Chuck Schumer has had enough of this crap
After the tumultuous night Democrats had on Tuesday, Chuck Schumer had a new found urgency in working to pass a form of the Voting Rights Act as quickly as possible, despite Republicans’ open refusal to even open debate on it. After the GOP filibustered the bill as expected, Schumer made his displeasure known: “Over 100 years ago, the great Senator of Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, said that “to vote without debating is perilous, but to debate and never vote is imbecile.” We should heed those words today, and explore whatever paths we have to restore the Senate so it does what its framers intended: debate, deliberate, compromise, and vote.”
Although the Senate has the misfortune of often going at a slow and deliberate pace, Schumer is well aware what the passage of the bill means for the future of democracy in the US. The party has been sharply criticized, in some cases rightly so, for taking their time at passing the BBB bill and the articles in it, and some pundits have attributed this to them losing or coming up short in important races on Tuesday, but there is some silver lining to the bill not having passed yet, and that is that a future draft of the bill could include voting rights legislation, something that already has the approval of Nancy Pelosi.
There is also the possibility that they could use reconciliation or rewrite the rules of the filibuster, something that even Joe Manchin has suggested being open to. It was a not so subtle jab at the status of the Senate under Mitch McConnell – who proudly used his power to kill every bill he possibly could when he was majority leader – far from doing anything about voting rights. He’s made clear that there’s only one party that cares about them and must do something if democracy is to remain standing – it’s not the GOP.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making