Josh excoriates Kamala Harris for coming out in favor of nuking the Senate filibuster.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The Josh Hammer Show
TYRANNY: Kamala Harris Supports Nuking Senate Filibuster
James Caesar is a political science professor at the University of Virginia. He is director of the program on constitutionalism and democracy at UVA. Years ago he explained that in American constitutional theory, the U.S. Constitution needs to be understood in two separate, albeit related, senses. Here is a quote from Professor Caesar, "The first sense legalistic constitutionalism understands the Constitution as a set of rules that can decide policies or cases. These rules are of a sort that can offer definitive answers, and that could be employed and enforced by courts. The second sense, political constitutionalism, understands the Constitution as a document that fixes certain ends of government activity, delineates a structure and arrangement of powers, and encourages a certain tone to the operation of the institutions. By this understanding, it falls mostly to political actors making political decisions to protect and promote constitutional goals." Let me read that concluding line again because that is the crux of what Professor Caesar is getting at. It falls mostly to political actors making political decisions to protect and promote constitutional goals. That takes us to Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris is running an incognito campaign for President. You have no idea what she believes, what she claims she believes, when she claims to change her stance on every issue under the sun. Does she still believe in a national ban on fracking, does she still believe in a ban on liquefied natural gas exports, does she still believe on phasing out gas-powered cars within the next 5 to 10 years, does she still support decriminalizing legal alien crossing in the border? I could go on. We have no idea, no idea at all what this woman believes. That ought to be terrifying. That ought to be terrifying as you, the voter, go into the voting booth if you haven't already cast your early ballot in our way to early voting system. As you go to make your final decision, that ought to be terrifying. But on Tuesday, on Tuesday, September 24th, Kamala Harris let the cat out of the back. She was talking about the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Here's what she had to say on Wisconsin public radio. And so I would also emphasize that while the presidential election is extremely important and dispositive of where we go moving forward, it also is about what we need to do to hold on to the Senate and win seats in the House. That being said, I've been very clear. I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law, the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government held in what to do. All right, so a lot to unpack there and we'll have to save the abortion euphemisms, the reproductive freedom, right to decide your own medical thing. No, it's actually the taking of an unborn innocent human being's life. It is disgusting and demonic, but we'll have to cabin that particular aspect of that total word salad so-called answer for another day because right now, let's focus on the filibuster. If Professor Caesar at UVA is correct, that it falls mostly to political, not legal or judicial actors. If it falls mostly to political actors to protect and promote constitutional goals, then we are in deep due due when we have someone like Kamala Harris, who actually served, who actually served in the US Senate, who is now talking about getting rid of the filibuster. The filibuster in the Senate is the requirement for all but so-called reconciliation bills, which is a once a year annual budget appropriation related bill, other than that, which is a one off once a year thing. Other than that, you need 60 votes. There are good reasons for there to be a 60 vote threshold in the United States Senate. I wrote a column about this about three to three and a half years ago for Newsweek and I explained partially what makes the Senate different and why that 60 vote threshold is actually important in a way that the House, which is a 50 plus one majority, the lower House, in a way that they don't necessarily have. Here's what I wrote, "Perhaps most important dispensing with the Senate filibuster would accelerate the Senate's lamentable institutional decline." The so-called "world's greatest deliberative body" was, especially prior to the ratification of the 17th Amendment, intended to be a "cooling saucer of sorts that filters out and soberizes the House's hotter, intemperate passions." The filibuster, which is legally not a constitutional or statutory provision but instead merely a rule of internal Senate procedure, has nonetheless attained an ethos of quasi-constitutional status. Put another way, the filibuster is philosophically and intellectually downstream of the counter-majoritarian features that have attained constitutional status, such as federalism and separation of powers. In a sense, then, the Senate filibuster directly flows from James Madison's famous discussion of faction in the Federalist No. 10, the most famous founding-ever