Senate Republicans used the filibuster to reject a bipartisan Congressional investigation into the January 6, 2021 insurrection that attempted to overturn the election of President Biden. The vote was 54 - 35 for the investigation, with only six Republicans supporting it, and thus fell short of the 60 votes needed. This is just as disturbing as the attempted coup itself. It shows that the coup is not over, but is still in process.
If Congress can’t even act in a bipartisan way to
investigate the people who literally tried to kill the Vice President and
Speaker of the House, there is no chance at all that this Republican Party will
ever be bipartisan. (Of course, a few
Republicans have a lot to fear from an investigation because they were part of
the attempted coup by conducting advance tours of the Capitol to give the
insurrectionists a chance to case the place for their violence the next day,
and some of them also communicated with the assassins as to where the Speaker
and the Vice President were during the violence itself.)
And, indeed, the former guy is literally threatening the
lives of any who contradict his Big Lie, according to Liz Cheney former number
three Congressperson in the House who was deposed by a public voice vote in
order to please their mob boss leader of the Party in Mar-a-Lago.
So, I think it is time to end the filibuster rule that
requires a 60% vote in the Senate to pass any legislation. The filibuster is not in the
Constitution. The Constitution expected
that both the Senate and the House would have votes decided by a majority, not
a supermajority. The filibuster has a
sordid past in that it was most often used by white supremacist southern
Democrats to stop civil rights legislation. All they need is to keep the votes short of the 60 votes required to end the filibuster to stop anything. And it has become a way for the minority to rule the country. (By the way, the population of the Republican red states is about 42 million less than the population of the blue Democratic states) It is now used
by as few as 41 Republicans to block all Democrat bills.
The filibuster is unconstitutional and should be abolished
in the Senate.
