Byron York: Democrats have 'turned on a dime' on filibuster issue
Fox News contributor Byron York expects Democrats' effort to get rid of the filibuster will go 'nowhere'
The Republican National Committee (RNC) called out the Senate Democrats in a new memo for their hypocrisy on plotting an assault on the filibuster after previously supporting the filibuster and fighting to preserve the measure.
The RNC took aim at dozens of Democrat senators, including President Biden, who was previously in the Senate prior to being vice president during the Obama administration.
The memo comes the day before Biden’s speech in support of the Democrats’ voting rights overhaul, during which he is expected to speak on a change to or elimination of the filibuster.
President Joe Biden walks with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, July 14th, 2021, as he arrives to discuss the latest progress on his infrastructure agenda. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
As a senator and even as recently as 2020, Biden has supported the legislative countermeasure that the Democrats used 327 times in 2020 during the Trump administration.
The president seems to have flipped on his support of the measure, though, with White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying last week that Biden would be open to supporting a change to the rule.
Several Democratic senators were blasted in the memo, as well, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii.
Schumer recently came under fire for setting a vote to change the filibuster by Martin Luther King Day after decrying getting rid of the measure in 2005.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) speaks to reporters outside of his office on Capitol Hill on October 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Manchin spoke on the debt limit and the infrastructure bill. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
In 2005, Schumer said it would be a "doomsday for democracy" if the Senate changed the filibuster rules and added that he would "stand in [the] way" if his colleagues tried to eliminate the filibuster. In 2003, he also remarked that the filibuster brings "balance" to the Senate.
Hirono said in 2019 that she was not "particularly in favor of getting rid of the filibuster because that just means majority rule" but just in December posted on Twitter calling to "eliminate" the filibuster.
The Senate Democrats’ push to eliminate the filibuster has a massive hurdle in their own party to clear: getting both Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, D-W.V., on board with the plan.
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However, Sinema and Manchin have both been stalwart in their defense of the measure and have spoken out against gutting it.
"I am not going to be part of blowing up this Senate of ours or basically this democracy of ours or the republic that we have," Manchin said last April, referring to the Democratic push to eliminate the filibuster. "If we have a 51-vote threshold in the Senate, the same as the House--the House wasn't designed to be partisan."
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