Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) addresses a news conference prior to the reconvening of the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 21, 2020. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 12:29 pm
Congressional Democrats are signaling that they learned their lesson from the Obama years and won’t allow Republicans to waste time and obstruct Biden.
E.J. Dionne wrote in The Washington Post:
The 2009-2010 example comes up again and again in conversations with Democrats. “We have to learn from that experience in an even more urgent crisis,” said Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.), the assistant House speaker, in an interview.
This means being willing to move quickly to what is known as the reconciliation process, which would allow passage of economic relief on a simple Senate majority.
“We should give Senate Republicans a very short amount of time to signal if they want to be partners in moving the country forward, or if they intend to be obstructionists,” Van Hollen said. “And the early signaling is that they are reverting to their obstructionist mode.”
Democrats aren’t going to allow the Republican Party to waste precious time by stalling and obstructing Joe Biden. Senate Majority Leader Schumer‘s threat to nuke or weaken the filibuster is real. There are many ways besides one big vote to get rid of the filibuster. There is a death by a thousand obstructions strategy that is especially appealing.
Each time that McConnell uses the filibuster to block a bill, Democrats respond by weakening the filibuster. The more that McConnell obstructs, the weaker the filibuster becomes overall. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and a couple of others want to keep the filibuster, but they have no opposition to weakening it.
The brilliance of this strategy is that it keeps Democrats on board while directly punishing Mitch McConnel for each abuse of power.
The overall point is that Senate Democrats have learned their lesson.
Democrats are in the majority to get things done, and they aren’t going to let Mitch McConnell stop them.
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