WASHINGTON — The two leaders of the U.S. Senate dueled over the preservation of the filibuster on Monday, with Mitch McConnell accusing Chuck Schumer of readying an attack on the institution’s core identity to permit widespread changes to how elections are run.
“The Senate Democratic leaders are trying to use a big lie to bully and break their own members into breaking their word, breaking the rules and breaking the Senate,” McConnell said on the Senate floor, employing some of his most dramatic rhetoric on the subject to date. “The excuses put forward for this behavior are entirely fake. The supposed justifications are simply false.”
Schumer, the Democratic leader from New York, is planning to hold a vote this week on one or more of his party’s proposals to liberalize voting across the country. If Republicans block those bills, he is threatening to hold a debate on scrapping the filibuster – the rule that requires most Senate legislation attain 60 votes for passage.
Yet at the moment, Schumer’s bigger obstacle than McConnell is uniting all of his own party around the changes. Moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have consistently said they oppose lowering the 60 vote threshold to a simple majority.
Still, just as ardently as Schumer outlined the need for election reforms, McConnell fiercely pushed back, even adopting similar language to former President Donald Trump to dismiss the Democrats’ claims of a democracy under siege in the states.
“This is totally fake. It does not exist,” McConnell said. “Every hysterical claim that our democracy is in crisis rings hollow.”
The Senate Republican leader pointed out that Georgia now allows for a longer early voting period than liberal New York.
The Peach State offers three weeks of early voting, including during two Saturdays statewide. The Republican legislature there also imposed more stringent voting identification for absentee balloting and limited the number of drop boxes available.
“When Republicans in states like Georgia, Indiana and Florida cut back on the number and the availability of locations where people can drop off their absentee ballots, how can Republicans say that voting hasn’t been made harder?” Schumer argued. “And when Republicans in states like Georgia make it a crime to give food and water to people waiting in line at the polls, how is that not making it harder for them to cast a ballot?”
President Joe Biden will visit Georgia on Tuesday to make his pitch for expanded voting rights.
McConnell also cited Texas, which rolled back overnight and drive-thru voting used in the heavily Democratic Houston area.
“Neither of these things existed in Texas before 2020 and neither widely exist in blue states,” McConnell said.
Democrats’ federal legislation would seek to override the state-by-state changes, making Election Day a holiday, forcing states that require a photo I.D. to accept a broad range of other forms of identification and restricting states' ability to purge voters from their rolls. It would also mandate same-day registration and no-excuse absentee voting.
“If Republicans refuse to join us in a bipartisan spirit — if they continue to hijack the rules of the Senate to turn this chamber into a deep freezer — we are going to consider the appropriate steps necessary to restore the Senate, so we can pass these proposals and send them to the president’s desk,” Schumer promised.
McConnell said if Schumer carried through with his threat to scrap the filibuster, the move would disenfranchise millions of Americans represented by the 50 Republican senators in an evenly divided upper chamber. The 50 Senate Democrats represent more than 41 million more people than their Republican counterparts.
“It would destroy a key feature of American government forever,” McConnell said. “And senators on both sides know it.”
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