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Schumer, Pelosi

Do Democrats Have An Ace Up Their Sleeve To Beat Filibuster On Voting Rights?

The Senate resumes Tuesday at noon, foregoing what would have been a week of recess for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in order to debate the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, the combined voting rights and election reform bills passed by the House last week. That debate can’t be avoided, thanks to the process Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered to bypass the first Republican filibuster, on the motion to proceed. The House folded the combined voting rights bill into an unrelated bill that was in reconciliation between the two chambers. Because the Senate had already passed the underlying bill, the whole thing can go directly to the floor for debate.

There, Democratic senators who aren’t Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will talk about its importance and—other than Mitch McConnell and a few grandstanders declaring that it’s a Democratic power grab trying to seize power from the states—Republicans will mostly not show up. That argument, by the way, is exactly the same framing that Southern segregationists in the 1950s and ‘60s used while filibustering civil and voting rights legislation.

Republicans—with the help of Manchin and Sinema—will use the filibuster in the most Jim Crow tradition to defeat the bill. Schumer and fellow Democrats—minus Manchin and Sinema—will move to alter the filibuster in order to pass the bills. Because of the two saboteurs will refuse to help save democracy, the bill will fail to pass. That is, unless a miracle of decency and enlightenment occurs between now and then for the two -- or Democrats agree to use another procedural gambit to outlast Republicans and pass it with a simple majority without ending the filibuster.

Democrats are pushing forward because, in the words of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, “We all have to be recorded at this moment in time about where are we in protecting the right to vote.”

In comments at a National Action Network event on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Schumer called out Manchin and Sinema. He said he would do “everything in my power to advance legislation that would strengthen our democracy” despite the “two Democrats who don’t want to make that happen,” adding that the “fight is not over.”

“Far from it,” Schumer said. “I’m going down to Washington, and we are going to debate voting rights. We are going to debate it, and, in the Senate, you know we need 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster … but since we only have 50 Democrats in our razor-thin majority, the only path forward on this important issue is to change the rules to bypass the filibuster.”

“We must never give up,” Schumer said Monday. “We are going to continue till we get full voting rights for all Americans. We will never give up until we stop these horrible, horrible laws from passing, until we expand the right to vote, not contract it.”

How that’s going to happen, or when exactly, is not clear. As of Tuesday morning, the health status of all Democrats wasn’t apparent—Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii had tested positive for COVID last week, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California was absent for an undisclosed reason. It’s possible there won’t be 50 Democrats available right now to move forward.

That could argue for that other procedural trick at Schumer’s disposal—it would buy time. That’s to use yet another Senate rule to force Republicans to hold the floor with speeches and procedural motions and tire either them or the two traitor Democrats out enough to just break the filibuster.

This is something Democrats are looking at. “There are a couple of paths here. Do we go down the path and do a long debate until it’s done and then have a simple debate?” Kaine said last week. “We wouldn’t need a rules change to pass the bill by simple majority if the debate is over. Theoretically, you do not need a rules change to pass a bill that’s on the floor, you just have to allow debate to occur,” he added.

James Wallner, a former Senate Republican aide and expert on Senate procedure, explained how it would work. “The easiest way to get to final passage on this bill is to put it on the floor and have Vice President Kamala Harris or Majority Leader Schumer or any other senator start to make points of order against any senator who tries to speak more than twice.” That’s Senate Rule XIX, which says a senator can’t speak more than twice on the same question on a legislative day. That would mean Schumer would have to keep the Senate in session indefinitely—staying on the same legislative day for days, possibly weeks. That means simply recessing at night instead of adjourning. That would force Republicans to debate until all 50 of them had spoken twice.

That would put some pressure on the 16 sitting Republicans, including McConnell, who are on the record in support of the federal government protecting voting rights. Those sixteen have all voted to reauthorize the federal Voting Rights Act.

But it would also require a much more coordinated Democratic caucus than we’re used to seeing, and a presiding officer who was rock solid on the rules. “This requires a more aggressive presiding officer,” a senior aide to Senate Democrats told The Hill. “The parliamentarian is not going to advise the presiding officer, ‘Nobody seems to be seeking debate so bring the question.’ It will have to be affirmatively sought by the presiding officer.” The aide added: “The two-speech rule is hard to make work because you can always offer another amendment or bring up a new debate proposition and then get two more speeches out of that. And once again, the parliamentarian doesn’t look to enforce it again, so it would have to be presiding officer causing the parliamentarian to do something they don’t traditionally do.”

It would also mean that all 50 Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris would have to be available all the time to squash Republican procedural motions. It requires both energy and discipline. If Schumer could muster that among his conference for a week, maybe two, it actually might wear Sinema and Manchin down to the point where they would give in on a filibuster carve-out for voting rights. Or not. The tactic would also force Manchin to stand by his claims that he thinks the talking filibuster should be restored. Because this would be essentially that, a talking filibuster.

There’s really nothing else pending in the immediate term to keep Democrats from trying this, though we’re just one month away from the next must-pass government funding bill. The continuing resolution that government is currently operating on runs out on February 18. A potential government shutdown could serve as an additional pressure point on Manchin and Sinema, who were more than happy to support a filibuster carve out in a similar situation last month, with the debt ceiling.

“They can table at any point anything before the Senate, so the Democrats are literally in simple-majority territory right now,” Wallner told The Hill. "They’ve got the majority, even though in a 50-50 Senate that’s kind of a technicality. They have it and they need to use it."

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Rand Paul Gets Torched After Making 'Empty' MLK Tweet

Rand Paul Gets Torched After Making 'Empty' MLK Tweet

Many House and Senate lawmakers are honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., today, but social media users are correcting the record of so many Republicans who are trying to use the late, great American civil rights leader and icon as a shield for their own egregious attacks on civil rights and Black Americans.

Take, for example, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who posted this tweet attempting to paint himself as a bipartisan actor “working together for change” – which many were quick to provide proof of how he is not:

Sen. Paul’s Democratic challenger in the upcoming 2022 race, Charles Booker, offered some of the best examples:

Several others joined in to chastise the right wing Senator:

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Danziger: The Arc Of Injustice

Danziger: The Arc Of Injustice

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel.

Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

The Great Trumpkin Rises From The Trumpkin Patch

The Great Trumpkin Rises From The Trumpkin Patch

Sometimes, you’ve got to go through it to get to it.

That’s a personal motto with which I have occasionally consoled myself since I was a teenager. It means that for as much as we naturally seek to avoid the unpleasant situation, to find a way over or around it, there are times in this life when the only option is to go through it, to endure the unendurable thing and pick up the pieces on the other side.

That philosophy has succored me through breakups, deaths, and career reversals. I find myself turning to it again to gird for the inauguration of the 45th president.

For years, many of us have sought to avoid, to go over or around, the consequences of the Republican Party’s retreat from seriousness. Meaning its studied outrage, its practiced hysteria, its obstructionism, its bigotry, its withdrawal into a facts-free alternate universe, its embrace of human cartoons like Sarah Palin, Ben Carson, and Herman Cain. But avoidance is no longer an option, and the impossible is upon us.

The Great Trumpkin is rising from the Trumpkin patch. Cliff Clavin just got the last laugh on the gang at “Cheers.”

The most flagrantly unfit man in history is about to be sworn in as president. And for the first time in my life, I am not optimistic about America’s future — at least not its next four years. There is no disaster, up to and including a nuclear exchange, that would surprise me under the incoming administration.

If you need a silver lining, I can offer only this: Assuming America survives the next four years in any recognizable form — by no means a foregone conclusion — I suspect Donald Trump’s debacles and the sheer tiresomeness of the man himself, will so thoroughly discredit this strain of Republicanism as to destroy it completely.

Maybe then the country will be in a mood for serious people — Democratic and Republican — with serious ideas again. That’s what passes for hope these days. Meantime, I have made a resolution: I will, at all costs, retain my capacity for outrage.

Yes, that will be easier said than done.

The capacity for outrage is like a physical muscle in the sense that it tires from being overworked. And certainly, Trump has worked our capacity for outrage like a drill sergeant.

Shock upon shock, insult upon insult, falsehood upon falsehood, he has been a daily deluge of the unbelievable and the unthinkable until you don’t even know what to respond to first. Shall we answer the misogyny? But then, what about the bigotry? Shall we decry the incompetence? Will that leave us time to deal with the ignorance? The man is a white noise of badness.

The danger is that it comes to seem normal, that you stop seeing how truly bizarre it is. One of the things that makes us human, after all, is our resilient adaptability. Whether sickened by cancer, swamped by flood, broken by bankruptcy, or savaged by war, we always find a way to accommodate ourselves to the new circumstance. With good humor and quiet courage, we accept the new normal.

But I refuse to do that now.

Doing it now would feel less like an act of courage and good humor than one of surrender, of forgetting that there was once a time dignity, intelligence, honesty, and statesmanship were traits we desired and demanded in our leaders. But if we forget that, we forget us, and then we are well and truly lost.

Love of country demands better. Martin Luther King once said he was “proud to be maladjusted” to the inequities and inequalities of his time. That works for me.

So I am proud to be maladjusted to Donald Trump.

IMAGE: DonkeyHotey/Flickr