Filibuster
Floor Speech
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Mrs. CAPITO. Mr. President, I rise today to deliver I think one of my more important speeches that I will give as a Member of this body, and that is to defend the longstanding rules of the U.S. Senate.
We are at a critical moment, make no mistake. With the slimmest of majorities, the Democrats haven't been able to pass their wildly unpopular agenda, so they are considering using the nuclear option-- just think of the term ``nuclear option'' to show you how draconian it is--to eliminate the Senate's 60-vote threshold for legislation. They are doing it under the guise of protecting voting rights, but make no mistake--this power grab is not about voting rights. Instead, it is about advancing one party's agenda.
So I would like to take a look back at what Democrats, including President Biden, have said on the issue and why they are changing their tune. We can also debunk the argument that, if given the chance, Republicans would change the rules and eliminate the filibuster as the Democrats wish to do now.
Finally and most important to me, I am going to talk about how this shortsighted move would impact West Virginians, those whom I represent here in the Senate. They are the ones who will ultimately be hurt by this reckless and irresponsible change, and it is my responsibility to do what I can to stop it.
So President Biden is in Atlanta today, taking the bully pulpit to protest a State's law that he does not like as a reason to end the filibuster. He even says this is one of those defining moments. It really is. People are going to be judged as to where they were before and where they are after the vote.
It is interesting that he would say that because I would like to remind President Biden where he was when he was Senator Biden and what he had to say about eliminating the filibuster on this very floor in 2005.
He said:
It is not only a bad idea; it upsets the constitutional design, and it disservices the country.
Well, Senator Biden, I couldn't agree more. But he is not the only one who has done a complete 180 when it comes to the filibuster.
Majority Leader Schumer once said it would be ``doomsday for democracy''--that sounds pretty bad, ``doomsday for democracy''--if the filibuster were to be eliminated, and he was right. More recently, he has called the filibuster the most important distinction between the House and the Senate. Again, I couldn't agree more.
Then, from my home State of West Virginia, the late Senator Robert Byrd, a longtime Democrat, was unequivocal in his defense of preserving Senate rules.
He wrote in 2010:
The Senate has been the last fortress of minority rights and freedom of speech in this Republic for more than two centuries. I pray that Senators will pause and reflect before ignoring that history and that tradition in favor of the political priority of the moment.
What would he say today?
Again, this is not about voting rights. It is important to note that we did have a record turnout in 2020. More people voted than ever before. More than 158 million ballots were cast in 2020, which is a 7- percent increase from 2016, and we didn't have this voting rights legislation. In West Virginia, we had thousands more people vote than voted in 2016. As a matter of fact, the total number of ballots that were cast in 2020 was more than in any election in our history with one exception--the 1960 election of President John F. Kennedy.
So don't believe the hyperbole. Don't believe the rhetoric. Don't take the bait. The party-wide flip-flop we are now seeing has nothing to do with voting rights. Instead, it has everything to do with paving the way for an aggressive and progressive agenda that the Democrats wish to enact.
One of the arguments from the other side that I hear all the time is, well, the Republicans would do the same thing and change the rules if given the chance. Guess what. We could have done that. Unfortunately, that argument doesn't carry much weight. Leader McConnell, while sometimes under intense pressure to do this, never wavered, and we protected this institution. We didn't change the rules on the legislative filibuster when we didn't get our way. We could have, but we didn't.
Again, he knows, just as President Biden and Leader Schumer know, that if you can't get what you want, changing the rules is no way to govern. I certainly wouldn't run my household like that. It is no way to govern because it ultimately hurts those who sent us here to represent them.
In my home State of West Virginia, do you know what they want? They want us to work together like they saw us do on the bipartisan infrastructure bill. I hear this all the time. Bipartisanship is critical to making good and better policy, and if the Senate rules are changed, it would be a relic of the past. We just passed and signed into law the infrastructure bill that I worked to negotiate. We also passed the CARES Act. We passed opioid. We passed the Great American Outdoors Act--bipartisan.
We can do this, but if we change the rules to where only 50 votes are needed to pass legislation, there will be zero incentive or motivation for the two sides to work together. Just as bad, legislative accomplishments could be done or undone or redone and done over and over with just one flip of a Senate seat. Policies harmful to my State could be enacted: the Green New Deal, court packing, the federalizing of our elections. By the way, 54 of my 55 county clerks oppose that legislation. There would be packing the Senate with new States, defunding the police, attacking the Second Amendment for law-abiding Americans, and more.
We don't even have to imagine what the Democrats would do or would want to do; we can just look at New York and what they just did. They are going to allow 800,000 noncitizens to vote. To put that in context, in my State of West Virginia, we only had 794,000 voters who voted for President in 2020.
Ramming radical policies through Congress without even attempting to gain consensus is not what our Founders envisioned, and it is not how Americans want us to operate.
Rest assured, those willing to change the rules to benefit themselves will do it again and again and again. Today, supposedly, it is voting rights. Tomorrow, it could be gun control. The next day, it could be open borders. I can only imagine.
I am asking my fellow Senators on the other side of the aisle: Don't do this. You will come to regret it, I think, if you do.
But I think that we need to preserve the rights of the minority.
We need to preserve the chance for bipartisanship. We need to preserve the traditions of the Senate. If you destroy this tradition, unfortunately, the country will suffer the consequences.
Thank you.
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