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      ‘Dumb son of a bitch’: Trump attacks McConnell in Republican donors speech

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      Donald Trump devoted part of a speech to Republican donors on Saturday night to insulting the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. According to multiple reports of the $400,000-a-ticket, closed-press event, the former president called the Kentucky senator “a dumb son of a bitch”.Trump also said Mike Pence, his vice-president, should have had the “courage” to object to the certification of electoral college results at the US Capitol on 6 January. Trump claims his defeat by Joe Biden, by 306-232 in the electoral college and more than 7m votes, was the result of electoral fraud. It was not and the lie was repeatedly thrown out of court.Earlier, the Associated Press reported that it obtained a Pentagon timeline of events on 6 January, which showed Pence demanding military leadership “clear the Capitol” of rioters sent by Trump.Trump did nothing and around six hours passed between Pence’s order and the Capitol being cleared. Five people including a police officer died and some in the mob were recorded chanting “hang Mike Pence”. More than 400 face charges.In his remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday, amid a weekend of Republican events in Florida, some at Trump properties, the former president also mocked Dr Anthony Fauci.“Have you ever seen somebody who is so full of crap?“ Trump reportedly said about the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Joe Biden’s top medical adviser who was a key member of Trump’s coronavirus taskforce.Trump also said Covid-19 vaccines should be renamed “Trumpcines” in his honour.According to Politico, the attack on McConnell concerned the senator’s perceived failure to defend Trump with sufficient zeal in the impeachment trial which followed the Capitol riot.Trump, who told supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell”, was charged with inciting an insurrection. He was acquitted when only seven Republican senators voted to convict, not enough to reach the super-majority needed. McConnell voted to acquit, then excoriated Trump on the Senate floor.Of the certification of the election result on 6 January, according to the Washington Post, Trump said: “If that were [Chuck] Schumer [the Democratic Senate leader] instead of this dumb son of a bitch Mitch McConnell, they would never allow it to happen. They would have fought it.”Trump also attacked McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who was transportation secretary until she resigned over the Capitol riot, just before the end of Trump’s term.“I hired his wife,” Trump said, according to the Post. “Did he ever say thank you?”He also ridiculed her decision to resign – “She suffered so greatly,” the Post reported him saying, his “voice dripping with sarcasm” – and said he had won her husband’s Senate seat for him.Trump has attacked McConnell before, in February calling him a “dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack”. On Saturday night he also reportedly called him a “stone cold loser”. McConnell did not immediately comment.The former president remains barred from social media over the Capitol riot but he retains influence and has begun to issue endorsements for the 2022 midterms. Most have been in line with the party hierarchy, including backing Marco Rubio, a Florida senator and former presidential rival many expected would attract a challenge from Trump’s daughter Ivanka.Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment left him free to run for the White House. He regularly tops polls of Republican voters regarding possible candidates for 2024. On Saturday night, he reportedly left that possibility undiscussed.On Sunday morning, the Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson was asked if Trump’s remarks – and their reported enthusiastic reception by party donors and leaders – helped or hindered the Republican cause.“Anything that’s divisive is a concern,” Hutchinson told CNN’s State of the Union, “and is not helpful for us fighting the battles in Washington and at the state level.“In some ways it’s not a big deal what he said. But at the same time whenever it draws attention, we don’t need that. We need unity, we need to be focused together, we have … slim numbers in Washington and we got battles to fight, so we need to get beyond that.”At Mar-a-Lago, the Post said, the former president told Republicans to stick together.“We can’t have these guys that like publicity,” he said. More

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      Republican ‘attacks’ on corporations over voting rights bills are a hypocritical sham | Robert Reich

