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During her speech at the Democratic National Convention some weeks ago, Vice President Kamala Harris imparted some wisdom from her later mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris. “Never do anything half-assed,” she said, insisting: “That is a direct quote.”
But on Tuesday, she seemed to betray that virtue when she told Wisconsin Public Radio that she would support eliminating the filibuster to restore abortion rights enshrined in Roe v Wade. To be clear, that would mean getting rid of the filibuster only in the case of reproductive access — and not for other issues.
Nobody should be surprised by this. In 2022, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson opinion leaked, Harris and Democrats supported doing the very same thing.
The attempt ultimately failed, thanks to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin — then a Democrat who has since become an independent — opposing the legislation. That meant Democrats, who only had 50 seats with Harris serving as a tie-breaker, couldn’t even get past the first hurdle in trying to make it a reality.
Unsurprisingly, Manchin went into a rage this week when Harris made her announcement.
“It's hard for me to endorse anybody that accepts you can get rid of the 60-vote threshold,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
It’s a change in tune for Manchin, who praised Harris recently in a conversation with me after the first debate between Harris and Trump. When Harris defended fracking at that time, Manchin told The Independent, “I was tickled to death,” because “now we have a policy that’s producing energy that we need and investing in energy we want.” It seemed likely at that juncture that he would endorse her.
Whatever Manchin thinks will be irrelevant next year, given he is retiring and he has always liked sticking his finger in the eye of Democratic leadership. But despite the fact he annoys Democrats, he has half a point: Harris is, to borrow from her late mother, half-assing the filibuster.
And for that matter, so is Manchin.
Morever, Republicans are refusing to even sit part of their hindquarters in the chair.
Democrats are now talking about getting rid of the filibuster to codify abortion rights. But earlier in 2022, before Dobbs, they attempted to get the entire caucus on board to carve out an exception to pass a new version of the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court weakened it in 2013.
Democrats — and in particular, Joe Biden — felt they needed to do so in response to Black Lives Matter protests, considering that Black voters propelled Biden to the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. Democrats even had the gall to name their legislation after John Lewis, the late congressman and civil rights activist who had his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, knowing full well it could not pass.
This reveals the major problem for Democrats: given that the Senate gives equal representation to rural states with plenty of white people as it does to states with large Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ populations, it is much harder to overcome the filibuster and invoke cloture. In fact, they learned this very lesson in 2013 when they nuked the filibuster to confirm Barack Obama’s cabinet nominations and all judicial nominees save for those on the Supreme Court.
And who’s to say whether voting rights matter more, in terms of breaking the rules of the Senate, than, say, abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, the rights of workers to organize a union, or the rights of people in Washington DC or Puerto Rico to claim statehood?
In 2017, when Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, used the precedent to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court justices to overcome opposition to Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch. That also meant that when Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg weeks before the 2020 election, Democrats had no means to block Republicans’ confirmation. What Democrats started, Republicans finished.
But Manchin is being equally dishonest. He — and his fellow Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema — have long opposed getting rid of the filibuster. In their eyes, it prevents acrimony and partisan rancor and in turn forces both parties to work together.
This is a rose-colored perspective on the filibuster, a vestige of when the Senate was dominated by white men and when white men used it to block civil rights laws and anti-lynching bills.
During his gaggle, Manchin invoked his predecessor, the late Robert Byrd (Manchin sits in the same seat as Byrd now). Byrd was famously a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act, before publicly admitting that he was wrong and changing his views. Byrd went on to support civil rights and to endorse Barack Obama in 2008. A particularly affecting of Obama’s memoir describes the moment when Byrd was poised to apologize to him personally for his past behavior, and Obama said he forgave him.
Byrd did have the decency to admit he was wrong to block civil rights. But his legacy is complex. He was still was a believer in the traditions of the Senate until his dying breath.
Republicans are not off the hook on this, either. They have essentially made the filibuster the default tactic in voting in the Senate for even the most basic legislation, all while they ramrod any legislation and use any procedural tactics possible to get around filibusters when they have the majority.
It’s true that Republicans resisted the temptation to get rid of the filibuster before, despite the urging of Trump after their attempts to repeal Obamacare failed. But as was the case in 2017, the moment Democrats get rid of it, they will also readily abandon it to pass their own priorities.
It also should be noted that Republicans tend to use the filibuster as a convenient excuse to not pass legislation their most extreme members want. Not being able to use it as cover could make their lives a lot harder in terms of pleasing the far-right sections of the GOP.
Plenty of people have strong opinions on the filibuster. But until someone is serious about pulling the trigger on it, it’s better if they don’t “half-ass” it and just take a seat.