writing on the insidious threat of majoritarian tyranny. It's a lot of words, but I am basically saying that the concept of counter-majoritarianism, which is why we have such structural constitutional provisions as federalism and separation of powers, ambition must be made to counteract ambition, as Madison so famously wrote in Federalist No. 51, that is the exact same reason that we have the filibuster in the Senate. It is a tool designed to get senators to moderate, to mediate with one another, and to engage in the act of statesmanship, to actually go back and forth when it comes to trading what some side can give up, what does the other side want there, to ultimately moderate and compromise. It is a tool that is there to foster civic debate and rationality, and once upon a time, the US Senate took that very seriously. In fact, there actually still are, at least some senators who still take the Senate filibuster, the 60-vote threshold seriously. For example, Kamala Harris' comments on Wisconsin Public Radio went over like a lead balloon to Joe Manchin, the lifelong Democrat from West Virginia, who is something of a political maverick. He is retiring from the senior body in Congress after this term that seems going to flip from Democrat to Republican hands all but assuredly, but Joe Manchin is not happy with Kamala Harris on his way out the door. Here's what he had to say on Tuesday. I think I've been very clear in my whole career as if it's the 60-vote threshold that we basically operate under in the Senate is essential. Would you endorse her for President then? I'm not endorsing Kamala Harris. So he's not endorsing Kamala Harris. The point is that Joe Manchin is not endorsing Kamala Harris, and he is citing the filibuster as the reason for that. Joe Manchin referring to the Senate filibuster as the holy grail of the Senate and their protection of democracy. More generally, of course, this gives the lie, this gives the lie to the Democrats' notion to their claim that they are the institutional party of democracy. This gives the lie to their assertion that they are the guardians and the custodians of the American lowercase D Democratic tradition going back hundreds of years. I mean, you would have had to have been an idiot not to realize that already. This after all is the same political party that tried to remove Donald Trump from the ballot. They literally tried to remove him from the ballot, and he was quintessentially undemocratic thing you could ever do in literally your entire life. They tried to do exactly that in Colorado before losing, thank goodness, nine to zero at the U.S. Supreme Court and the Trump versus Anderson case. This is a party, a Democratic party that is literally trying to put its political opponent. Donald J. Trump in jail, that it, of course, is what Jack Smith is trying to do. Jack Smith simply just being the hit man for the broader Biden-Harris, Merigarland Democrat warfare complex regime, and right now, that is what this party is trying to do when it comes to trying to do such things as get rid of the filibuster. And you know, have no doubt about it that when Kamala Harris, who is running for president, when she says it, that means it will be done if Democrats get actual 50 senators. Right now the U.S. Senate is 49 votes for Republican, 51 people who caucus with Democrats. Joe Manchin's seat is going to flip from Democrat to Republican. There is very little doubt about that. So all Republicans are going to have to do is pick up one additional seat in order to make sure that they have a check on this and that the Senate filibuster stays into place. But heaven forbid, if Democrats do keep every other seat, if they secure every other incumbent and they fail to knock off Ted Cruz in Texas or Rick Scott in Florida and good luck guys, you're not going to do that on either count. If they stay at 50 and Tim Walls has the tie breaking votes as vice president of the United States, God help us. This is not a scenario that any of us particularly want to be in. At that point, you should have little doubt, little doubt that they will go ahead and actually do the deed and follow their president, follow their commander in chiefs orders to actually nuke the filibuster. Notably, notably this is not the first time. This is not the first time that Senate Democrats have gone down this road. If we go back 11 years, it was 2013, then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was frustrated with how Mitch McConnell's Senate Republicans were filibustering all of President Obama's lower court judicial nominees. So you may recall what did Harry Reid do at that time? Well, he was actually the first filibuster nuke. At that time, there was still a 60-vote threshold for voting for all judicial nominees from the district court level all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. So Harry Reid, in an imperious act, decided to nuke the filibuster for lower court judicial nominees for district court and for court repeal nominees alike. He did that in order to help Barack Obama stack the judiciary on his way out the door in his second term. At that time, at that time, then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, then and still Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, told Harry Reid in no uncertain terms that he would regret that. Let's listen to Mitch McConnell from 2013. If you want to play games, set yet another precedent that you will know the outcome to regret, say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you'll regret this and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think. You'll regret this and you may regret this a lot sooner than you may think. You know, I don't say this every day, but good for Mitch McConnell. That is obviously correct and it was borne out by history because what happened just a few years later? Well, in the year 2017, facing fierce Democratic party opposition on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to replace the late great Anthony Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, what did Mitch McConnell do? Well, he merely extended Harry Reid's own precedent. He took the precedent that Harry Reid had established four years prior for district court and court repeal judges and then applied it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Put another way, McConnell just took the president, took it to its logical conclusion, obliterated the filibuster for all judicial nominees so you can have this bizarre two-tier system where it's in place for some judges, not others. That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Once you break the dam, you might as well finish it. And you know, it's humorous that Democrats this day just drone on and on and on about Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, the dreaded Trump justices on the U.S. Supreme Court who as an aside are not nearly as conservative as Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito, but going back to the point, it's humorous that they complain all the time about Gorsuch Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Supreme Court when in reality, in reality, who do they have to thank for that? Harry Reid. They literally have Harry Reid to thank for that. Mitch McConnell is a Senate institutionalist. You think that he would have done that in 2017 if Harry Reid hadn't first gone down that run 2013? No way. No freaking way. Zero chance, I say, zero, zero, zero. The reason that Democrats have the current Supreme Court composition that we currently have is literally Harry Reid for one. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, also Ruth Bader Ginsburg for not doing what she should have done from a Democrat perspective and resigned from the bench during the Obama presidency because she, of course, passed away towards the end of the Trump administration and the rest, as we know, is history. But getting back to Kamala Harris, there is a lot of debate over what kind of president God help us. Kamala Harris would actually be in office. Would she be a moderate? Would she be a progressive? Would she be a radical? What would she be? Well, she's slipping. She's trying so hard to conceal her hand and to not reveal what she actually thinks to the extent that she thinks anything or what she really will do to the extent that she has any plans on that whatsoever. She gets trying really hard to avoid anything remotely resembling a candid or honest interview and to not let you know what she is going to do in office. But she's let it slip, hasn't she? With this interview on Wisconsin Public Radio, by letting the cat add the bag and letting the mask slip that she fully intends to do what progressives have been calling for her to do for a long time, which is abolish the filibuster. She is indulging in the very worst of the passions of the moment of the far left. She is she is sacrificing all that remains of what professor Caesar referred to as our political constitution again, not necessarily just our legal constitution when it comes to federalism, separation of powers, but our political constitution, the ethos, the spirit of the constitution, the counter majoritarianism, the elaborate checks and balances of the senators, all that. She's done with it. And the party of norms you might expect, yes, you might expect that they would indeed be done with the filibuster. But after this, after Comma lets out of the bag, after trying so hard to have it both ways with donors, trying to appease the Hamas nicks at the DNC in Chicago while she's not upsetting the pro-Israel people, she's constantly trying to have it both ways on virtually every issue. But there should be no doubt, no doubt whatsoever. But after she is coming out in favor of nuking, what Joe Manchin referred to as the holy grail of the US Senate and what Kirsten Sinema, who's also retiring out in Arizona as a Democrat turned independent, what Kirsten Sinema said was a terrible idea. She's really, really, really alienated, multiple, multiple Democrat caucus goers in the US Senate. We should be under no illusions whatsoever at this point, that Kamala Harris is a far left radical who would, to borrow from Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008, 16 years ago now, we should have no doubt that Kamala Harris come January 2025 would do everything possible within her power, everything possible to quote fundamentally transform America. Vote accordingly.