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      For four decades, the basic deal between big American corporations and politicians has been simple. Corporations provide campaign funds. Politicians reciprocate by lowering corporate taxes and doing whatever else corporations need to boost profits.The deal has proven beneficial to both sides, although not to the American public. Campaign spending has soared while corporate taxes have shriveled.In the 1950s, corporations accounted for about 40% of federal revenue. Today, they contribute a meager 7%. Last year, more than 50 of the largest US companies paid no federal income taxes at all. Many haven’t paid taxes for years.Both parties have been in on this deal although the GOP has been the bigger player. Yet since Donald Trump issued his big lie about the fraudulence of the 2020 election, corporate America has had a few qualms about the GOP.After the storming of the Capitol, dozens of giant corporations said they would no longer donate to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to the certification of Biden electors on the basis of the big lie.Then came the GOP’s wave of restrictive state voting laws, premised on the same big lie. Georgia’s are among the most egregious. The chief executive of Coca-Cola, headquartered in the peach tree state, calls those laws “wrong” and “a step backward”. The chief executive of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer, says they’re “unacceptable”. Major League Baseball decided to take its annual All-Star Game away from the home of the Atlanta Braves.The basic deal between the GOP and corporate America is still very much aliveThese criticisms have unleashed a rare firestorm of anti-corporate Republican indignation. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, warns corporations of unspecified “serious consequences” for speaking out. Republicans are moving to revoke MLB’s antitrust status. Georgia Republicans threaten to punish Delta by repealing a state tax credit for jet fuel.“Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations and antitrust?” asks the Florida senator Marco Rubio.Why? For the same reason Willie Sutton gave when asked why he robbed banks: that’s where the money is.McConnell told reporters corporations should “stay out of politics” but then qualified his remark: “I’m not talking about political contributions.” Of course not. Republicans have long championed “corporate speech” when it comes in the form of campaign cash – just not as criticism.Talk about hypocrisy. McConnell was the top recipient of corporate money in the 2020 election cycle and has a long history of battling attempts to limit it. In 2010, he hailed the supreme court’s Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on corporate political donations, on the dubious grounds that corporations are “people” under the first amendment to the constitution.“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” McConnell said at the time. Hint: he wasn’t referring to poor Black people.It’s hypocrisy squared. The growing tsunami of corporate campaign money suppresses votes indirectly by drowning out all other voices. Republicans are in the grotesque position of calling on corporations to continue bribing politicians as long as they don’t criticize Republicans for suppressing votes directly.The hypocrisy flows in the other direction as well. The Delta chief criticized the GOP’s voter suppression in Georgia but the company continues to bankroll Republicans. Its Pac contributed $1,725,956 in the 2020 election, more than $1m of which went to federal candidates, mostly Republicans. Oh, and Delta hasn’t paid federal taxes for years.Don’t let the spat fool you. The basic deal between the GOP and corporate America is still very much alive.Which is why, despite record-low corporate taxes, congressional Republicans are feigning outrage at Joe Biden’s plan to have corporations pay for his $2tn infrastructure proposal. Biden isn’t even seeking to raise the corporate tax rate as high as it was before the Trump tax cut, yet not a single Republicans will support it.A few Democrats, such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, don’t want to raise corporate taxes as high as Biden does either. Yet almost two-thirds of Americans support the idea.The basic deal between American corporations and American politicians has been a terrible deal for America. Which is why a piece of legislation entitled the For the People Act, passed by the House and co-sponsored in the Senate by every Democratic senator except Manchin, is so important. It would both stop states from suppressing votes and also move the country toward public financing of elections, thereby reducing politicians’ dependence on corporate cash.Corporations can and should bankroll much of what America needs. But they won’t, as long as corporations keep bankrolling American politicians. More

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      JD Vance eyes Ohio’s Senate seat as a working-class man – with millions in tech funds

