Coronavirus

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Now, Mr. President, on a totally different message, I had hoped, Republicans had hoped, and the American people had hoped that the Senate would be spending this week finishing up another bipartisan agreement on coronavirus relief. We want to get hundreds of billions more dollars into the pipeline for kids, for jobs, for healthcare.

Unfortunately, Senate Democrats chose to block it all. Our Democratic colleagues voted against hundreds of billions of dollars to help Americans fight the virus. This wasn't even a vote on final passage, just a procedural vote to break the Democratic leader's filibuster and move forward with something. Senate Democrats, nevertheless, filibustered the aid.

Then, just a few short days later, they went right back to signaling that a Democratic Senate majority paired with a President Joe Biden would abolish the filibuster and permanently vandalize this institution to more easily force radical change on the country. This threat to permanently disfigure the Senate has been the latest growing drumbeat in the modern Democratic Party's war against our governing institutions.

There was former Senator Reid starting the ``nuclear'' exchange back in 2013. There have been years of unprecedented tactics to try and deny President Trump the government the people elected. There has been the least fair, least thorough, and most rushed impeachment inquiry in modern history.

Now, the most shameless--the most shameless--hypocrisy: Senate Democrats happily use the filibuster to block coronavirus relief and Senator Tim Scott's police reform bill at the very same time they are conspiring to destroy that very tool so they can ram through their radical agenda if they ever win power. Grade A hypocrisy and nothing more.

We have had former President Obama call for ``eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic,'' about 1 month after his own party used it to kill Senator Tim Scott's police reform bill. We have some of former Vice President Biden's allies in the Senate daydreaming about ending the filibuster even as they themselves use the filibuster to kill pandemic relief for working families.

Democrats want completely different sets of rules depending on whether they hold power--different sets of rules depending upon whether they hold power. They want to assert minority rights when they have the minority and steamroll them if they get a majority.

Here is NBC News:

Democratic insiders are assembling a coalition behind the scenes to wage an all-out war on the Senate filibuster. . . . Veteran party operatives, activist groups and supportive Senators are coordinating message and strategy.

This takes measuring the drapes to a new level. The Democratic leader and his colleagues aren't just measuring the drapes; they are calculating how much kerosene it would take to burn the drapes down.

They aren't just threatening to pass radical policies like Medicare for none or the Green New Deal--no, no, no. The far left wants to hot- wire democracy itself--things like packing the Supreme Court with new seats or packing the Senate by handing out new statehood to one individual city.

I said it a few months ago. Today's Democrats have lost patience with playing by the rules and want to wage war on the rule book itself. They are saying as much out loud.

Perhaps our colleagues think promising a shameless power grab is the only way to energize their radical, far-left base, but the real effect--the real effect--is to make the stakes in these issues completely and totally clear to the American people.

The Framers designed the Senate to be the country's firewall against ill-considered and radical change. That is what the Senate was all about in the beginning. If our Democratic friends have concluded their worst ideas could never clear the high bar--if they think their ideas could never clear the high bar, it is their bad ideas that need to be scrapped, not the core checks and balances of our government.

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