Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) on Wednesday stood firm on keeping the filibuster in place under a Senate GOP majority, even though the party will control a 52- or 53-seat Senate majority along with the White House and possibly the House next year.
President-elect Trump has talked about jettisoning the filibuster before and could pressure Senate Republicans to do so. He and McConnell do not have the best relationship, and the Kentucky senator is relinquishing his role as GOP Senate leader next year.
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Nonetheless, McConnell voiced confidence that the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to overcome procedural objections in the Senate, will remain in place.
“I think one of the most gratifying results of the Senate becoming Republican, the filibuster will stand, there won’t be any new states admitted to give a partisan advantage to the other side, and we’ll quit beating up the Supreme Court every time we don’t like a decision they make,” McConnell told reporters at a press conference.
“I think this shifting to a Republican Senate majority helps control the guardrails, keep people who want to change the rules in order to achieve something they think is worthwhile not successful,” he added.
“I think the filibuster is very secure,” he added.
Senate Republicans will control at least 52 seats next year and could expand their majority to 53 or 54 seats depending on what happens to the races in Pennsylvania and Nevada, where Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Jacky Rosen (R-Nev.) are currently trailing their GOP challengers in the whip count.
Trump pressured Republicans to jettison the filibuster in 2018, when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress and he was in the middle of his first term as president.
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He told a group of GOP lawmakers that they should get rid of the 60-vote threshold for passing controversial legislation through the upper chamber before Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) could do so to push a Democratic president’s agenda through Congress.
Schumer tried to pass a carve-out of the Senate’s filibuster rule in January 2022 to pass voting rights legislation, but he fell short of the simple majority vote to change the Senate’s rules after Sens. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who were Democrats at the time, voted with Republicans to quash the effort.
Schumer told reporters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that if Democrats kept control of the White House and Senate and won back the House in the 2024 election, one of their first priorities would be to amend the filibuster rule to pass voting rights and campaign finance legislation.
“One of the first things we want to do is what we did first last time but I think we’ll have more success and that’s democracy, dealing with voting rights, dealing with Citizens United, dealing with reapportionment,” Schumer told reporters in August, adding campaign finance reform and extreme gerrymandering of congressional districts to his top priorities.
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He said that Democrats would have the votes to implement filibuster reform if they managed to hold on to their majority.
“There were probably 35 Democrats who were willing to change the rules on that issue. We got it up to 48. Of course, Sinema and Manchin voted no. … Well, they’re both gone,” he noted.
Instead, Democrats lost at least three Senate seats in Tuesday’s election. Republicans easily picked up Manchin’s seat after he decided not to run for reelection and defeated 3rd-term Sens. Jon Tester (D) and Sherrod Brown (D) in Montana and Ohio, respectively.