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      As a prospective conservative candidate for the US Senate from Ohio, author JD Vance can claim a rarely authentic connection to the white working-class voters who helped make Donald Trump president.In his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the tale of his escape from generations of poverty and addiction in the shadow of Appalachia, thanks to a fiercely loving grandmother and a stroke or two of lonesome luck. (The Netflix film adaptation was less well received than the book.)Even if Vance, 36, were a Democrat, his life story – the Marines, Yale law school, venture capital, national renown – would make for political biography gold.But as the Republican party embarks on a highly tenuous makeover, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, from being “the party of the country clubs” to the party of the working class, Vance and his political fortunes have attracted a disproportionate share of excitement in conservative circles – and a mounting pile of actual gold.Before he has even confirmed that he will run for office, Vance has built a campaign slush fund worth at least $10m on the strength of donations from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a formerly ardent Trump supporter, and the hedge fund heiress-slash-Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, Forbes magazine first reported.The new working-class face of the Republican party, it seems, will be rolled out on a distinctly ruling class budget.But a successful Vance candidacy might be worth a very large sum indeed for Republicans, who could see a rare opportunity to confer blue-collar legitimacy on the tricky project of sweeping decades of hostility on workers’ issues – from wages to unions to health care to the giant economic relief package signed into law by Joe Biden just last month – behind a red curtain.“They’re not going to get there on the standard worker issues,” said David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic party, of the Republican attempt to rebrand. “There’s no way.”The conventional wisdom among political strategists has long been that the Republican party, whose supporters are disproportionately white, faces a demographic timebomb as the US electorate diversifies. Trump knocked down the theory a bit last year by making inroads among Latinos and, to a lesser extent, African American men.The “working-class” pitch is partly an appeal to those new Republican-curious voters. But Trump also pointed to another, powerful way for the Republican party to extend its reach: by winning an ever-greater share of working-class white voters, the kind who might have once belonged to a union and voted Democratic, but who backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 by a margin 40 points greater than the national spread.Republican strategists are brainstorming about how to retain those voters. An internal Republican memo revealed this week by Axios, called Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party, advised that “House Republicans can broaden our electorate, increase voter turnout, and take back the House by enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class.”Plutocrats inside the party who might disagree are keeping mum for now, or placing their bets discreetly, while the party’s leading firebrands in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election – senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – have taken up the message and are running with it.“The Republican party is not the party of the country clubs, it’s the party of hardworking, blue-collar men and women,” Cruz hypnotically declared in February, in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).“We are a working-class party now,” Hawley tweeted a day after the November election. “That’s the future.”Democratic partisans snipe that a half-century long commitment by Republicans to increasing the comfort of America’s wealthiest combined with a more recent strategy of trying to prevent voters from voting cannot be erased with simple assertions of newborn political intent.But unfortunately for Democrats, in a world where politics has largely come detached from policy – taken over by culture wars and other more sinister currents roiled by Trump, including racist resentments and the scapegoating of immigrants – the Republican strategy is not dead on arrival, as top Democratic strategists themselves admit.“The Democratic party envisions themselves as the party of working people,” said David Axelrod, former Barack Obama adviser, in a debrief of the 2020 election, “but it doesn’t feel that way to a lot of working people, and the party needs to figure that out.”Both sides acknowledge that branding is important, and in 2022 in Ohio, that could be where Vance comes in. The Senate seat in play unexpectedly opened earlier this year, when incumbent Republican Rob Portman, a mild-mannered Trump skeptic who nevertheless supported the former president, indicated he had had enough of Washington.Older-style conservatives, who dislike Trump but might nod knowingly at the scenes in Vance’s book describing people who “gamed the welfare system”, have encouraged him to get in the race.“I hope Vance will run for Ohio Senator Rob Portman’s seat in 2022,” tweeted Rod Dreher, senior editor of the American Conservative magazine. “He is exactly the kind of new Republican we need.”Assuming that Vance’s Yale law degree or Silicon Valley money would not torpedo his working-class credibility with Ohio voters, however, he could face a second crisis of authenticity, one that could stop his candidacy short before he gets to face a single Democratic opponent.To get to the general election, if he runs, Vance must first survive a Republican primary race – and in the cutthroat world of base Republican politics, where fealty to Trump is all-important, Vance is distinctly vulnerable.“I think that I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance told NPR on book tour in 2016. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”Perhaps even worse, Vance wrote admiringly of Barack Obama in the New York Times in 2017, saying he would “miss” the former president “and the example he set”.His primary opponents would hammer him relentlessly on plentiful past statements such as those, and in recent months a new version of JD Vance has been scrambling furiously away from the old JD Vance. He has tweeted broadsides against the “ruling class”; suggested that immigrants represent a pandemic threat; appeared on Fox News to trash Meghan and Harry, and bash Biden on immigration; gone after big tech, as he takes Silicon Valley money; and even played Twitter footsie with QAnon.“He’s clearly trying to mimic this Trump genuflection that we’re seeing from some of the other candidates, which is kind of embarrassing for JD Vance, because his brand was very different just a couple years ago,” said Pepper, the former Democratic party chair.It remains to be seen whether the internal tensions – not to say hypocrisies – of a Vance candidacy funded by coastal cash, or of the greater Republican rebranding project, will prove too great to sustain in real life. For now, they are both untested political theories.But with a $10m war chest, Vance has enough to get in the game.“That’s a lot of money, that will help him a lot,” said Pepper, adding that Vance’s popularity as an author belied a low name-recognition, for now, among Ohio voters. “But if the only reason he’s in the game is because of coastal big tech, it kills the ‘I’m-a-Trump-guy’ narrative – but it also kills his narrative about representing the working man.” More

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      in US Politics

      Democratic senator Tina Smith: 'I'd vote to get rid of the filibuster hook, line and sinker'

