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| AP Photo/Patrick Semansky |
President Biden said Tuesday he would support changing the Senate‘s filibuster rules to require a senator to hold the floor in order to block legislation from moving forward.
“I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster — you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” Mr. Biden told ABC News. “You had to stand up and command the floor and you had to keep talking.”
Host George Stephanopoulos then asked if Mr. Biden is for bringing back the “talking filibuster.”
“I am. That’s what it was supposed to be,” the president said. “It’s almost getting to the point where democracy is having a hard time functioning.” --->READ MORE HERE
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| xxcheng/Getty Images |
Egged on once more by the ambitions of Lady Macbeth, Joe Biden has weakened his commitment to the filibuster. It now falls to two members of his party, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to save the Senate as we have known it.
And save it they most assuredly should. The two most frequent criticisms of the Senate filibuster are that it is “not in the Constitution” and that it is “undemocratic.” On a superficial level, both of these charges seem correct. And yet, when one gives them a little more thought, one soon realizes that there is a great deal more going on here than meets the partisan eye. Indeed, when one gives them a little more thought, one realizes that, far from subverting our system of government, the contemporary filibuster plays a vital role in its preservation.
By explicit and hard-fought design, the United States Constitution created a federal government of limited and delineated powers, while leaving all remaining inquiries to the states. In the modern era, we have mostly forgotten this, having come instead to conceive of Congress as an omnipotent national parliament in which all meaningful questions are resolved. But to forget is not to obviate, and it remains the case that, by law, our Congress is charged with handling a small handful of truly national questions and with staying silent on everything else. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to related stories:
The filibuster explained: Breaking down the debate supercharged by Biden
The Democrats’ Arguments for Killing the Filibuster Make No Sense
Why Some Democratic Senators Are Still Hesitant to Abolish the Filibuster
Biden’s foray into filibuster fight leaves liberals no closer to victory
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