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KAMALA HARRIS’ DNC PROMISES DEPEND ON FILIBUSTER REFORM  
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David Dayan
August 23, 2024
Jacobin
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_ At the DNC last night, Kamala Harris promised big change. But the
only way to ensure her full agenda can be passed is by killing the
filibuster. _

Kamala Harris, Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

In the Democratic National Convention hall, in side events in hotel
ballrooms and conference centers, and on the campaign trail, lawmakers
and candidates are promising big change.

They have promised to codify _Roe v. Wade_ and end the assault on
reproductive rights. They have promised to end gerrymandering and
voter suppression in a pair of consequential voting-rights bills: the
For the People Act and the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. They
want to address affordable housing, child care, paid family and
medical leave, and child poverty; they want to transform the tax code;
and so on.

To accomplish all of this, or at least to make it unencumbered by
artificial constraints and rules and processes, they need to end the
circumstance whereby a minority of members in the US Senate get a veto
over everything the chamber does. At the heart of the entire agenda
that this convention’s pitch is predicated upon is the imperative to
reform the filibuster.

Republicans will not vote for abortion rights or voting rights; under
a sixty-vote Senate, those bills will fail. You could technically get
tax reform and care-economy investments done the way it was done in
2022 in the Inflation Reduction Act, by using budget reconciliation.
But that carries with it complicated rules
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spending limitations within the ten-year budget window.

Because Kamala Harris’s tax plans would raise trillions of dollars
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eliminating Trump-era tax cuts for the rich, along with raising the
corporate tax rate to 28 percent, that would seem like no problem. But
with the Child Tax Credit expansion costing over $1 trillion
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that same ten-year window, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer
(D-NY) promising
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repeal the cap on state and local tax deductions costing hundreds of
billions, the no-taxes-on-tips
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hundreds of billions more, and a drive to devote some portion of the
proceeds to deficit reduction, those dollars won’t stretch as far as
people expect.

The only way to ensure the full agenda can be passed without
constraints is by ending the filibuster.

There has never been a time when the Senate is closer to unshackling
itself from this tyranny of the minority than right now. After decades
of talk, Democrats decided in unprecedented fashion to carve the two
voting-rights bills out of the filibuster and use a different process
for them that would have required the minority to actually get on the
floor and object, repeatedly, with a vote all but guaranteed at the
end.

This so-called “talking filibuster,” pioneered by Sen. Jeff
Merkley
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was the culmination of a fifteen-year odyssey to break the minority
veto. But two of the fifty members of the Democratic caucus, Sens. Joe
Manchin (I-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), opposed
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reform. All forty-eight other sitting senators supported it, but
without a majority, it lost.

That is, in theory, no longer a problem.

“The two folks who have been most opposed to filibuster reform are
Manchin and Sinema, and both are retiring from the Senate,” said
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee (DSCC), at a pen-and-pad briefing on the sidelines of the
convention. The inference is that, with Manchin and Sinema out of the
way, the Senate can get on with doing the people’s business.

But that comment aside, senators asked about filibuster reform at the
DSCC event were remarkably reticent to come out and say that they
would remove the main impediment to the promises they are boisterously
announcing to the nation.

“Senators and candidates have a variety of views on filibuster
reform,” Peters followed up quickly after saying that the main
obstructers of reform are now gone.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) added that on the campaign trail,
“the issues that matter are the kitchen-table issues . . . access to
health care, affordable housing, how do we keep communities safe.”
The implication is that process stuff like the filibuster doesn’t
come up. But _of course_ it doesn’t come up; no process issue has
headed campaign rhetoric in American history! The point is that none
of those kitchen-table issues can actually be realized without dealing
with process.

This reticence by senators to say clearly to a reporter who wants to
know that the Senate will not handcuff itself on the popular agenda
Democrats are presenting to the public perhaps speaks to the fact that
Manchin and Sinema were convenient scapegoats
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able to take all the heat for blocking things that other senators may
not want to see passed. Maybe some other senator will step up in their
absence, and the cycle will repeat.

