By Ruth Moreno
It's no secret that a lot of Democrats are interested in abolishing or creating exceptions to the filibuster, a procedural rule which requires that 60 senators instead of a simple majority must agree to vote upon a proposed piece of legislation. With the Senate split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, and Vice President Kamala Harris acting as the tiebreaker vote, the filibuster is the only thing stopping Democrats from pushing their radical left-wing agenda through Congress and to the president's desk, where President Joe Biden will likely sign most of the Democrat-controlled Congress' bills into law. The Democrats' solution? Reframe a number of proposals as necessary for the advance of "civil rights," for which the filibuster should move out of the way.
Yet no one should be fooled. If the Democrats have their way and the filibuster is limited or abolished, we will likely see avalanche of radical anti-life, anti-family, and anti-freedom legislation passed in short order.
The Democrats are honing in on three bills in particular -- H.R.1, H.R.5, and H.R.51.
H.R.1, the For the People Act of 2021, is essentially a federal takeover of elections that will also gut free speech in contemporary policy debates. As Joseph Backholm and Ken Blackwell discussed on Friday's episode of "Washington Watch," this bill would hand over an incredible amount of power to the federal government and erase many safeguards against election fraud in the process.
Not only is this questionable on a constitutional basis, it is the exact opposite of what America needs right now. Instead of restoring voter confidence in elections, H.R.1 would undermine it by nationalizing and regularizing many of the same practices which eroded trust in the 2020 election. Proponents of the For the People Act claim that this bill will protect voting rights, but by loosening safeguards surrounding voter I.D.s, voting days and election verification processes, this bill will instead make manipulating elections or even changing their outcomes easier than ever (and impose a religious test in the process).
H.R. 5, the Equality Act, is another radical piece of legislation that as already passed the House. Under the guise of LGBT rights, this bill wraps the Left's most radical social issues stances into one package, enshrining abortion on-demand as a constitutional right and steamrolling religious liberty. Under a piece of legislation as comprehensive and far-reaching as the Equality Act, individual rights would be compromised in service of the Left's social agenda, and women and children in particular would be harmed.
H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, seeks to make the District of Columbia the 51st state in the Union. This bill, which is currently making its way through the House, is constitutionally murky and clearly politically-motivated. Democrats have argued that the seven hundred thousand taxpaying citizens who live in D.C. ought not to be disenfranchised, saying that Republicans have only fought against measures to give D.C. statehood because of the racial demographics of the district. The truth, however, is the issue of D.C. statehood is far more complicated than that. The American Founders never intended for the seat of the federal government to be part of a single state and giving D.C. congressional representation would likely make it the first among states, favored above the other fifty. Additionally, right now, Congress has sole oversight over Washington, D.C., but that oversight would be compromised if D.C. itself were to be made a state. And finally, it is relatively obvious that the main reason why Democrats want to make D.C. a state in the first place, is because the political demographics make it likely that it would grant the Democratic Party two new senators.
These are just three of the measures Democrats are all of a sudden claiming to be "civil rights" issues that the filibuster needs to make way for, but they all have serious implications which would permeate nearly every aspect of American society and government. Not only would a filibuster carve-out enable Democrats to legislate their far-Left agenda, but bills like H.R.1 and H.R.51 would change the structure of American politics to ensure Democrats are able to legislate that same agenda much more easily in the future. With Democrats in control of both Congress and the presidency, it is imperative that the filibuster stays in place to protect against the Democratic Party's radical and transformative social agenda.
