Thread by @AceBearstrom

Voting Rights: The Constitutional Option

#HR1 #SB1 #ForThePeopleAct #VotingRightsAct

by @Thom_Hartmann

@SenSchumer @SenWhitehouse @SenWarren
@POTUS @VP

hartmannreport.com/p/time-to-trig…

1/Since 1917, the Senate has drilled several holes in the filibuster. It’s time to drill another.

2/Anything that can permanently block the Senate from doing constitutionally-mandated business is in violation of the spirit, if not the text, of the Constitution itself.

3/The filibuster was made possible by a senate rule change in 1806. It did not actually get used as a serious way to block debate on legislation until 1837. From then until 1917, it was mostly used to block discussion of civil rights legislation.

4/In 1917, under Woodrow Wilson, when a debate erupted over WWI spending, Senator Thomas Walsh (D-Montana) proposed what he called a “Constitutional Option.” His logic was straightforward:

5/The Constitution:
· Requires each body of Congress to reset or re-ratify its rules at the beginning of every Congress (every 2 years)
· Requires Congress to conduct the people’s business in a republican fashion (by vote)

6/The 1917 Senate passed Walsh’s Constitutional Option, putting it into the Senate’s rules, so, going forward, a 2/3rds (since reduced to 3/5ths) supermajority of senators can overcome a filibuster.

7/The Walsh Constitutional Option — that a filibuster could be overcome with a supermajority vote (invoke cloture) — stands to this day.

8/In 1980, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-TN) further expanded the Constitutional Option to completely prevent taxing and spending legislation from even being filibustered at all.

9/His rationale was that, because spending money to do the nation’s business is a defined responsibility of Congress in Article I of the Constitution, taxing and spending legislation (within limits) could ignore the filibuster and be passed with a simple majority vote.

10/Today we call this “Budget Reconciliation” or just “reconciliation” and it’s been used over 25 times.

11/In the beginning of another expansion, in 2003 Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott renamed the Constitutional Option the “Nuclear Option” and suggested it should be expanded from just Article I work (taxing and spending) to include Article III types of work (approving judges).

12/Approving judges, after all, is also an explicit duty of the United States Senate found in the Constitution.

13/But Senator Lott didn’t get his way; it took years until approving federal judges was finally validated under the Constitutional Nuclear Option.

14/On November 21, 2013, after years of Obama’s judicial nominations being routinely blocked by Republican filibusters, Reid pushed through a new set of Senate rules that exempted judges (except the Supreme Court) from the filibuster.

15/Then in 2017, Mitch McConnell expanded that exemption to Supreme Court judges when Democrats declared an intent to filibuster Trump’s SCOTUS nominee, Neal Gorsuch.

16/Today, the Senate has an exclusion to the filibuster so that judges can be approved by simple majority vote.

17/Thus, two of the duties of the Senate listed in the Constitution — appropriating and spending money, and ratifying the President’s judicial nominees — are today exempt from the filibuster.

18/It’s time to add a third. The Elections Clause of the Constitution also empowers Congress to make or alter state regulations with regard to elections.

@SenSchumer @SenWhitehouse @SenWarren
@POTUS @VP

19/In 1795, in his Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, Paine wrote:
“The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every person has a right to one vote … "

20/As Thomas Paine pointed out, the right to vote is foundational to all other rights, and is what gives legitimacy to our government itself.

@SenSchumer @SenWhitehouse @SenWarren
@POTUS @VP

21/Another constitutional obligation of Congress should be included in the Constitutional/Nuclear Option: Laws to protect all Americans' constitutional right to vote.

@SenSchumer @SenWhitehouse @SenWarren
@POTUS @VP

22/The right to vote is far more important then Congress spending money or approving judges. It deserves at least equal treatment.

And the crisis is upon us.

23/Nobody should legislate away or filibuster any American person's constitutional rights, primary among which is voting.

@SenSchumer @SenWhitehouse @SenWarren
@POTUS @VP

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