To nobody’s surprise, the United States Senate defeated the Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act by refusing to invoke cloture. Moreover, the Democrats’ bid to bypass the filibuster met a similar fate as Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema stayed true to their word and voted with every GOP senator in opposition to the raw power grab.
The debate dragged on for hours with each side repeating itself numerous times. But the salient points cannot be questioned. The Founders did not create the Senate to be a smaller scale carbon copy of the House. They clearly envisioned the Senate to act as a check to the passions of the moment and to forge legislative solutions far more stable than the pendulum swings of temporary majorities. And since the filibuster uniquely enables the Senate to fulfill what the Founders envisioned, its elimination would effectively create two houses of representatives instead of one.
Given the fact that numerous Democratic senators recently and very publicly affirmed support for the filibuster, the natural question to ask is why? It’s one thing to say that one’s views are different now than what they were 25 years ago; it’s another altogether to pivot literally days after utilizing it to vote for its elimination. It will do no good to argue that the Democrats were merely wanting to return the filibuster to an actual debate and that they’d only do it just this once. They knew good and well that once that boundary was crossed, there would be no turning back. Moreover, they also knew (because several of them acknowledged it) that they would die by the sword they created as soon as the GOP regained control of the Senate. They would be powerless to stop Republicans from steamrolling their agenda when a GOP president occupied the White House. Indeed, President Trump had urged the Senate to kill the filibuster some 34 times (which the Senate wisely ignored).
It seems rather obvious that the Democrats’ obsession to establish a permanent majority caused them to craft partisan legislation designed to federalize local elections and create an environment where fraud is harder if not impossible to detect. Their specious advocacy of voters’ rights was laid bare by their opposition to voter ID and other curbs to voter fraud. The speed with which they rushed this through to a vote, in comparison with many other items of legislation having bipartisan support, demonstrates beyond ambiguity that the Democrats did not want to even give lip service to bipartisanship. That seems to be the nature of things nowadays in Washington, but if that’s how they’re going to operate, they have no basis to complain when the Republicans won’t get on board—especially when you call them racists just because they disagree with you.
On that score, in what lunatic universe do you think you’ll convince members of your own party to vote with you when you compare their opposition (Manchin’s & Sinema’s) to siding with the likes of Jefferson Davis and Jim Crow? Of course, playing the race card is part and parcel of the Democratic playbook, but it’s been played so often and so irrelevantly that it’s become devoid of any real meaning. It is well-nigh impossible to gin up racial animus when the election laws of Democratic strongholds are far more restrictive than the ones they chose to criticize.
We may, however, have to look at another angle. As stated above, the Senate’s action today comes as no surprise, so Schumer knew good and well that he’d go down in flames. Nonetheless, President Biden may have given away the store during his laughable press conference when he refused to affirm that the upcoming midterms would be fair. In other words, if his legislation is defeated, we cannot trust the results of the midterms if the GOP takes back the House and the Senate. Thus, by forcing a public vote with a lot of press coverage, Schumer and the Democrats were positioning themselves to blame voter suppression if the midterms are disastrous. As they incessantly blamed Russian collusion to delegitimize Trump’s 2016 election, so they will allege GOP shenanigans to delegitimize any GOP victory. The translation: Elections are only valid if the Democrats win. It’s a “big lie” only if conservatives cry foul. The Democrats can cry foul as the day is long, and that’s never a big lie, right? And we’re somehow supposed to believe that we’ve never had a democratic republic before the Freedom to Vote Act? Yes, there is a big lie, and it’s coming from the Left.
There is one thing, however, that all sides seem to agree on. If the public loses faith in its elections, then it will not believe that it has given its consent to be governed. That will have a catastrophic effect on our country. When one side advocates voting rights for illegal aliens and opposes measures to ensure that every vote is legal, it cannot avoid the implication that it is trying to cheat. And that’s the bottom line, isn’t it? A raw power grab is what they’re after, and they’ll stop at nothing to obtain it. The likes of Manchin and Sinema are rare in the Democratic Party. But if our Republic is to survive, we cannot pretend that autocrats in sheep’s clothing are acting in good faith. To pretend otherwise is to cut our own throats.
