Chuck Schumer potentially eliminating the filibuster is the key to a radical agenda

Chuck Schumer is doing us a favor. 

Often, parties try to obscure or deny their radical plans prior to an election, but the Senate majority leader is being more candid. 

In a session with reporters at the Democratic National Convention, Schumer (D-NY) suggested that — should Democrats win the White House, Senate and House in November — he would seek to end the filibuster for purposes of passing voting rights and abortion legislation. 

This would be an inflection point in American government. 

There’s no nuking the legislative filibuster a little bit. 

The end run around the Senate’s long-standing requirement for 60 votes to pass nonfiscal legislation might begin with voting rights and abortion, but it surely wouldn’t end there. 

If a nationwide imposition of abortion on demand can pass with 51 votes, why can’t Medicare for All or the Green New Deal?

Schumer already says he wants another massive climate bill, and waves away any criticism about the national debt. 

Drooling at pet causes 

Once the legislative filibuster has been significantly breached, any group of Democratic senators that wants a particular bill would demand that its pet cause get ­exempted, too. 

And left-wing interest groups would also insist on getting equal treatment — if Planned Parenthood gets a carve-out for national abortion legislation, why wouldn’t the unions for all their priorities? 

The appetite grows with eating. 

Everything that Democrats want, but is currently out reach for the lack of 60 votes or ­bipartisan support, would become ­obtainable, from comprehensive immigration reform to national gun control. 

President Biden’s unilateral measures that have been struck down by the courts, including his student debt relief scheme, would be revived and slammed through Congress. 

A filibuster-free Democratic trifecta in Washington easily could tilt the political order fundamentally in its favor.

It could pass “court reform” that would allow it to instantly wipe out the constitutionalist majority on the Supreme Court that has been built up over decades, and make Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, states to add easy electoral votes and more senators to the Democratic column. 

The configuration of the filibuster has changed over the years, but it is a practice that has defined the Senate since its ­inception. 

The filibuster’s function of making it difficult to pass enormously consequential legislation based on transient majorities is entirely in keeping with the spirit of America’s constitutional structure, and exactly why progressives now disdain it (although they made ample use of it during the Donald Trump years). 

Schumer is not making an idle threat.

His Senate majority already tried to blow up the filibuster in the name of “voting rights” in 2022.

The only Democrats opposed were West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin III and Arizona Sen. Kristen Sinema, neither of whom is now a member of the Democratic Party and both of whom are leaving the Senate. 

Moderate Dems mum 

It is quite possible that other Senate Democrats privately believe it would be a mistake to kneecap the filibuster, but they are unlikely to speak up.

Everyone could see the pressure, and abuse, Manchin and Sinema were subjected to. 

As for potential new Democratic senators after the election in November, they’ve all been coming out against the filibuster and there are no Manchin- or Sinema-style moderates in the offing. 

If Schumer were to prevail, the nature of one institution, the Senate, would be fundamentally changed in order to make it possible to fundamentally change others.

This would be a naked power play.

It would trample norms and centralize power in Washington in an unprecedented way for progressive ends. 

The best thing to be said for it is that we’ve been warned.