Schumer Hopes to “Harry Reid” His Way Into Ending The Filibuster. But Here’s the Problem.

Photo: Jay Scott Applewhite / AP

In 2013, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid was growing very frustrated. Despite holding 55 senate votes in his conference, he was unable to push critical cabinet and judicial nominees that body through because Republicans were blockading them with the filibuster. Believing the Senate was broken and that Republicans had resorted to using the maneuver to put the brakes on President Obama’s agenda, Reid set out to persuade his caucus to use the “nuclear option,” meaning get rid of the filibuster, as least as it pertained to cabinet officials and to judicial nominees other than the Supreme Court.

To do this, he lined up a series of high profile nominations for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, daring the Republican minority to use its filibuster in bad faith. These nominations were highly qualified but inherently contentious because that circuit is viewed as a feeder to the Supreme Court, and its composition is often a bellwether for the direction of the judiciary. Democrats argued that Mitch McConnell and his minority didn’t even present any substantive objections to the D.C. Circuit nominees and instead merely stonewalled them. So when these nominees were blocked, as expected, Reid went to his fellow Democrats with a plea, arguing the chamber had to evolve beyond parliamentary roadblocks. “The American people believe the Senate is broken, and I believe the American people are right,” he said, adding: “It’s time to get the Senate working again.”

In the end, Reid got 52 out of 55 votes to change the rule, and he triggered the first nuclear option. A furious McConnell would return the favor years later when Republicans retook the majority and eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, paving the way for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh,and Barrett to cement a conservative majority.

Today, Majority Leader Schumer faces an intransigent GOP once again, but in order to pass key voter protection legislation like the For the People Act, which many Dems see as critical to beating back an existential threat to our democracy, he will need to pull a third nuclear option and get 50 out of 50 senators to go along with that rule change, even if it is a limited one that affects only, say, laws brought under the Elections Clause of the Constitution. 

But here’s the problem: one of the three senators that Harry Reid failed to convince back in 2013 is Joe Manchin of West Virginia. And there is no indication that Manchin, who represents a state that went to Trump by 40 points, is going to change the tune he has been whistling for eight years: that the filibuster is the thing that distinguishes the Senate from almost any other representative body in the world because it gives so much power to the minority party.

Whether that is a good or bad thing is certainly debatable, especially when the minority party’s chief priority is to erode democratic norms. But the practical problem remains: How can Schumer convince Sen. Manchin (and his sidekick on the matter, Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona, or other possible fence-sitters like Sens. Angus King, Jon Tester or Dianne Feinstein) that the filibuster needs to be modified or scrapped? The most recent vote to create a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate and report on the January 6th insurrection failed to overcome a GOP filibuster, despite Manchin’s apparently earnest belief that he could find “10 good people” in the Republican caucus. Manchin’s terse statement about the final vote seemed to indicate he understood that the blockage was a purely calculated move by their leader: 

There is no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission since Democrats agreed to everything they asked for. Mitch McConnell has made this his political position, thinking it will help in his 2022 elections. They do not believe the truth will set you free, so they continue to live in fear.

Yet when asked whether this means he would consider a rule change, Manchin held firm. While seeming visibly upset by the vote, Manchin said he stood by his belief that ending the filibuster would “destroy our government.” He told reporters, “This job’s not worth it to me to sell my soul. What are you gonna do, vote me out? That’s not a bad option, I get to go home.”

Still, Schumer plans to continue to add pressure using the Harry Reid model, lining up popular pieces of legislation that the GOP will simply gun down. These likely include the Equal Pay act guaranteeing men and women receive the same pay for the same work, the Equality Act extending federal protection against workplace, housing and other forms of discrimination against LGBTs, and gun safety legislation such as universal background checks that a vast majority of American support. Schumer is hoping to educate not only his reluctant colleagues but also the American public about the deep cynicism and obstruction at the heart of the Republican minority, in the diminishing hope that he will move Manchin, Sinema and others to action.

“Each vote will be building the case to convict the Republican Senate leadership of engaging in political gridlock for their advantage, rather than voting for the agenda the American people voted for in 2020,” said Sen. Jeff Markey, a proponent of filibuster reform.

Whether the American public will understand that it was the GOP who blocked these popular bills or point the finger at Democrats—whose holdouts elevated custom and the false hope of bipartisanship over actual results—remains to be seen. Do you blame the shooter, or the officer who stood by and watched and could have easily taken his gun from him?

One thing is already abundantly clear: Currently, Schumer simply doesn’t have the support of enough senators to move any legislation through the Senate that isn’t tied strictly to the budget, meaning the Biden priorities will be stuck in a legislative quagmire unless Schumer breaks the logjam somehow. 

If in the end we are left only with more angry and frustrated Democrats, a bewildered Joe Manchin, and a self-satisfied, sneering Krysten Sinema, it will take an even greater effort in 2022 to retain the House in the face of an organized GOP rollout of voter suppression bills and far fewer legislative wins for Democrats in the first two years of the Biden White House.