As the recent historical record shows, the Democratic Party’s about-face on the filibuster is entirely opportunistic and their claims fact-free.
Senate Democrats have declared war on the filibuster, claiming it’s a response to a recent barrage of Republican filibusters. Senator Dick Durbin, who expressed strong support for the filibuster in an ABC interview in 2018, now says that he has abandoned that support because since that time “Senator McConnell . . . managed to use and abuse the filibuster so many times and stopped the Senate in its track.” Senator Dianne Feinstein has threatened that, if “Republicans continue to abuse the filibuster,” she will introduce reforms to weaken it. Getting right into the act, California senator Alex Padilla, newly appointed to the seat formerly held by Kamala Harris, says his colleagues’ “patience” with Republican filibusters “is wearing thin.”
One problem: The last Republican filibuster was back in 2014. The new crisis of soaring Republican filibusters is entirely fabricated. As the Senate majority party, Republicans had no reason to filibuster during the period in question. Where are the media fact-checkers?
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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here
This piece originally appeared in National Review Online