Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made his presence felt on Tuesday.
“I think the American people should know what it means if the Senate shifts control, and you’ve heard it,” he told reporters at the Capitol. “Eliminating the filibuster, D.C. statehood, Puerto Rican statehood, and packing the courts. That’s what you get if you change the Senate.”
Plus he argued, “Who do they want to run the Senate? Do [voters] want to enable the Democrats to run roughshod over the country by changing the basic structure here? … What [Democrats are] saying is they don’t want to win the argument, they want to change the rules in order to guarantee the outcome, and I think the American people need to be aware of that before they vote on Nov. 3.”
Majority Whip Sen. John Thune (R-SD) told, “So the very mechanism that they used repeatedly here in just the last year … they are now talking about getting rid of that very rule. Think about that. The irony of that is pretty rich,”
Thune added, “Now the filibuster rule could be said to be the thing that distinguishes the Senate from the House of Representatives. That matters because the Senate is supposed to be different from the House of Representatives… The framers of the Constitution designed the Senate to be … the cooling saucer of democracy.”
Then claimed, “As time has gone on the legislative filibuster is the Senate rule that has had perhaps the greatest impact in preserving the founders’ vision in the Senate. Thanks to the filibuster it is often harder to get legislation through the Senate than the House. It requires more thought. More debate.”
Though Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois questioned, “I have to ask them in all candor, as I listened to the speech about preserving the Senate as we know it, if they are really taking a look at the Senate as we know it?”
And declared, “Do you know how many amendments were debated on the floor of the United States Senate in the year 2019? In the entire year? The world’s greatest deliberative body considered 22 amendments in the year.”
As McConnell announced, “You’ll notice we’ve been confirming district judges on a bipartisan basis and I want to make the point that that underscores, that we are continuing the process of honoring the blue slip. There are 47 Democrats in the Senate each of whom would have the ability to block a judicial appointment from their home states.”
He stressed, “And so we’ve continued to deal with district judges in the way they’ve historically been dealt with which is that the home state senator has a lot to do with it.”
