Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks about modernizing infrastructure and his plans for tackling climate change during a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware, July 14.
Photo: leah millis/ReutersJoe Biden spent 36 years as a Senator from Delaware and was a staunch supporter of Senate traditions, including the filibuster. But now that he’s on the cusp of the White House, he’s rethinking that long-time protection for the minority.
In a 45-minute phone call Monday with the press reported by the New York Times, Mr. Biden said that his agenda today is far more ambitious—that is, progressive—than Barack Obama’s. “I think we have an opportunity to make some really systemic change,” he said.
But the filibuster, by allowing a minority of 41 Senators to keep a bill from a final vote, would be an obstacle to getting this agenda passed. Which is why, Mr. Biden says, Democrats “have to take a look” at whether it should be eliminated.
Mr. Biden added that the fate of the filibuster is “going to depend on how obstreperous they become,” meaning Republicans. In other words, if Republicans don’t agree to surrender to his agenda, Democrats will have no choice but to lay partisan siege to Senate rules.
On this as on so much else, Mr. Biden is going with the left-wing flow of his party. Democrats are increasingly confident that they’ll win enough seats to control the Senate in 2021. And if they do, they don’t want 47 or even 49 Republicans interfering with Democratic plans for the Green New Deal, making the District of Columbia a state, forgiving all student loans, and perhaps packing the Supreme Court, among so much more.
As Mr. Biden’s comments make clear, this prospect isn’t some GOP invention. Elizabeth Warren campaigned on it, and nearly all of the younger Senate Democrats agree. Chris Coons, the supposed centrist who holds Mr. Biden’s former Delaware seat, recently flipped his support for the legislative filibuster when Republicans control the Senate to favor killing it if Democrats take control. A few old traditionalists might object at first, but woe be the Democrat who opposes repeal if it comes up for a vote. The partisan pressure would be overwhelming.
Democrats removed the filibuster for judicial nominees (except the Supreme Court) in 2013, because they were frustrated by Republican Senate opposition to Barack Obama’s appointees to the bench. That has come back to bite them as it opened the door for President Trump and Senate Republicans to streamline confirmation of judicial nominees—and to kill the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.
Once the 60-vote barrier for legislation is gone, it will be gone for both parties. And this could put policies cherished by Democrats in jeopardy down the road. But the new Democrats in Congress are men and women in a hurry, and they’ll worry about that later. Mr. Biden is serious when he says the filibuster is likely to be road kill on the highway to transforming America. And so much for all that media blather about preserving “institutional norms.”
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