WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. Thom Tillis threatened Wednesday from the floor of the U.S. Senate to leave Congress if members of his party ever voted to change the filibuster.
“The day the Republicans change the filibuster is the day that I resign from the Senate,” Tillis said from the chamber’s podium.
Senate rules allow members to debate a piece of legislation for as long as they choose. A filibuster is a political maneuver in which a bill is continually debated as a means to delay or block a vote. It forces the majority party to find 60 votes to approve most legislation in the 100-member Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called his colleagues out of recess this week to decide on a voting rights bill backed by Schumer and his fellow Democrats. He was also expected to bring a second vote forward that would scale back the filibuster on voting rights bills. Both votes were expected to fail.
The Senate blocked the voting rights bill Wednesday night, with North Carolina’s Tillis and Sen. Richard Burr joining their fellow Republicans in voting to block the bill.
Democrats hold a slight majority over Republicans in Congress, and Republicans have been more consistently using the filibuster to block key votes Democrats bring forward. Changing the filibuster would help Democrats counter a wave of changes to election laws in states controlled by Republicans.
But Tillis told Democrats Wednesday that he stood by them when former President Donald Trump repeatedly called for Republicans to end the filibuster. He said that led to attacks, protests and proposals from his county and state GOPs to censure him. He said hearing from Democrats Wednesday that things changed left him feeling betrayed.
Tillis joined other Republicans in exempting Supreme Court confirmations from the filibuster in 2017, but on Wednesday he defended the filibuster for legislation.
“And if you vote to nuke the legislative filibuster, you might as well build a wall straight down this body,” Tillis said.
Tillis said election reform is needed.
He said that Congress needs to modernize the Electoral Count Act and stop using it as a weapon against the other party, citing the increasing number of members of Congress who have voted against certifying a president’s election over the past 20 years.
He said there needs to be a higher bar for objecting to certification and added that he was “proud” to certify the election of President Joe Biden.
“We have legitimate problems that we need to fix,” Tillis said. “We need to make it harder to cheat and easier to vote.”
But Tillis said ending the filibuster isn’t the way to do it, would divide the parties further and would dilute the minority party’s voice well into the future.
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