Filibuster

Floor Speech

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Mrs. FISCHER. Mr. President, President Biden wants to pass a new New Deal. In fact, in some ways, the reckless spending the President is pushing for actually dwarfs the New Deal. But Joe Biden is not FDR, and we are not living in the Great Depression. The New Deal passed the House and the Senate on the back of huge Democratic supermajorities.

Today, Americans have elected a 50-50 Senate and a razor-thin Democratic majority in the House. The American people voted for bipartisanship and compromise in the U.S. Congress, not a blanket mandate for progressives to reorganize American life as they see fit. But some Democrats in Congress seem to think they did.

Because they haven't reached out to Republicans to work together on important issues, they haven't been able to pass their Build Back Better plan, so they have turned their attention to another kind of Federal Government overreach: overhauling the way our country runs elections. Their argument is that lawmakers in red States are trying to make it harder for people to vote, and so it is necessary for Washington Democrats to take over election administration in all 50 States.

One important point: The first part of that is simply not true. The right to vote is not under assault. According to Pew Research, 94 percent of Americans believe that voting is easy. In my home State of Nebraska, we achieved a record 76 percent voter turnout in the 2020 election, in the middle of a pandemic, because of all the different ways that my State made it easier for Nebraskans to vote, including expanded early voting and no-excuse absentee voting. But Democrats still want to pass a Federal takeover of elections.

Because the rules don't allow them to pass every single law they would like to in a 50-50 Senate, many of my Democrat colleagues are flip-flopping to oppose the filibuster. President Biden, who defended the filibuster during his nearly 40 years in the Senate, now wants a special carve-out for Democrats' election takeover. But who says it is going to stop there? The majority leader said in 2005, when Democrats were in the minority, that doing away with the filibuster would ``wash away 200 years of history'' and mean ``doomsday for democracy.'' Today, no one is pushing harder to end it than he is. And Democrats were perfectly happy to use the filibuster hundreds of times during the 4 years of the Trump Presidency, when the majority leader was the minority leader and Republicans had even larger majorities in Congress.

This isn't some debate about some arcane Senate rule. This is about protecting the rights of the minority in our democracy. This is about providing stability and certainty to our people. If the majority is able to constantly push through their views and policy every few years, drastic swings in policy will take place. Tax policy, social policy, health policy, foreign policy, defense policy--the laws of the United States will start just to whip back and forth, following where the power lies in this Chamber, and those shifts will weaken our Nation both here at home and abroad.

In 2017, the senior Senator from Maine and the junior Senator from Delaware led a bipartisan letter urging Senate leadership to preserve the 60-vote threshold for legislation.

While I appreciate their efforts, I did not sign that letter. I was concerned that many Democrats only signed it because they were afraid the GOP--that Republicans were going to end the filibuster. I believed that many of my Democratic colleagues would soon turn against the letter's own arguments and they would go back on their word. I believed that because a few years earlier, I had listened to reasons they gave for changing the executive filibuster for Presidential nominations when they were in the majority, and I had then watched them reverse those positions when they were back in the minority. I felt they would flip again for political reasons as soon as they returned to the majority.

Of the 61 Senators who did sign that letter, 30 were Democrats, 28 are still in office, and I am sorry to say that they have proved me right. But when Republicans were in the majority, we said we wouldn't abolish the legislative filibuster, and we have kept our word.

The truth is that some of my Democratic colleagues want to remake the American system only in their own image, not considering the views of about half of our citizens. To do that, they have to take an ax to the filibuster. But I urge them to think about the consequences their actions may have.

Without the filibuster, any Senate majority would be free to ignore the other side to pass their own agenda. Bipartisanship? Well, it would become a relic of the past. I know that Democrats don't want that to happen. I don't want it to happen, either, and that is why I have consistently supported the Senate filibuster no matter who is in power.

I urge my colleagues to think beyond the passions of the moment and to do what is best for this country in the long term: Leave the filibuster in place. Democrats may want to use it again as soon as next year.

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