The soon-to-be minority leader wants fair treatment from the new Senate majority – but what is fair?
By | Nov 17, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics
Republicans swept the 2024 election, winning a trifecta in the halls of power the left simply didn’t see coming. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) certainly didn’t see it coming. He predicted back in August that Democrats would keep the Senate majority – and now he’s begging for bipartisanship. The New York lawmaker was ready for war when he thought his party might nab the trifecta, but now he’s suing for peace. What goes around comes around, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, you reap what you sow, or something about a pot calling a kettle black – whatever witty expression you choose, the world Schumer now faces as soon-to-be minority leader is one of his own making.
Chuck Schumer and the Plea for Unity
“To my Republican colleagues, I offer a word of caution in good faith,” Schumer said on the Senate floor after the blue trifecta he predicted turned out red instead. “Take care not to misread the will of the people, and do not abandon the need for bipartisanship. After winning an election, the temptation may be to go to the extreme. We’ve seen this happen over the decades, and it has consistently backfired on the party in power.”
“So instead of going to the extremes, I remind my colleagues that this body is most effective when it’s bipartisan,” he continued. “If we want the next four years in the Senate to be as productive as the last four, the only way that will happen is through bipartisan cooperation.”
The senator seems to forget, however, just how partisan his legislative body has been since Democrats took the majority. Indeed, if it weren’t for former Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the legislative landscape would look a lot different.
Foolin’ With the Filibuster
As Liberty Nation News reported back in August, Schumer sang a very different song when he thought Democrats might pull a trifecta of their own, sans Manchin and Sinema:
“The New York Democrat has held his seat for the last quarter century, and throughout that tenure, he has waffled back and forth on whether to protect or destroy this particular upper-chamber tradition – seemingly based entirely on which side of the majority he happens to be at the time. Well, Democrats currently hold a slim 51-vote majority, and Schumer made it clear this week that if Kamala Harris wins in November, Democrats maintain the Senate lead, and if they win even a razor-thin majority in the House, the filibuster is as good as dead.”
At that time, Schumer told Politico he was planning to end the 60-vote rule for legislation to pass two voting rights bills. He also toyed with the idea of codifying abortion access into federal law and even expanding the Supreme Court from nine justices to 13.
In fact, he tried to kill it in 2022, and the only reason he failed is that then-Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema stood firm on protecting the filibuster. Once those two perpetual thorns in his side left the party and announced they wouldn’t run for re-election, Sen. Schumer figured the filibuster was as good as dead in the 119th Congress. “We got it up to 48, but, of course, Sinema and Manchin voted no; that’s why we couldn’t change the rules. Well, they’re both gone,” he explained.
Democrats: Define “Unity”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “unite” as “to put or come together to form a single unit,” or “to cause to cling together.” Unity is defined as the “quality or state of not being multiple” or “a condition of harmony.” If you find yourself wondering why such a simple word needs to be explicitly defined here, it’s because Democratic Party elites – from Chuck Schumer to Joe Biden – seem confused about the topic. Both call for “unity” whenever it seems Republicans may have some power over them, yet then they turn around and try to steamroll right over any GOP resistance, all the while hurling insults at the politicians across the aisle and any Americans who support them.
Trump supporters are “garbage,” according to the sitting president, remember? Digging just a bit deeper into the memory hole, one might recall a time when congressional Democrats promised bipartisanship and unity only to betray their Republican colleagues once they got their way. As LNN Senior Political Analyst Tim Donner wrote back in 2021 after the two-part “infrastructure” reconciliation debacle:
“After weeks of back-and-forth wrangling involving both parties, conflicting House and Senate priorities, and on-again, off-again agreements, the two parties have begrudgingly signaled their willingness to advance a roughly $1 trillion plan for actual infrastructure, which is aging or substandard – roads, bridges, rail, power grid, broadband internet – but they’ll only get it if they agree to roll over for another bill more than three times the size – somewhere beyond $3 trillion – for what it has amusingly termed ‘human infrastructure.’
…
“Much as there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, there are also good deals, bad deals, and outright blackmail. When a rare, truly bipartisan effort for a popular cause is sandbagged by a demand more closely resembling a ransom, an already deeply discredited institution edges dangerously close to the worst democracy has to offer – majority rule by brute force.”
To shamelessly steal a quote from Inigo Montoya, Mandy Patinkin’s character from the film The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Good Luck Chuck
Luckily for Schumer, Senate Democrats, and leftists nationwide, Republicans do plan to play nice – at least when it comes to the MAGA legislative agenda. Senate confirmation hearings will likely be put to the same majority bulldozer in the next Congress as they were in the current and previous ones now that there’s no filibuster on presidential appointments – even for the Supreme Court. But soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has vowed to protect the filibuster, no matter how much Democrats resort to the tactic to create a legislative logjam.
The best summary of the New Yorker’s plea comes from Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner: “Please don’t do to us what we were going to do to you.” Despite Schumer’s total disregard for unity and willingness to pull the rug out from under his opponents whenever he held the upper hand, Republicans simply will not play the same game. So, at least regarding the filibuster, what goes around does not come back around. What’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander after all, and the pot calling the kettle black doesn’t apply.
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