Back from a two-week hiatus, we have to say that not much has changed given today's "Meet The Press" with an independent, Senator Angus King (M), trying to thread a legislative needle, Democrats being hammered during their very public and messy legislative sausage making, and Republicans saying 'no' to anything and everything.
One thing is for sure, Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) who is not running for reelection doesn't give a shit about anything with the exception of the small bit of power he can still wield in the Senate, which is not the 'world's most deliberative body' because you can not call it that when their is zero deliberation, and that was Senator King's point when discussing the filibuster. Mr. Blunt for his part had not one constructive answer to any of Ms. Mitchell's questions.
In the Senate as it is, having the majority means nothing except when it comes to appointing judges, which is now the chamber's basic function as legislating takes a back seat. Senator King said that there should be filibuster reform but to achieve it, you have to 'thread the needle' of retaining minority rights while also not effectively giving them a veto on everything the majority wants.
The filibuster as it stands now exacerbates the disproportionate representation in the Senate. Because every state has two senators the country a disproportionate amount of senators represent fewer people. E.g. Two senators for California's 40 million people and two senators for South Dakota's 860,000 people. Given that, there needs to be reform because as it stands whether the Republicans are the majority in the senate or the minority, they have control.
Because Democrats always like to bite off more than they can chew, we'd suggest a first step. One this one rules change to the filibuster and that would be to make it standing, meaning that if a Senator wants to filibuster a bill he or she must stand up and hold the floor with pertinent rhetoric on why they oppose it.
Democrats should make that one change and then stick it to Republicans by bringing a slew of bills to the floor so that they have to physically make octogenarians like Mitchell McConnell and Chuck Grassley stand at the podium for 8 to 12 hours and then have a vote.
Why make legislating physically punishing? Let's throw that back the other way and ask haven't the American people been physically punished enough with unaffordable housing and healthcare, crappy employment and covid? Is it a little cynical to physically punish Mitch McConnell? Yes, but it's justified.
Stand up and make a case or shut the hell up, right? Since when is the United States an apartheid state where it's minority rule?
Specifically, voting rights for all Americans are being curtailed by conservative state legislatures and what used to be a bipartisan no-brainer of reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act is no more since The Supreme Court's 2013 decision to eliminate the pre-clearance provision in which states wanting to change election laws had to have approval from the Justice Dept. States like Texas and Arizona are running wild in changing their laws to suppress and potentially nullify votes. No Republicans voted to reauthorize the Act.
Again, Roy Blunt not helpful with his disingenuous answer that a voting rights bill would be a national take over of voting, empty rhetoric. Look at it this way, states set their own minimum wage, but there is a baseline national minimum wage, which is $7.25 by the way. What the voting rights bill establishes is some basic minimums like making presidential election day a national holiday.
But here's the rub, the bill also institutes a reauthorization of the pre-clearance provision. The Republican minority is saying 'no' to that, and what the minority in the Senate wants, it gets.
Panel: Ayesha Rascoe, NPR, Maria Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino; Eugene Daniels, Politco; Brendan Buck, Republican Strategist
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