I don’t come to this conclusion lightly. The threats from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are not to be discounted. “Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues,” the Kentucky Republican said March 16. “Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin to imagine — what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like.”
Oh, yes they can. No one has handled the blowtorch in pursuit of his priorities more adroitly than McConnell.
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Having failed in making good on his 2010 promise to make Barack Obama a one-term president, McConnell put Republican legislative recalcitrance into overdrive. In the fall of Obama’s second term in 2013, Republicans blocked three of his nominees for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and, for the first time ever, they filibustered a defense secretary nominee. By November of that year, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had had enough. He ended the filibuster for lower federal court and executive branch nominees.
It’s this action that critics point to as the genesis of our current filibuster crisis. But if Reid’s action was the match, then the subsequent actions taken by McConnell were gasoline on the fire.
First, McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat. Upon the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, nine months before the presidential election, McConnell argued the American people should choose the next president to fill the lifetime appointment. McConnell and most Republicans refused to meet Obama’s nominee, then-Judge Merrick Garland. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), then-chair of the Judiciary Committee, refused to hold a hearing. Garland is now the attorney general.
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Then, not even three months after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, McConnell blew up the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. That allowed the confirmation of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch by a simple-majority vote. And then, after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020, McConnell sealed a 6-3 conservative majority by ramming through the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett just eight days before the presidential election. So much for McConnell’s earlier insistence that the American people elect a new president to pick the new jurist.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who has been working on filibuster reform since 2011, is not moved by McConnell’s “scorched earth” threat. “If anyone’s destroyed the Senate, it’s Mitch McConnell. His strategy of obstruct and delay has been deeply, deeply damaging,” Merkley told me during an interview for my podcast “Cape Up.” The minority leader, Merkley says, “is the master breaker of the Senate, and we need to fix it.” Merkley thinks a talking filibuster where senators can block bills only by keeping debate open through continuous floor speeches is the way to go.
The understandable argument that Democrats shouldn’t reform the filibuster for fear of what Republicans would do if they regained the majority holds no weight with Merkley. “The Republicans have already torn down the filibuster on their own priorities,” Merkley said, referring to judicial appointments and tax cuts.
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“They have what they think is a perfect situation because it’s kind of heads, they win, tails, Democrats lose. So that’s why Mitch McConnell likes it the way it is,” Merkley said. “His theory of power is that if you paralyze the Senate when there’s a Democrat in the White House, that makes a better case for replacing the Democrats with Republicans.” Another way for Republicans to regain the majority is for Democrats not to wield the power they have.
“The grass roots is saying, ‘Listen, you said if you’ve got a majority, you would do these things on health care, housing, education, jobs, equality, climate, immigration, ‘dreamers.’ Are you going to simply say you’ll let Mitch McConnell have a veto over all that when you don’t have a veto over his priorities?’” Merkley told me. “Our grass roots understand. They are not going to show up in 2022 if we disappoint them. And, quite frankly, even if they show up, they’ll be blocked from the ballot box in sufficient numbers that Republicans will take control.”
Which leads me back to H.R. 1. — or S. 1, as it’s called in the Senate. If Republicans aren’t willing to vote for voting rights, and if the only way to safeguard our fundamental right to vote is to blow up the filibuster, then ignore McConnell’s taunts and do it. As fallen-away Republican Sophia Nelson advised Democrats on my MSNBC Sunday show, “Stop being afraid of Mitch McConnell ’cause he’s not afraid of you.”
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