their mouths from time to time and act righteously indignant or pretend that they have their own opinions, but when push comes to shove, they vote as a block. They vote as they’re told. Even Independents have been trained like show dogs to vote with the Democrats, unless they really go rogue like Joe Manchin just did by telling the truth about the filibuster.
So rigid is Democrat vote-blocking that Manchin’s articulated opposition to Harris’s candidacy and his support of the filibuster made headlines in almost all of the media outlets covering national politics. Politically, it was heresy, even for an alleged Independent. But it was weak hot sauce, since Manchin is not seeking re-election and neither is another friend of the filibuster, Kyrsten Sinema. In other words, despite the battle cry, two supporters of the filibuster are leaving the Senate.
But there is another danger to the filibuster that we aren’t talking about.
Republicans themselves might sound the death knell of the filibuster. For instance, imagine Trump in the White House and a Republican Congress. That Republican Senate is not going to have a 60-person majority. So in this scenario, the Republicans could get rid of the filibuster and pretty much allow Trump to do anything and everything he wants. A Trump victory and a Republican Senate will bring out Democrat cries that the filibuster must be preserved at all costs, unless of course Kamala wins and we have a Democrat Senate. Then the filibuster must end.
This reminds me of the decidedly unpolitical movie Thelma and Louise. This is the part where we drive over the cliff.