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      It’s rare a federal lawmaker makes a complete about-face on an issue with major legislative consequences.But for Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, the need to shift her position on one of the most crucial issues facing the Biden administration – reform of the filibuster rule – has become too strong to ignore.She now believes that without reform, the filibuster – a rule by which the minority party in the Senate can block legislation – will do serious “damage” to American democracy, she told the Guardian.Smith’s move is crucial. Behind the loud voices of the Senate Democratic caucus calling to either dramatically scale back or gut entirely a tool used to obstruct legislation, there’s a usually quieter set of senators, like Smith, who are finally speaking out. They’ve had enough, these senators say, and want to see a substantial change to the filibuster – either workarounds for certain legislative proposals like voting rights, or modifications so the threat of a filibuster doesn’t bring Congress to a standstill.Senator Angus King of Maine, in a recent op-ed, laid out his shift on the filibuster. Similarly, Smith laid out her own rationale for coming around on some kind of major change on the filibuster. Smith, a former lieutenant governor of Minnesota who came to the Senate via an appointment from then governor Mark Dayton in 2018, initially saw value in it. That has changed.In an interview with the Guardian, Smith argued that contrary to how the filibuster is portrayed by its advocates – as a tool to make the minority heard – it simply gives a minority of lawmakers outsized power.“I often thought that it’s important that the minority view is heard in the Senate, and that there should be an opportunity for people to come together across lines of difference to get things done. But that wasn’t happening either,” Smith said.“The filibuster wasn’t encouraging compromise. The filibuster was making it easy for any member of the Senate to say no. And the more I looked at that, the more I looked at the damage it was doing to our democracy.”She added: “The more I realized this is so undemocratic, and [that] every other governing body I’ve ever worked with has fundamentally operated on the rule that the majority gets to decide, I came to the conclusion that the filibuster was contributing to a broken Senate.”Smith’s comments come as Republican senators go in the opposite direction from Democrats on the filibuster.Top Senate Republicans have argued that the Democrats’ move to change the legislative tool is simply a grab to snatch power from lawmakers in the minority. The former senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, a firebrand conservative Republican, recently wrote his own op-ed arguing that the importance of the filibuster for small states.“The people who want to get rid of the filibuster are precisely the people the Founders wanted to protect us from!” DeMint wrote.But even as support for doing something about the filibuster is growing, Democrats haven’t decided on exactly what yet.Smith said: “Well, I think that decisions about what we need to do, and how we need to change the rules – if we need to change the rules – are decisions that need to happen in their own way. But it happens in a particular place and time. So I’ve come to the conclusion that I would vote to get rid of the filibuster hook, line and sinker.“Others in my caucus haven’t come to that position. If we got to a point where somebody were to say, ‘We should get rid of the filibuster for this issue’, I would, of course, consider that. Of course I would.”Whatever they decide, if Democrats do make a drastic change to the filibuster, they could come to rue it if Republicans regain power in the Senate in the 2022 midterms. Then, they would be the minority party facing the prospect of little input into legislation.Asked about that prospect, Smith paused.“Well,” Smith said. “I thought long and hard about that. And I thought about the issues that I care so much about that I’d be concerned that Republicans could overturn, like women’s reproductive choice, or issues that they could turn the clock back on, like labor, [or] people’s rights to organize.”“But fundamentally, I believe that the core value in a democracy, in a republic … a majority of the people need to be able to decide, and we need to be able to make sure that that happens. If the Republicans were to take steps to roll back values and steps and rights Americans really cherish, then that is going to be a big problem for them.” More

