Hypocrisy: 8 Democrats Defended Senate Filibuster for Decades, Research Shows

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Sunday wrote an op-ed seeking to destroy election integrity by terminating the 60 vote filibuster threshold, but a video from the Republican National Committee (RNC) research team revealed eight Democrats have defended the filibuster for decades, including President Biden.

Schumer’s Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled, “Sen. Chuck Schumer Responds on the Filibuster,” suggests January 6 is the reason Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) should break the filibuster by voting with 48 other Democrat senators:

Nineteen states have passed 33 laws to make it harder to vote. Election workers have endured violent threats over the past year simply for doing their jobs. These are not isolated developments. They are born of the same antidemocratic poison of last year’s deadly insurrection, and they urgently require the Senate to pass legislation.

Despite Schumer’s Sunday desperation, Senate Democrats have sung the virtues of the filibuster for years. The RNC video and transcript follows:

Schumer: They want to make this country into a banana republic where if you don’t get your way you change the rules.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ): The legislative filibuster should stay there and I will personally resist efforts to get rid of it.

Sen. Chis Coons (D-DE): I’m committed to never voting to change the legislative filibuster.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL): That would be the end of the Senate.

Joe Biden: It raises problems that are more damaging than the problem that exists.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ): You cannot change the rules in the middle of the game because you do not like the outcome.

Biden: You’re going to throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.

Schumer: Change the rules in midstream to wash away 200 years of history.

Biden: Nothing at all will get done.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA): I don’t think that we ought to be coming in willy-nilly and changing the rules.

Durbin: You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game.

Schumer: Ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the founding fathers called the cooling saucer of democracy into the rubber stamp of dictatorship.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY): If you don’t have 60 votes yet, it just means you haven’t done enough advocacy and you need to work a lot harder.

Biden: It is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.

Menendez: Partisan power grab that will stomp on the rights of the minority and leave fundamentally changed for the worse.

Durbin: Preserve checks and balances so that no one party can do whatever it wants.

Schumer: It’ll be a doomsday for democracy.

Coons: The one most important rule that requires compromise requires working across the aisle.

Biden: It is a fundamental power grab.

Menendez: I will not stand by when a party drunk with power tries to overturn 200 years of precedent.

Biden: Ending the filibuster is a very dangerous thing to do.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø