Biden accelerates filibuster fight -- despite a critical hedge
President Joe Biden’s call for a return to old-school Senate filibusters is elating Democrats who want to gut the chamber's 60-vote requirement to pass most bills — but even its biggest liberal opponents acknowledge Biden hasn't gone as far as they want.
On Tuesday night Biden appeared to back a return to what’s known as the talking filibuster, which requires a senator or group of senators to hold the floor in order to delay a bill. But the president notably tiptoed around, and was not asked about, whether he believed that any filibustered legislation should no longer have to win 60 votes to pass. The question of the 60-vote threshold is essential to his liberal base's clamor for change.
“He’s being vague about it, but that’s all right. I think he is acknowledging that the filibuster has become institutionalized by Sen. McConnell. We now accept the premise that everything needs 60 votes,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in an interview on Wednesday morning.
The filibuster is an increasingly potent threat to the Democratic agenda as a parade of the party's high-priority bills pass Speaker Nancy Pelosi's House on a simple majority vote only to run into an obvious Senate roadblock. Currently most legislation requires 60 Senate votes to both open debate and close it, since one senator can demand that supermajority threshold. There's a growing consensus among Democrats to change that dynamic, but the party's senators will need all 50 of their members to agree on any path forward.
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