Does the Senate filibuster protect democracy or block a mandate?

I don't recommend anybody getting caught in a 50-50 Senate in the United States, because the United States Senate is supposed to be the most deliberate body in the world, and the reason it's deliberate, because you have to have a 60-vote threshold, the cloture to get on to get on a bill. And with that, that was intended from our founding fathers, is that the house is going to be simple majority, 218 out of 435 Don't even talk to the other side. You don't have to. Just shove it through. And George Washington said, you know, it's just going to be like a hot cup of tea, and it goes over to the Senate. It should cool itself off so we can drink it. Well, that's the whole premise. And people keep saying, get rid of the filibuster. That's the holy grail to democracy as we know it, because without it, we wouldn't be the country we are now. It forced us to sit down in one of the bodies, to calm things down, and talk to our friends over in the House, and say, guys, this is how it's got to be. We've got to moderate this some. And that's what I'd always known from Bob Byrd, Senator Robert C. Byrd, our Senator forever, 50 years plus in West Virginia. When I became governor, I think he kind of knew in his mind that I would probably run for the Senate. And he was getting to the end of his career, or his age was creeping up on him pretty hard. Anyway, he kept telling me all the different things and why he did certain things, why the rules were the way they were. So I had a real understanding of the purpose of the Senate and my responsibilities. So here we go. And then the whole thing on reconciliation, there's a reconciliation, it's a movement that we operate under, and it's basically stopping, it stops anybody from preventing us to make sure we can take care of our financial responsibilities. And so reconciliation only takes a simple majority. Well, in the Senate, that's the only vehicle that you can have a 51-vote threshold without a cloture vote of 60 votes getting to the bill. So then Joe Biden gets elected. And I think the story in the book, it starts out, Schumer kept calling me every hour on the hour the night of the election. And I'm thinking, why is he so worked up? Because in the Senate, in all honesty, whether you're in the majority, you're a leader, but you're one of the senators in the caucus of the Democratic Republicans, you have the same power, you have the same, you can participate, every senator can participate. They're all important, 100 of them. So he keeps saying, Joe, he says, you don't understand, this Georgia thing could really, you know, it could happen. I'm thinking, well, I don't think we're going to win Georgia. We hadn't, and then it wasn't predicted. But Donald Trump put him in play, to be honest with you. Him going down there and getting into a tiff with everybody, he did, and so all of a sudden, we got two senators that are running from there, and boom, the first one calls, Rafael Warnock, he wins. Ossoff's later on that night, boom, they call that, and Schumer says, you know what this means, don't you? And I said, well, Chuck, I think it means you're the majority leader. He says, no, it means that you can probably have anything you want. And I said, I just want my country to do well. If my country does well, my state will do well. That's all I care about.

Seek to 5:04

There are two Democrats who are opposed to getting rid of the filibuster, it was Manchin and Sinema, they're now both gone. So the moderate Democrats are largely out of the caucus now, and if and when, because at some point the Democrats will at some point return to power, you know they're going to get rid of the filibuster. Here's the crazy thing, you can get rid of the filibuster with 50 votes in the Senate. I don't think people realize that. So basically, you've got this custom, because that's all it is, is a customer convention or tradition in the Senate of having this filibuster vote, but the majority can just get rid of it. And the Democrats have already said they're going to. So why would the Republicans foolishly abide by this sort of gentleman's agreement that doesn't exist anymore, hold themselves to a 60-vote majority? The country gave President Trump a mandate. They gave him a sweeping re-election, seven out of seven swing states, the House and the Senate. And they want results. And those results are being thwarted by a government shutdown and more generally by this crazy filibuster rule. Why wouldn't we get rid of it now and actually pass the reform that the country wants? And then let's be judged on that in the midterms in 2028 And if it ends up not being good, then we'll pay the price.

Seek to 1:00:55