During a CNN presidential town hall on July 21, Joe Biden snubs a key Democrat talking point in a major way. The increasingly radical party has been calling for the filibuster to be abolished, but it appears that their leader disagrees.
Joe Biden shot down calls from the radical left to abolish the filibuster, which Democrats have been advocating for as a way to ram through their destructive agenda with a divided Senate.
As both an attendee of his town hall and its moderator, CNN fake news host Don Lemon, pressed Biden to explain why he hasn’t joined in on the calls to abolish the filibuster, he responded by claiming that any effort to do so would jeopardize his entire legislative agenda.
“There’s no reason to protect it, other than you’re going to throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done,” he said. “Nothing at all will get done. There’s a lot at stake. The most important one is the right to vote, that’s the single most important one.”
Fox News reports:
“Demands among progressives to abolish the filibuster have escalated since June, when Senate Republicans blocked consideration of the ‘For The People Act’ after Democrats failed to secure the 60 votes required to overcome the filibuster. Biden is a staunch advocate of the bill, arguing it is a necessary check on election integrity bills in GOP-led states that the president has likened to ‘Jim Crow in the 21st Century.'”
Despite his unwillingness to push for an end to the filibuster, Biden did state that so-called “abuse” of the tactic has been “pretty overwhelming” in the Senate. He also reiterated his belief that lawmakers should be required to actually “hold the floor,” aka deliver continued remarks in the Senate chamber, to maintain a filibuster.
Biden made similar comments to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos earlier this year, stating: “I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster, you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days. You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking.”
In March of 2021, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Biden and the Democrats that they risk a “scorched earth” Congress if they end the filibuster.
“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin to imagine — what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like,” McConnell said in a Senate speech.
Just as Democrats came to regret their move to lower the Senate vote threshold to 51 to confirm most presidential appointments — which happened in 2013 under the leadership of Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — they will come to regret abolishing the filibuster if Republicans retake the Senate majority in 2022. Their short-sightedness often gets them into trouble, and this situation is no different. For once, Joe Biden is right, abolishing the filibuster would be a bad idea.