But to the extent that there is a plan, relayed to me by other
senators at the convention, it goes like this: the first item on the
agenda will be restoring _Roe_, and I’ve been assured there are
fifty votes (provided Democrats win all the Senate battlegrounds) for
that. Democrats will carve out an exception from the filibuster for
that.

Then, nearly all Democratic senators are already on the record for
carving out the voting-rights bills from the filibuster. Rep. Ruben
Gallego, the House member running to replace Sinema in the Senate in
Arizona and one of the few who wasn’t in the Senate for that 2022
vote, has come out squarely for killing the filibuster
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as did Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) last cycle.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) was clear that he is “deeply
interested” in getting the voting-rights bills passed outside of a
filibuster. “The problem now is that the filibuster doesn’t cost
you anything,” said Warnock. “I call it a latte filibuster, you
can go across the street and have a latte, it’s not painful.”

So if successful, that’s two carve-outs. Once you’ve done that,
how can you tell other advocates who have been working on their issues
for years that the Senate’s hands are tied? Suppose the PRO Act
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which would make it easier to join a union, came up for a vote. After
saying yes to women and saying yes to voters of color, how could
Democrats get away with saying no to unions without paying an
electoral price?

Of course, this depends on the advocates knowing the score. As my
colleague Harold Meyerson mentioned
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I participated in a roundtable discussion that United Auto Workers
president Shawn Fain had with reporters. I asked Fain if he would
expect the Senate to get the PRO Act done and to abolish or limit the
filibuster if they have to in order to do it.

“I expect the PRO Act to pass for sure,” he said. “As far as the
filibuster goes, I don’t know where that goes right now.” I
replied that if the filibuster isn’t broken, the PRO Act cannot
pass. “I would say we hope so, we’d like to see that for sure,”
said Fain.

I asked if Fain had talked to senators personally about filibuster
reform.

“We’ve talked to a lot of representatives about the PRO Act and
our expectations. . . . It’s one of the reasons why when it came to
the selection for vice president, we didn’t consider the senator
from Arizona for that reason, because he didn’t support the PRO
Act,” he said, referring to Sen. Mark Kelly.

It’s worth remembering that Fain is very new on the political scene,
having only been elected in the last year. But he didn’t quite seem
to grasp that filibuster reform underlies any successful legislative
agenda for Democrats, particularly on issues with thin Republican
support like unions.

I do think that once you start carving out exceptions to the
filibuster on legislation, it’s functionally dead, just as we saw on
nominations. So the strategy of carve-outs followed by enough
browbeating to whittle away more and more until you no longer have a
stick does have some logic. But advocates have to play their part in
that, too, knowing their role in not allowing senators to make any
excuses anymore once they’ve shown they have the power to pass
things by majority vote.

There will still be a lot of momentum to revert back to mythologizing
bipartisanship, however.

After the briefing, I caught up with Sen. Warnock again and asked
about the filibuster. Despite his insistence on exempting
voting-rights bills from the minority veto, he started talking about
how on the Child Tax Credit expansion, there could be sixty votes in
the Senate. But that deal is on the table now, having passed the
House, in a way that was very favorable to Republican interests (there
are three times as many business tax cuts, in terms of value, as there
are Child Tax Credit expansions in that bill). Yet Senate Republicans
have blocked it, using the filibuster.

I asked Warnock about that. If you can’t even get a right-leaning
Child Tax Credit expansion done, why would you think a bipartisan
solution could be forged?

“Because the closer you get to the election the more people start to
play games,” he said, intimating that cooler heads would prevail
outside of an election cycle.

But the entire Mitch McConnell era in the Senate is a testament to the
fact that cooler heads often do not prevail, and that it’s always an
election cycle. The filibuster has evolved into a constant block on
progress. Democrats are promising to change the world, but will they
change the Senate rules to make that happen?

Warnock concluded, “I am singularly focused on winning this election
because there’s so much at stake.”

_David Dayen is the executive editor of the American Prospect. He is
the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020)
and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall
Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud (2016), which earned the Studs and
Ida Terkel Prize. He was the winner of the 2021 Hillman Prize for
excellence in magazine journalism._

_Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month. Subscribe
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