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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Tuesday accused Democrats of pushing “fake hysteria” over the allegedly racist “Jim Crow relic” filibuster, which they defended for years and used as recently as last week.
“Let’s spell this out,” McConnell, R-Ky., said. “Democrats want the American people to believe the filibuster was not a Jim Crow relic in 2005, was not even a Jim Crow relic in 2020, just miraculously became a Jim Crow relic in 2021, just briefly stopped being a Jim Crow relic last Thursday, but it’s now back to being a Jim Crow relic this week.”
McConnell was the first Republican to speak after Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., opened floor debate on two major Democrat-backed election bills. Republicans are expected to oppose block those bills using the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold for legislation.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, walks to the Senate floor at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2022.
(Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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Schumer says he’ll force a vote to change the filibuster if that happens. He says it’s not fair Republicans can pass election laws via a simple majority on the state level but Democrats can’t do the same in the Senate.
But McConnell detailed several instances in which Democrats supported and used the Senate filibuster over a period of nearly two decades.
He cited a letter from a conglomeration of left-leaning activist groups supporting the filibuster in 2005 – the same year Schumer himself made an impassioned defense of the practice.
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McConnell also said that Democrats used the filibuster repeatedly during former President Donald Trump’s term, including on the 2020 police reform bill from Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., before denouncing it last year, and then suddenly taking advantage of a 60-vote threshold to block a bill for sanctions against Russia last week.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., is seated before a Senate Rules and Administration Committee oversight hearing on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2022, in Washington. Schumer is going to push a vote to change the Senate filibuster that is almost guaranteed to fail.
(Elizabeth Frantz/Pool via AP)
“There were 55 votes to pass the bill,” McConnell said of the legislation to impose sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
The bill had the support of 49 Republicans and six Democrats. “But Democrats blocked it by denying 60,” McConnell said.
“Many of the same colleagues have spent weeks thundering… that the Senate’s 60-vote threshold is an offensive tool of obstruction, a Jim Crow relic, declaring that simple majorities should always get their way. But late last week they literally wielded the 60-vote threshold themselves,” McConnell said. “A useful reminder of just how fake, fake, the hysteria has been.”
The Nord Stream 2 bill did not come up under the Senate’s normal filibuster, which requires 60 votes to start or end debate on a bill before a simple-majority vote on passage.
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Democrats agreed to allow a fast-track final passage vote on the bill, pushed by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in exchange for Cruz’s cooperation in confirming some presidential nominees. But Democrats set the threshold for Cruz’s bill to pass at 60-votes, creating the same effect as a traditional filibuster. And they took advantage of it to block the legislation with a minority of senators.
McConnell also attacked the election bills underlying Schumer’s filibuster push as “not in any way successors of the civil rights legislation from the mid-twentieth century.”
Pipes for the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea gas pipeline are stored on the premises of the port of Mukran near Sassnitz, Germany, on Dec. 4, 2020. Democrats filibustered a bill to sanction individuals associated with the pipeline last week.
(Stefan Sauer/dpa via AP, File)
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“Targeting Americans’ online speech and sending government money to political campaigns is not about civil rights. It’s about tilting the playing field,” McConnell said Tuesday. “Weakening wildly popular voter ID laws and making it harder to produce accurate voter rolls is not about making voting easier. It’s about making cheating easier.”
Schumer, meanwhile, says Republicans’ votes on the election bills will mark their choice of “which side they stand on: Protecting democracy or offering their implicit endorsement of Donald Trump’s big lie.” And on the filibuster vote, which is almost certain to fail because Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., oppose changing it, Schumer said he’ll call the vote anyway.
“When this chamber confronts a question this important… you don’t slide it off the table and say, ‘nevermind,’” he said. “Win, lose or draw members of this chamber were elected to debate and to vote… And the public is entitled to know where each senator stands on an issue as sacrosanct as defending our democracy.”