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      in US Politics

      NRA’s grassroots clout still formidable with Republicans despite legal setbacks

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      The once all-powerful National Rifle Association is mired in legal and financial woes but its 5 million members still exert hefty grassroots influence with most Republicans as a fresh gun control debate in Congress heats up, say gun experts and NRA veterans.The NRA’s grassroots clout – via the Internet, letters, phone and other tools – coupled with the influence wielded by millions of other gun owners, keep many Republican allies fighting almost reflexively against gun curbs, notwithstanding recent NRA problems including electoral setbacks, staff cuts, drops in member dues revenue and legal threats, according to analysts.Which means that even after two mass shootings in March in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado spurred the House to pass bills to ban assault weapons and require mandatory background checks on gun purchases, the outlook in the evenly divided Senate to pass these bills seems very slim – unless filibuster rules are changed, say analysts.Still, NRA and Republican sources say if a weaker background check bill than the House passed one is introduced it may have enough Republican support in the Senate to pass as a compromise measure.To be sure, the NRA’s political strength by some key measures is markedly less than in recent years.After giving Donald Trump a huge boost in 2016 with over $30m in ad spending to help him win the White House, the NRA had a much smaller presence in 2020 to Trump’s and the Republican party’s dismay. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA’s spending in 2020 fell to $29.4m from $54.4m in 2016.What’s more in 2018, gun control advocates were credited with helping the Democrats take back control of the House in 2018 as their spending for the first time edged the NRA’s spending. And in 2019, the NRA’s revenue from its members dues declined from 2018 when it was $170m to $113m.Nonetheless, the NRA’s grassroots muscle remains formidable and is working to block the House passed measures.“The NRA is in a weakened condition, and their very future is at stake,” said Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at SUNY Cortland and author of several books on guns, in an interview. “But the gun rights movement is deeply embedded in the GOP. Even though the NRA as an organization is seriously weakened, grassroots supporters are still out there, and are willing to act on the issue.”“For the GOP, support for gun rights from its gun base is pretty much on autopilot,” Spitzer added.Moreover, Spitzer noted that the Senate prospects for the two bills that passed the House seem dim. “The divisions between the two parties are sharper than in the past. Democrats are clearly behind strong gun laws, and Republicans are mostly opposed.”“The filibuster is the real stumbling block,” he added. “ We’ve seen this movie before.”Similarly, a former senior NRA official touted the group’s grassroots strength.“The grassroots of gun owners are still a political force with or without the NRA. Even though the NRA has had significant problems and continues too, they will raise more money” to fend off new gun curbs, if past experience holds.But the ex-official cautioned that “if they changed the filibuster rule, all bets are off”.Further, the NRA veteran noted that he thought a weaker background checks bill like one sponsored in previous sessions by Senators Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Pat Toomey, a Republican, had a decent chance of getting enough Republican votes to pass the Senate if Democrats accepted it as a fallback option.Republican operative and lobbyist Charlie Black agreed that the less onerous bill like that previously backed by Manchin and Toomey has a good shot of getting through the Senate if Democratic leaders embraced it.But Black noted that the odds of the House’s mandatory checks bill passing the Senate are slim. “You’re not going to get the House bill through the Senate,” Black said in an interview.President Joe Biden has called on the Senate to pass the House measures which he called “common sense”, but at his first press conference last week gave mixed signals about how hard he will push for them.Just 10 days before the Boulder shooter killed 10 people, the NRA weighed in on Twitter and applauded a Colorado court ruling blocking a Boulder assault weapons ban enacted in 2018 which it had sought to overturn.However, the NRA and its leadership remain mired in legal and political battles to defeat the New York attorney general’s lawsuit that accused the nonprofit NRA, which has been chartered in the state for 150 years, of mismanagement and corruption.The lawsuit that attorney general Letitia James filed charges last summer that the NRA’s veteran chief executive Wayne LaPierre and a few other top NRA leaders looted the group costing it about $64m in just the three prior years.LaPierre was accused of self dealing by letting the NRA pay for millions of dollars of junkets with his wife and other family members to Europe, the Bahamas and other scenic spots.LaPierre and NRA lawyer William Brewer III have denounced the lawsuit as fueled by “political animus”, noting that James is a Democrat. And Brewer has said the NRA has taken steps to correct its financial problems including replacing some senior staffers. The NRA’s long-time top lobbyist Chris Cox, who had become a critic of LaPierre, was forced out in 2019.But the NRA’s 76 member board was mostly in the dark this January, when NRA leaders announced it was filing for bankruptcy in Texas where it hoped to incorporate, steps that two NRA veterans say were aimed at thwarting James’s probe.James has filed a motion seeking to halt the NRA’s bankruptcy move, and a bankruptcy judge in Texas is slated to hold a hearing on 5 April on the matter.On Sunday the NRA held an emergency board meeting in Dallas specifically to get the board to “retroactively” ratify the bankruptcy action before the 5 April hearing , say two NRA sources.Despite all the NRA’s legal and political maneuvering, Black sounds bullish that the House bills won’t get through the Senate.“The NRA’s grassroots is still active and powerful and influential with members of Congress,” he said. More

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      Just how severe will America's minority rule become? | David Sirota

