Vice President Kamala Harris has called for eliminating the filibuster to pass a national bill codifying abortion rights. Other top Democrats have called for abolishing the filibuster to pass a Supreme Court packing bill or voting rights legislation. Suspending the filibuster for your highest policy priorities, like guaranteeing abortion rights nationwide, is a very bad idea for four reasons.
First, if Kamala Harris and the Democrats abolish the filibuster on an issue as big as abortion rights for women, or to pack the Supreme Court, the Republicans will abolish the filibuster when they are next in power to ban public sector unions nationwide, to require school choice nationwide, to require tort reform nationwide, and to repack the Supreme Court. Democrats eliminated the filibuster of executive and judicial officers on the lower federal courts in 2013. As a direct result, when Republicans came to power and had a Senate majority in 2017, they eliminated the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees. This allowed the confirmations of Neil Gorsuch, by a vote of 54 to 45, of Brett Kavanaugh by a vote of 50 to 48, and of Amy Coney Barrett in October of a presidential election year by a vote of 52 to 48. What goes around comes around. Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party will rue the day they eliminated the filibuster to pass national abortion rights legislation or a Supreme Court packing bill.
This leads me to my second point, which is this: the one thing that we know for sure about the upcoming election on November 5th is that the presidential race and the races for control of both Houses of Congress are going to be incredibly close. If Democrats elect Harris by a small margin and win control of the two Houses of Congress by a small margin, they will not have a mandate to make a sweeping constitutional change in our system of government. Suspending the filibuster in the Senate would be a sweeping and probably permanent constitutional change in our system of government.
