US Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling for the end of the Senate filibuster should the Democrats return to power and face obstruction.
Warren announced her support for ending the Senate rule in a series of tweets on Friday morning, and she planned to discuss it in a speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network later in the morning, according to an excerpt of her remarks shared with the Globe.
The filibuster, in which senators employ a number of delay tactics to effectively kill a piece of legislation, has often spelled doom for legislation on both sides. If Senators filibuster a bill, it then needs the support of 60 members of the Senate in order to proceed to a vote, in what’s known as invoking cloture. The end of the filibuster would mean bills and other measures could pass with a simple majority vote.
Warren said that she would support the end of the Senate rule if the Democrats win the White House and face obstruction from Republicans.
“Enough with that. When we win the election, we WILL make the change that we need in this country,” she will say in her speech Friday morning.
Warren is framing her argument in terms of racial justice, using the recent example of a bill that made lynching a federal crime. It finally passed the Senate in 2018, 100 years after a similar version had first been introduced. One of the reasons? It was often the target of a Senate filibuster, Warren says in the speech.
“An entire century of obstruction because a small group of racists stopped the entire nation from doing what was right,” Warren will say, according to the remarks. “For generations, the filibuster was used as a tool to block progress on racial justice. And in recent years, it’s been used by the far right as a tool to block progress on everything.”
With no filibuster, Democrats see an opportunity to pass major progressive legislation on things like climate change and health care should the party take the Senate in 2020 and lack a 60-vote majority. But proponents of the filibuster say it fosters bipartisanship: Legislation must be supported by a wider range of voices in order to have a chance at passage.
Warren is the first major Democratic presidential candidate to call for the end of the filibuster. In February, Washington Governor Jay Inslee told HuffPost that it was an “artifact of a bygone era.” Other candidates in the field are flatly opposing the idea: Senator Cory Booker described the filibuster as “one of the distinguishing factors of this body” to Politico in January.
Christina Prignano can be reached at christina.prignano@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @cprignano.
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