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      As everyone from President Joe Biden to the conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin to liberal groups now push to reform the Senate’s rules, the defense of the filibuster goes something like this: by design, our nation is a republic, not a direct democracy, and therefore we must create institutional obstacles to empower a minority of Americans to prevent the whims of the majority from being too hastily enshrined in legislation. By this logic, we must keep the Senate’s cloture rule, which requires 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to end a filibuster and move a bill to a vote.Those who make this case seem to love sounding like erudite constitutional scholars steeped in the grandeur of American history, and they purport to be pluralists worrying about minority rights.“Letting the majority do everything it wants to is not what the founders had in mind,” said the Senate Republican whip, John Thune, in a floor speech defending the filibuster this week. “The founders recognized that it wasn’t just kings who could be tyrants. They knew majorities could be tyrants, too, and that a majority if unchecked could trample the rights of the minority … so the founders created the Senate as a check on the House of Representatives.”But an inconvenient fact undermines Thune’s argument and should set pluralists at ease: even if the filibuster were eliminated and bills could advance on a simple majority vote, the Senate would still be giving a minority of the American population enough Senate representation to block legislation supported by the majority of the country.In the debate over the filibuster, then, the question is not whether you believe the majority should rule. Instead, the question is this: how small a minority should be given legislative veto power over the rest of the country?Back in 2010, the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was not wrong when he said the founders were “quoted as saying at the constitutional convention the Senate was going to be like the saucer under the teacup, and the tea was going to slosh out and cool off”.To that end, the founders created a Senate giving large and small states equal representation. The idea was for the upper chamber to act as a stately bulwark against the more uncouth ideas that could bubble up from the rabble and its representatives in the lower chamber. In the words of James Madison, the Senate’s undemocratic structure was designed as a “necessary fence” against “the impulse of sudden and violent passions” of the people.In the modern era, the structure of the Senate has often turned the upper chamber into a place that does not merely respect minority rights – it has actually allowed the minority to rule, regardless of the status of the filibuster. As CNN’s Ronald Brownstein recounted last year, “While the [Republican party] has controlled the Senate for about 22 of the past 40 years, Republican senators have represented a majority of the nation’s population for only a single session over that period: from 1997 to 1998.”Maybe you like this undemocratic dynamic, because you believe it represents the founders’ ideals. Maybe you hate this dynamic, because you believe it makes a mockery of democracy. Whichever side you are on, here’s the point that is germane to the renewed debate over Senate rules: even if the filibuster is eliminated, a minority of the American population will still retain disproportionate, outsized power in Congress’s upper chamber, just as the founders desired.That is because under simple-majority voting rules, the majority of the country’s population does not necessarily rule the Senate. Even without the filibuster, the Senate is still a place where the 265,000 South Dakotans who elected Thune get as much representation as the 2.2 million Georgia voters who elected Raphael Warnock. Consequently, a filibuster-free Democratic Senate would still allow a minority of the population’s senators to rule, if they so choose – because the Senate still provides far less than half the country with the 51 votes necessary to stop any legislation in its tracks.To understand how, let’s do some math.Right now, the 50 Senate Democrats represent roughly 61% of the country’s population, according to census data. The 50 Senate Republicans represent just 49% of the population. All of the Republicans plus Manchin (the Democrat most likely to oppose progressive legislation) represent less than half the country’s population. And yet in a filibuster-free Senate, they could still use a simple-majority vote to stop anything pushed by 49 Senate Democrats who represent 61% of the country. (Note: the percentages don’t add up to 100 because six states have one Democratic and one Republican senator.)If you happen to be one of those constitutional originalists worried about preserving the power of small states, don’t fret. The power imbalance becomes more pronounced when you take party out of the equation and just look at states with the least population. A whopping 52 senators from the least populated states currently represent just 17% of America’s total population – but they would still be able to stop all legislation in a filibuster-free Senate under simple-majority rules.A different way to consider the situation is to think of each American being represented by two Senate votes. Right now, 49 Democrats represent 56% of all those votes. The Republican-Manchin caucus represents just 43% of all of those Senate votes. But again, even without the filibuster, conservatives would have 51 Senate votes to stop anything.These numbers actually understate the situation. That’s because while senators technically represent their entire states, they only need half the voter turnout in their states to actually get into the Senate.Filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% of the population to gridlock the governmentThe point here is simple: no matter what is done with the filibuster, the much-worshiped “cooling saucer” is preserved, and every armchair constitutional scholar with a high self-regard will still get to smugly tell others we are a republic, not a democracy.But these figures underscore not just that the filibuster can be safely discarded without trampling minority rights. They also spotlight how insane the filibuster actually is.Using the same aforementioned math, the filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% percent of the population to gridlock the government. Again, considering that it only takes 50% of the vote to get elected, the filibuster means that about 11% of the voting-age population has successfully elected Republican senators who can theoretically block anything that polls show the overwhelming majority of the country might want.Part of what makes the filibuster discourse so confusing is the differing definitions of “minority”.When the founders created the Senate, they aimed to guarantee that the minority of the population still had rights – they didn’t care about the rights of political parties or factions (which many of them hated).By contrast, when Republicans like Thune depict the filibuster as a noble bulwark protecting “minority rights”, he is not talking about protecting a minority of the population. He is talking about fortifying the power of the chamber’s minority political factions, regardless of how small a segment of the population those factions actually represent.That’s a huge difference – and it helps explain the filibuster’s practical application.Remember, the filibuster is not known as the instrument preventing the majority of the population from trampling the rights of racial or ethnic minorities. Quite the opposite: it has in practice empowered an ideologically conservative political faction to both deprive certain minority groups of their rights and block what the majority of the population wants.When it comes to racial equality, Martin Luther King III noted in an op-ed this week: “The filibuster has historically been used as a tool to try to keep segregationist policies in place. In the 1920s, it was employed to stop anti-lynching legislation from moving forward. In the 1950s, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina famously held the longest filibuster on record to delay, unsuccessfully, civil rights measures. And in a failed effort to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964, southern segregationists filibustered the bill for 60 working days.”Similarly, think about the debate over firearm policy in the wake of yet more mass shootings. The Nation’s Ari Berman notes that after the Sandy Hook massacre, “bipartisan legislation requiring background checks for gun sales was supported by 86% of Americans and 54 senators but blocked by 46 senators representing just 38% of the country.”In both cases, we see that Madison’s desire to restrict democracy in order to limit “the impulse of sudden and violent passions” of the public wrongly presumes that the only way those impulses are expressed is through the passage of new legislation. In practice, blocking legislation has been an equally pernicious expression of such volatile impulses and passions by a motivated but tiny segment of the population. The filibuster allows those impulses and passions to not just influence legislation but to wholly dominate public policy through that minority’s political factions.In light of this history and the math of the Senate, proposals to merely reform the rules with half measures like a “talking filibuster” seem at best unnecessarily cautious, especially since the filibuster is now so routinely invoked to halt legislation.Fully eliminating the filibuster would still allow a minority of the population to wield disproportionate power, because the chamber’s structure has baked-in rights for the minority of the population even in straight up-or-down vote situations.Put another way: even without the filibuster, there can be a Senate majority party whose senators represent less than half the country. There can also be a transpartisan coalition of 51 senators who represent less than half the country and who can stop essentially anything.The filibuster just makes this undemocratic system more undemocratic, in ways that cannot be justified. In the name of preventing a tyranny of the majority, it creates what I have called a tyranny of the tiny minority. It takes a House of Lords-style institution that has been rationalized by glib “we’re a republic, not a democracy” logic and transforms it into a cartoonishly undemocratic weapon of reactionary power.The rationale for that transformation has amounted to vapid paeans to the founders. Everybody seems to have forgotten that Alexander Hamilton admitted: “To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.”Even without the filibuster, the lesser number of the country will have more than enough Senate representation to express many of its political desires. Keeping the filibuster simply lets that lesser number completely rule everything.
      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter More

