Filibuster

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOOZMAN. Mr. President, I have had the privilege of serving Arkansans in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives in both the majority and minority. So I know how unmistakably important it is to protect the rights of the minority in the interest of individual States--especially those like Arkansas that are more rural and less populated.

That is what our country's Founders had in mind when they designed the Senate. The Senate is sometimes referred to as ``the world's greatest deliberative body''--the key word being ``deliberative.''

It is not crafted to quickly approve or reject legislation passed by the House as a mere formality. Instead, it offers equal representation to each State and a procedural process that incentivizes and rewards consensus.

Allowing individual Senators to secure and, just as importantly, stop dramatic policy changes is what sets this body apart. The filibuster provides each of us leverage that must be preserved.

Unfortunately, many of our colleagues on the other side have succumbed to shortsighted political calculations and are endorsing changing the Senate's rules in order to jam through their legislative priorities.

However, the ability to prevent radical, swift, and far-reaching changes that would surely sow confusion and uncertainty is invaluable. As such, I intend to continue protecting the filibuster.

Our Democratic friends, with some exceptions, are now abandoning their previous support for the filibuster, which, while in the minority, they argued was indispensable and utilized with zeal to great effect.

Even President Biden, who enjoyed a long career in the Senate and exercised his right to stop or hamper legislation and nominees he had concerns with, has decided his decades-long embrace of the filibuster is no match for the loudest voices in his party demanding to discard it.

The justifications all point in one direction: keeping power.

Today, the Biden administration and Senate Democrats believe a supposed threat to our democracy requires abandoning the minority party's ability to pump the brakes on the excesses of one-party control in Washington.

Worse, the grave threat to the fabric of our society and experiment in self-government they are touting amounts to nothing more than duly elected State legislatures reining in some of the most overly accommodating voting policies that were enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic: things like reasonable limits on absentee voting, commonsense registration rules, and practical deadlines.

Instead, they want to bring the full weight of the Federal Government down on States like Arkansas that have sought to protect election integrity by instituting voter ID, blocking ballot harvesting, or ensuring the accuracy of voter rolls.

These commonsense safeguards are not an existential threat to our Nation, nor do they warrant breaking the Senate and being unconstitutionally superseded.

It is concerning that most Members of the majority are now singing quite a different tune when it comes to tinkering with longstanding rules of the Senate to achieve partisan ends.

I think it is important to applaud our colleagues on the other side of the aisle who remain committed to protecting the filibuster and, by extension, the very integrity of this institution. They have come under intense pressure. Yet I recognize and they recognize how important this tool is, the harm that would come from abandoning or undermining it, and that majorities in the Senate do not last forever.

Should the Senate go down this path, it would result in exceedingly scorched Earth, where consensus is even harder to find and shifting majorities implement drastic policy transformations when a President is willing to rubberstamp whatever Congress approves.

I have opposed this ill-advised tactic in the face of opposition from my own side of the aisle in the past and understand it is not always an easy thing to do.

My colleagues and I will not acquiesce on this question, and I hope the Senate can move on, in a bipartisan way, to addressing the challenges that our country is facing and finding solutions that actually help Americans facing real-world problems instead of spending any more time on partisan threats that upend this body's traditions that would ultimately diminish its unique and necessary place within a government that is truly the envy of the world.

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