Biden calls for a return of the talking filibuster
Jules Witcover
WASHINGTON — Joe Biden, famous or infamous in his pre-presidential 36 years in Senate as a talking machine, has begun a pitch for revival of the nonstop filibuster on the floor of the upper chamber.
In the hope of facilitating more of his ambitious policy agenda beyond his $9.1 trillion economic recovery bill amid the public-health pandemic, Biden is urging the return of the dramatic talkathon employed by young movie hero Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
The new president observed last week that “democracy is having a hard time functioning” because of strategic political roadblocks by opposition factions. He told ABC News the time may have come for a return “to what it used to be when I first got to the Senate, back in the old days,”
For a 78-year-old gent often mocked as being beyond his expiration date, it was a rare recollection to make. But it reflected a certain frustration over the ability of critics in the current minority to block Biden’s majority agenda by requiring 60 votes, when his party has only 50 in the Senate.
If Biden yearned for the time a latter-day Mr. Smith could shut down the Senate by refusing to yield the floor, many contemporary senators of both major parties likely would be appalled at any requirement obliging their presence in the chamber during what has come to be called “a talking filibuster.”
Moderate Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who found himself a potential power wielder for a time by threatening to block passage of Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, said he would not support or weaken the filibuster as it now exists. “You either protect the Senate, you protect the institution and you protect democracy, or you don’t,” Manchin said.
Democrat Rahm Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff now close to Biden, told The Washington Post on the filibuster issue that Biden’s suggestion reflected that “the reality of seeing his agenda totally mugged by the GOP filibuster has required a more aggressive posture.”
He continued: “He knows that to save the Senate, and to save his agenda, the filibuster has not to be ended, but it has to be amended. Otherwise, both the institution and the agenda will be a victim of the Grim Reaper.”
A ranking Senate Democrat, Richard Durbin of Illinois, who supports altering the filibuster rule, noted there is considerable skepticism among others in the party toward changing it. “We have to demonstrate to them how the rules can be used and abused before we go any further.” But Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota insisted: “We just can’t wait two years to get things done. Rules are blocking us from progress.”
Biden, for all his emphasis and desire to work across the aisle, clearly has his eye on using the thin majority he now has in both congressional houses. And if he has to stall the business of the Senate to get his way, he seems willing to resort to the talking filibuster.
So it could come to pass that another Mr. or Ms. Smith may provide the old entertainment of a weary senator holding the floor until he or she drops, if doing so could further empower a president determined to get his agenda adopted.
Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.