Dems Pushing Biden On Filibuster Ahead Of Gun Control Vote

As the House of Representatives prepares to take up several gun control measures, including a bill that would require background checks to be conducted on most private firearm transfers, activists and Democratic officials are pressing yet again for the Senate to scrap the legislative filibuster, which requires most bills to get 60 votes for approval instead of a simple majority.

The Washington Post is reporting that, at the moment, most of the pressure is on President Joe Biden to throw his weight behind the move, which would require the action of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as well as the support of every Democrat senator.

Liberals have long pushed for sweeping changes like expanding the Supreme Court, ending the electoral college and banning gerrymandering. But as Biden faces a critical stretch of his presidency, even moderate Democrats are urging more immediate changes – particularly rewriting the filibuster, so that at the very least fewer bills need 60 votes to pass the Senate.

Democrats increasingly worry that popular pieces of Biden’s agenda will hit a wall in the Senate, including his plans for climate change, immigration, gun control, voting rights and LGBT protections. Failing to enact them, they fear, could be a political disaster for Democrats as well as a substantive one.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a centrist, said Wednesday she wants to “get rid of the filibuster,” her toughest comments to date on the matter. By Thursday, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., announced on via social media that she, too, now wants to abolish the filibuster, because “the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the filibuster has long been the enemy of progress.”

That may be one of the dumbest statements to ever come out of the U.S. Capitol, which is saying a lot. The filibuster is there for a simple reason; the Senate is supposed be the more deliberative of the two legislative chambers. Those involved in writing the Constitution made that fact crystal clear at the time in the years after the Constitution was ratified:

Read More HERE