President Joe Biden has shed his reluctance to alter Senate rules on the filibuster as his political standing has diminished and his legislative agenda has stalled.
Biden began to move away from his support for the 60-vote threshold to end debate on most legislation this fall after insisting that abolishing the filibuster would lead to “chaos” as recently as July. But the intensity with which he has advocated changing the rules of a congressional chamber in which he served for 36 years has increased in the new year.
Both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made nuking the filibuster a significant focus of their combative Atlanta speeches supporting Democratic voting legislation. They said if Republicans could not be persuaded to back bills seen as a federal takeover of election law to the electoral benefit of Democrats, the old rules must go.
“We do not know when we will have this opportunity again,” Harris said. “Senate Republicans have exploited arcane rules to block these bills.” She later added that “our children and grandchildren” would harshly judge those who stood with the filibuster: “We cannot tell them that we let a Senate rule stand in the way of our most fundamental freedom. Instead, let us tell them that we stood together as people of conscience and courage.”
But Harris was not viewed as an institutionalist during her time in the Senate. Biden was, and he made his ability to strike legislative deals a major selling point to the suburban voters who were decisive in putting him in the White House. He acknowledged as much in his speech that compared his political opponents to famous racists of yesteryear.
“It gives me no satisfaction in saying that, as an institutionalist, as a man who was honored to serve in the Senate,” Biden said in decrying the gridlock in the body. “But as an institutionalist, I believe that the threat to our democracy is so grave that we must find a way to pass these voting rights bills, debate them, let the majority prevail.”
Then, Biden lowered the boom: “And if that bare minimum is blocked, we have no option but to change the Senate rules, including getting rid of the filibuster for this.”
Biden has many reasons for renewed urgency on the filibuster front. Civil rights activists have complained he has spent more time and political capital promoting his massive spending bill, which has since stalled, than legislation they regard as protecting voting rights for their communities. Many of them boycotted his Atlanta speech, and Stacey Abrams, the once and likely future Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia who cast doubt on the 2018 election results, cited a scheduling conflict. (Abrams’s camp insisted to the Washington Examiner that it was an “inadvertent miscommunication.”)
Democrats can ill afford any decline in turnout among black voters, especially in competitive states such as Georgia. According to exit polls, while this critical voting bloc helped Biden secure the Democratic presidential nomination, nearly 1 in 5 black men voted for former President Donald Trump last year.
The party also believes it needs some of its voting bills’ provisions to be in effect by the midterm elections to save their majorities. For example, former Attorney General Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee has claimed that the Freedom to Vote Act would boost the number of competitive House districts by 40%.
But it is precisely the likelihood that these majorities will be lost in November, and with them the possibility of enacting much of Biden’s agenda, that has the White House so exercised. Republicans lead in the generic congressional ballot, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. If they win either the House or Senate, any liberal policy priorities left undone are unlikely to reach the finish line for the remainder of Biden’s term. Thus, Harris’s comments about missed opportunities.
The problem for Biden is that he lacks the votes to pass his biggest legislative asks now, with a 50-50 Senate that Democrats barely control due to Harris’s tiebreaking vote. At least one Democratic senator opposes the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. Two are against changing or eliminating the filibuster, sinking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s push to do so. Even breaking up the spending bill and finding stray provisions centrist Democrats and Republicans support on a stand-alone basis will become increasingly difficult the closer the election comes.
With his New Deal dreams stymied and the filibuster scapegoated, Biden could then face an even tougher election — his own.
Haisten Willis contributed to this report.