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      The McConnell filibuster is not the same as the Jim Crow filibuster – it's much worse | David Litt

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      President Obama chooses his words carefully. So last July, when he punctuated his eulogy to the civil rights legend John Lewis by calling the Senate filibuster “another relic of Jim Crow”, he wasn’t messing around.Many others (myself included) had written about the historical link between the Senate rule allowing a minority of lawmakers to kill a bill and the preservation of white supremacy. But Obama’s speech sparked a wholesale rebranding. Today, among progressive politicians and activists alike, “End the filibuster” is out. “End the Jim Crow filibuster” is in.Yet those who so bluntly tie Senate obstruction to southern segregation are missing an important piece of historical context. It’s not fair to suggest that the filibuster championed by defenders of Jim Crow decades ago is identical to the filibuster championed by Mitch McConnell today. Because today’s filibuster – McConnell’s filibuster – is actually much worse.To understand how the filibuster became essential, first to southern Democrats and then later to nearly all Republicans, we have to start a little more than 100 years ago. Until 1917, the filibuster allowed any group of legislators, no matter how small, to pass speaking privileges among themselves, holding the Senate floor and indefinitely delaying any bill. But when Senate obstruction threatened to derail America’s military buildup ahead of the first world war, lawmakers changed the rules, allowing a supermajority of senators to break a filibuster and force a vote.Overnight, the Senate’s balance of power shifted. Tiny handfuls of legislators were now powerless. But blocs of legislators – a few dozen senators willing to grind the body to a halt – could still derail nearly any piece of legislation by denying it an up-or-down vote. One cause in particular lacked majority support, yet consistently rallied a sizeable and passionate coalition: opposition to civil rights.Thus, and largely by accident, 1917 was the start of what can rightfully be called the Jim Crow filibuster. For decades, not a single civil rights bill survived southern Democratic obstruction. Occasionally, Senate leaders would introduce such a bill, fail to overcome segregationist obstruction and then withdraw it. More often, though, senators wouldn’t seriously consider civil rights at all. Rather than encourage “the world’s greatest deliberative body” to debate the issue, the filibuster functioned as a kind of gag rule. Since ending segregation was dead on arrival, why even bring it up?The Jim Crow filibuster had one obvious effect on the country – protecting white supremacy – but it also had two more subtle effects on the Senate itself. First, by forcing senators to ignore the country’s single most contentious issue, the gag rule created a cherished, albeit disingenuous, sense of decorum. With America’s fiercest battleground off limits, senators felt free to focus on common ground instead. Second, because the majority of senators didn’t want to legitimize Jim Crow’s most effective delaying tactic, they almost never used it. Precisely because civil rights bills were always filibustered, other bills were almost always not.For much of the 20th century, then, the filibuster forced a corrupt bargain. In exchange for preserving one-party segregationist rule in the south, Americans could enjoy a functional democracy everywhere else. In the Senate, civil rights bills were doomed – but most bills could pass with a simple majority.But as attitudes and politics changed, the detente became untenable. In 1964 and 1965, liberals overcame fierce obstruction to pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act – and in the process broke the filibuster free from its Jim Crow associations. With obstruction no longer linked to segregation, senators became more comfortable obstructing all sorts of legislation. The number of filibusters shot up.Among those present at the dawn of the filibuster’s new era was a young Senate intern named Mitch McConnell – and more than 40 years later, as Senate minority leader, McConnell would usher in a filibuster era all his own. Obstruction, from both parties, was on the rise before Barack Obama took office in 2009. But McConnell’s scorched-earth strategy, filibustering nearly anything that could be filibustered, was so different in degree as to be different in kind. In a body that runs by precedent rather than formal bylaws, McConnell essentially rewrote the rulebook. Under the new filibuster – the McConnell filibuster – it takes 60 votes to get almost any piece of legislation through Congress.What is supposed to be the world’s most august lawmaking body has rendered itself able to pass major legislation either once a year or not at allWhich brings us to the essential difference between the obstructionists who defended white supremacy and the obstructionists of today. First, a similarity: just as was the case 75 years ago, the filibuster makes it impossible to pass meaningful civil rights laws. But unlike the Jim Crow filibuster, the McConnell filibuster makes it impossible to pass nearly all other meaningful laws as well.There are a few exceptions, such as the once-a-year reconciliation process which allowed Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and Biden’s 2021 Covid relief to pass via up-or-down vote. But these outliers only underscore the way in which the McConnell filibuster is an act of legislative self-immolation. What is supposed to be the world’s most august lawmaking body has rendered itself able to pass major legislation either once a year or not at all. The Jim Crow filibuster’s great shame was that it divided America into two separate and unequal nations – one a functional democracy, the other a racist apartheid regime. The McConnell filibuster’s great shame is that it does away with functional democracy nationwide.And while the Jim Crow filibuster was more morally reprehensible, McConnell’s is a far greater threat to our republic. The institutions essential to our democracy – from our courts to our voting systems to the peaceful transition of power – are under unprecedented assault. As long as the 60-vote threshold remains in place, the Senate provides no meaningful way to protect those institutions. Instead, senators will find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle: it takes a supermajority of senators to defend democracy, yet those attacks make a supermajority of pro-democracy senators ever harder to obtain.Which is why, while Americans have debated Senate rules for centuries, the stakes are higher than ever. The threat to our democracy is greater. And the solution ought to be bolder. Unlike the pro-democracy activists of the civil rights era, we don’t have time on our side. If we don’t end the McConnell filibuster now, we may never get another chance. More

