Harry Reid Predicts Demise Of Filibuster While McConnell Frantically Tries To Save His Weapon Of Mass Obstruction

Doublethink is a process of indoctrination whereby the subject is expected to simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to one’s own memories or sense of reality. Doublethink is related to, but differs from, hypocrisy. — Wikipedia

Doublethink: the acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination. —  Oxford Dictionary

The times they are a changing and the filibuster, it is a going, and Mitch McConnell, he is a freaking. The filibuster was theoretically designed to provide a safety mechanism in the upper chamber of Congress to distinguish its process of bill passage from the faster moving and more capricious voting in the House. It also was supposed to provide a means to lobby so that the people’s attention would be drawn to a good cause, i.e. the Jimmy Stewart character in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, where Mr. Smith stayed on the floor speaking until he collapsed, in order to call attention to the good cause of protecting a boy’s camp. All of these philosophical underpinnings sound good, but the fact remains that in Mitch McConnell’s hands the filibuster became a weapon which he used to obstruct and grind the gears of government to a halt. By abusing the filibuster power as egregiously as he did, McConnell called attention to it and made people question its legitimacy, just as some future legislature will undoubtedly address the pardon power, which was rampantly abused in ways that it was never designed for, in Donald Trump’s hands.

McConnell and the conservative world are calling attention to the fact that both Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden initially opposed the elimination of the filibuster in days of yore. The reexamination of the filibuster is now being touted as high hypocrisy by McConnell. His spin is that democrats are now going to act out of malice and because they’re in a position to do so — which, if true, is the GOP playbook and so what?  McConnell quoted Schumer in his scorched-earth Wall Street Journal editorial.

The legislative filibuster is the most important distinction between the Senate and the House,” one of my colleagues said a few years ago. “Without the 60-vote threshold for legislation, the Senate becomes a majoritarian institution, just like the House, much more subject to the winds of short-term electoral change. No senator would like to see that happen.”

And Joe Biden didn’t used to want to do away with the filibuster, either. But he stated the plain fact of the matter, which is that right now, democracy isn’t functioning properly in the Senate. And now McConnell’s old nemesis and former majority leader himself, Harry Reid, has hammer and nails in hand, and he’s pounding them into the filibuster coffin. Mediaite:

“The filibuster is on its way out,” Reid said. “It’s not a question of if but when. It may not be tomorrow or six months from now, but the filibuster is doomed for failure. You can’t have a democracy that requires 60 percent of the vote on everything.

Reid famously spent years quibbling with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) over the Senate’s filibuster, which permits the minority party to block votes unless the majority can come up with 60 votes to end debate. He ceased honoring it on federal court nominees in 2013, when he accused Republicans of blocking former President Barack Obama’s appointees. McConnell reciprocated in 2017, overriding Senate Democrats to confirm Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The filibuster, which has been a parliamentary option since 1806, is still in place for legislative items, but Democrats have called for eliminating it. Obama called it a “Jim Crow relic” last year and said his party should end it in order to add Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico as states. President Joe Biden said Tuesday he wanted the chamber to begin requiring members to continue speaking in order to uphold filibusters, rather than simply assuming they would do so.

“Here’s the choice: 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,” Biden said. “You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking.”

You had to be the Jimmy Stewart character in a Frank Capra movie, in other words. Good luck finding that kind of idealism, courage, soaring optimism and faith in democracy in any Republican senator sitting today. They don’t even know what those characteristics are, much less know they’re supposed to possess them in some measure to be real leaders, let alone have them.

Now McConnell is nobody’s fool. He sees the handwriting on the wall and he’s out there swinging. But terms like intellectual dishonesty and doublethink don’t begin to cover what he’s doing now, or what he tried to do in his op/ed. Pure gaslighting is more like it. Johnathan Chait, Intelligencer:

A specter is haunting the Republican Party. And that specter, oddly enough, is a future world in which Republicans control government and pass bills that they campaigned on.

Mitch McConnell’s latest defense of what remains of the filibuster yesterday veered wildly between two irreconcilable claims. On the one hand, he warned a majority-rules Senate would be a “scorched earth,” “disaster,” “hundred-car pileup” in which nothing happens. On the other hand, he warned that once Republicans gained control of government, the chamber would become a smooth-running machine in which conservative priorities are quickly enacted. […]

McConnell has made gridlock so routine that both he and his imagined audience see the idea of a party enacting the proposals it advocates as fantastical and scary. But if you go to any of the 50 states, that is not how political rhetoric operates. Candidates for office advocate positions, then try to pass them into law when elected, and take credit for them if they work. The opposition party either accepts those changes, modified, or runs against them and tries to reverse them if they remain unpopular. Likewise, every democratic government in the world that I’m aware of operates on the same principle.

None of these democracies, domestic or foreign, needs a supermajority to protect against an elected government carrying out its promised agenda. Obviously, temporary majorities need some restraint to prevent excess. But those restraints exist — in the American system, not only multiple veto points and courts that can curtail unconstitutional laws, but democracy itself. The dynamic that inhibits majorities from exceeding their mandate is the prospect that their policies will create a backlash and be subject to reversal.

In place of this, we have the peculiar dynamic in which the leader of a major party is invoking his own agenda as something that cannot and should not happen.

That’s the sublime irony, the doublethink, the paradox even, if it were true. What is true is that McConnell knows all too well that what he represents is the tyranny of the minority. That’s what the Republican party has been about for years now and they all know it. They seek to enforce their rule by the only mechanisms they have — and democracy’s not on the list — which are gerrymandering, voter suppression and failing that, the filibuster. And don’t forget that other gem, the electoral college system, the jewel in the crown, which makes possible the tyranny of the minority. The Republicans love that one best of all. The only way that the GOP can keep the true will of the majority of people from being realized legislatively is to keep all four of these mechanisms in place. Then and only then does the minority rule, established on the basis of white supremacy and dedicating to keeping that system alive, continue. That, ladies and gentlemen, is your GOP in 2021. It’s no undercurrent in the GOP, it is the GOP.

The two senators per state rule was established back in the day when it was necessary to placate former slave owners. In modern times, the population centers of the country, particularly on both coasts, contain a huge amount of the population.  Despite that, a minority of people in mostly rural states can overrule the will of the actual, physical majority of Americans, by having their two senators vote down issues that the majority favors and by gerrymandering and voter suppression tweak the electorate, to the point where the electoral college can and does determine who is president, even if the person loses the popular vote. A Republican candidate hasn’t won the popular vote in 20 years. Trump lost the popular vote resoundingly both times he ran.

This is the state of play in American politics in this day and age and this is the basic recipe for the culture war. Throw in some right-wing media to convince people removed from the cities that they are the only true Americans and that city dwellers are some alien life form, and POCs are coming from urban centers — or across the Mexican border — to rape and murder them, to quote Donald Trump, season that mix with a little QAnon and you have baked in insanity in the body politic. And that is how Trump got elected. And this is what McConnell is trying to hang onto, starting with his precious filibuster.

All that Joe Biden is suggesting is that senators use the filibuster the way it was designed to be used, talk, keep talking and do it by the book, or it needs to be eliminated. And it needs to be eliminated, or go back to its original form, one or the other. Now is the time for that determination to be made. And McConnell wants to keep it in the form he likes it, pure obstruction.

Harry Reid seems to think the filibuster is going the way of the dinosaur and he’s probably right. The real battle though, make no mistake, is voters rights and the desperate smoke screen that GOPers are trying to throw up regarding non existent voter fraud, in order to forestall it. That’s the democratic experiment’s next biggest test.