Filibuster
Floor Speech
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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, my friend Senator Schumer, and some of my Democratic friends would like to change one of the enduring institutions of this institution. They want to get rid of the filibuster--and I call it the 60-vote threshold.
And a reasonable person might ask: Well, why not? Institutions change all the time. Change is the law of life. I will tell you why not. I want you to hear these words of wisdom:
We are on the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional crisis--
Getting rid of the filibuster. the checks and balances which have been at the core of this Republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option--
Getting rid of the filibuster. the checks and balances which say if you get 51 percent of the vote you do not get your way 100 percent of the time--
If you get 51 percent of the vote, you do not get your way 100 percent of the time in the U.S. Senate-- that is what we call abuse of power. There is, unfortunately, a whiff of extremism in the air.
Those are words of wisdom by Senator Chuck Schumer, May 18, 2005.
If we change the 60-vote threshold, if we change this institution which is part of the institution of the U.S. Senate, it will gut this body like a fish--like a fish. And everybody in this body knows that if that is accomplished, our institution will look like a scene out of ``Mad Max.''
America is a--God, what a wonderful place. It is a big, wide, open, diverse, sometimes dysfunctional, oftentimes imperfect, but good country with good people in it. And I want to emphasize the diversity part. What constitutes the good life in my State may not constitute the good life in Connecticut or in California or in Florida or in Maine.
And that is one of the reasons that we have and have had the institution of the 60-vote threshold. If you are going to make a law that is going to impact the entirety of this big, wide, open, diverse country, then you ought to have 60 votes because if you only have 51 votes, 51 percent of the vote does not get your way 100 percent of the time.
It has worked for a long time.
Now, I don't want to sound like I am lecturing, because I get it. I get it. I get that my Democratic friends and some of my Republican friends, who, frankly, are probably thinking about this--but I get that my Democratic friends want to--that they want to serve their President. We all want to serve our President. But you especially want to serve your President when the President is of your own party.
I remember when President Trump--now like President Biden--said: Change the filibuster. Get rid of it. I can't get my bills passed.
We said no. And by ``we,'' I mean Republicans and Democrats. Here is the letter right here. It was led by Senator Collins, a Republican, and Senator Chris Coons. I signed it. We said no.
Now President Biden wants to do the same thing. That is what Presidents do. They try to pass their bills. So I get it.
To my Democratic colleagues and any Republican colleagues who are thinking about voting for Senator Schumer's change of heart, I want to tell them: I get it too. I get it. I know the frustration. I have felt it. I have talked about it on this floor before.
You know, we all come up here for one reason: to make this country better. And we are ready to go to work, and we want to debate, and we want to decide. We didn't come up here for delay. We didn't come up here for stultification. So I get it. I get the frustration. But you don't satisfy those aims by not following these words of wisdom by Senator Schumer.
Now, once passions have cooled, I don't want my words to be construed as an assertion that everything about our body is perfect. There are changes, once passions have cooled and the filibuster is intact, the 60-vote threshold is intact--I use ``60-vote threshold'' because ``filibuster'' to some has negative connotations, and it is a positive rule, not a negative rule. But once passions have cooled, there are a lot of questions that we need to sit down and talk about, and if my Democratic friends want to talk about them, I will be there. Call the meeting. I will pounce on it like a ninja.
I mean, there are questions that we need to be asking ourselves about this body; how we can make it better. Do we give our majority leader too much authority? It is not personal. Do we give our minority leader too much authority? It is not personal, but that is a fair question.
Every Member of this body knows about the diminution of our committee system. Why do we even have committees anymore, for God's sake? I mean, you go work your committee, and you get a bill out, and it is a bipartisan bill, and you are feeling all toasty and ready to go, and you learn pretty quick around this place that doesn't matter. It is probably dead as fried chicken if the majority leader doesn't want to bring it up. And that is true whether the majority leader is Republican or Democrat. We need to have an honest conversation about the diminution of the committee process.
Our amendment rules. My God, there is not a single Member of this body who really understands those rules. I mean, if you ask--pick 10 Senators at random and say: Tell me the truth, now. Do you understand the rules of the Senate about how to offer an amendment? Nine out of ten will tell you no, and the tenth is lying. We ought to have an amendment process that looks like somebody designed it on purpose, and we don't. We ought to talk about that.
We ought to talk about the fact that this body--it didn't happen just yesterday--has ceded an enormous amount of our power, under a Madisonian system of separation of powers, to the executive branch and to the administrative staff.
After this is over, if any of my Democratic friends want to have that talk and see if we can't come up with a way to improve this body and ask some hard questions, I will be there happily, and I hope we can make progress. But to my colleagues, I say: Please, please, don't do this.
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