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      Senate filibuster reform would produce 'nuclear winter', says Mitch McConnell

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      Mitch McConnell, who was accused of laying waste to bipartisan co-operation in the Senate when he blocked a supreme court pick by Barack Obama then changed the rules to hurry through three picks for Donald Trump, has said that if Democrats do away with the filibuster, they will “turn the Senate into a sort of nuclear winter”.The Republican minority leader, who himself invoked the “nuclear option” to change the rule for supreme court justices in 2017, was speaking to the Ruthless podcast in an episode released on Tuesday.Eyeing major legislation on voting rights, gun control, infrastructure and more, Democrats who control the White House and Congress are pressuring leaders to reform or abolish the Senate filibuster rule, by which a minority of just 41 out of 100 senators is able to block most legislation.Joe Biden saw his $1.9tn coronavirus relief package pass earlier this month by budget reconciliation, a narrowly applied process that sidesteps the filibuster rule and allows for passage by a simple majority. He is reportedly considering further major steps by that route, although key priorities such as voting rights could not advance through reconciliation.But Biden has indicated he may be open to some change to the filibuster.McConnell is not.“I think if they destroy the essence of the Senate, the legislative filibuster, they will find a Senate that will not function,” said the Kentucky Republican, who took his own nuclear option six years after then Democratic majority leader Harry Reid made such a move on lower-court appointments and executive branch nominees, to bypass Republican obstruction.“It takes unanimous consent to turn the lights on here,” McConnell said. “And I think they would leave an angry 50 senators not interested in being cooperative on even the simplest things.”In 2010, McConnell famously said his chief aim was to ensure Obama was a one-term president. Under Trump, he resisted White House calls to scrap the filibuster.Democrats in the 50-50 Senate, which is controlled by the vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris, might well retort to McConnell that Republicans have shown precious little interest in co-operation on anything for many years. The Covid relief bill did not attract a single Republican vote.On Tuesday, in the immediate aftermath of a shooting in a Colorado supermarket that killed 10 and a week after shootings at spas near Atlanta killed eight, the Senate will hold a hearing on “Constitutional and Common Sense Steps to Reduce Gun Violence”. The House has passed gun control measures but without filibuster reform, any such steps seem impossible in the Senate.Republicans – and some Democrats, including the conservative Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has indicated he is open to some sort of reform – insist the filibuster protects the rights of the minority.McConnell said filibuster reform “may not be the panacea that they anticipate it would be. It could turn the Senate into sort of a nuclear winter, nor the aftermath of the so-called nuclear option is not a sustainable place”. More