Plus, would Dems make Puerto Rico and D.C. states?
I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
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Today's read: 13 minutes.
Last week.
I appeared on S.E. Cupp’s Battleground show to discuss how the counties around Philadelphia — including my hometown Bucks County — will be voting in the coming election. You can check it out here!
Tomorrow.
Is crime in America getting better or worse? We consulted three crime experts with three different perspectives about what the data does (and doesn’t) tell us. In tomorrow’s members-only post, we’re going to share their arguments side by side.
Quick hits.
- New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) was indicted in a federal corruption investigation, according to a report from The New York Times. Adams is charged with bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. (The indictment)
- Congress voted to pass a stopgap funding bill to keep the government funded for three months. President Biden is expected to sign the bill today. (The bill)
- The Israeli military’s top commander told his troops that they should prepare for a ground invasion of Lebanon in the near future. (The comments) Separately, President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron released a joint statement calling for a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. Nine other countries and the European Union endorsed the statement. (The statement) On Thursday, Israel rejected the ceasefire proposal. (The rejection)
- President Biden announced an $8 billion military aid package for Ukraine during a visit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. (The package)
- The National Hurricane Center expects Hurricane Helene to strengthen to a Category 3 or 4 storm and make landfall along Florida's Gulf Coast on Thursday evening. (The latest)
Today's topic.
Kamala Harris’s filibuster comments. On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris said she supports eliminating the Senate’s filibuster rule to pursue legislation codifying abortion access nationwide. The comments, made in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio after a campaign stop in the state, mark the first time Harris has called for an end to the filibuster since she became the 2024 Democratic nominee, though she has supported similar proposals in the past.
Back up: The Senate functions primarily on unanimous consent, meaning that if a single senator objects to a measure being considered by the chamber, the entire Senate has to stop and address that senator’s concern. These objections sometimes take the form of a filibuster, which originally meant speaking until the session ended to prevent a vote. The term now refers to any effort to delay or prevent a vote on a bill, resolution, amendment, or other debatable question. Before 1917, the Senate did not have any process to override a filibuster, but that year it adopted a rule that a two-thirds majority vote for “cloture” could do so. In 1975, the number of votes required for cloture was reduced to three fifths of the Senate, or 60 votes.
In 2013, Senate Democrats eliminated the filibuster for executive and judicial branch nominees (excluding the Supreme Court), and in 2017, Senate Republicans eliminated it for Supreme Court nominees. Since then, some Democratic senators have pushed to end the filibuster entirely, which would only require 50 votes (plus the tie-breaking vote from the vice president) since Senate rule changes cannot be filibustered themselves. If the filibuster were to be removed, a simple majority of 51 votes would be required to advance legislation in the Senate.
As vice president, Harris has expressed support for eliminating the filibuster. “I cannot wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights,” she said in 2022. In 2019, then-Senator Harris said in her presidential campaign that she would support abolishing the filibuster to pass climate change legislation like the Green New Deal. However, in 2017, Harris signed onto a letter written by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) urging the-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to preserve the filibuster.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned, President Joe Biden said he would support a carveout to the filibuster rules to allow for a vote on abortion rights legislation, but then-Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) opposed the move, preventing it from proceeding. Former President Donald Trump also backed ending the filibuster when he was in office, suggesting that Republicans should do it before Democrats won back the Senate.
Manchin and Sinema have both criticized Harris for her comments this week, and Manchin told CNN that he would not endorse Harris’s candidacy over the remarks. “Shame on her,” Manchin said. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together.”
We previously covered efforts to eliminate the filibuster during Biden’s term and published a deep dive on the issue in 2020.
Today, we’ll explore arguments about Harris’s comments from the right and left, followed by my take.
What the right is saying.
- The right criticizes Harris’s comments, suggesting her stance on the filibuster is dependent on whether her party is in power.
- Some say politicians on both sides should defend the filibuster on principle.
- Others suggest Harris’s stance on the filibuster and the related abortion rights bill are extreme.
In National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke criticized “Kamala Harris’s fair-weather filibuster” stance.
“When Donald Trump was president and the Republicans ran both the Senate and the House, Harris signed a bipartisan letter that expressed her ‘determination to preserve the ability of Members to engage in extended debate when bills are on the Senate floor.’... When she joined this push, Harris’s party was in control of neither the executive nor legislative branch,” Cooke wrote. “When, four years later, the Democrats won their own trifecta, two of those Democrats — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — continued in their support for the filibuster and proved that they, too, had acted on principle. But Kamala Harris? Kamala Harris did not.”
“Leave aside for a moment that Harris was calling for a change in the rules based on nothing more honorable than that her party had temporarily won power — and that, in the process, she had moved from one branch of the government to another — and consider instead what her call for a ‘carve-out’ implied,” Cooke said. “As a practical matter, to demand a ‘carve-out’ for the 60-vote threshold is to request that the rules be suspended when you are inconvenienced by them but imposed when you seek their protection. That, to put it mildly, is not a position that can be made consistent with the rule of law.”
In The Hill, Brian Darling said “the filibuster is under attack yet again.”
“No matter who takes the White House or the Senate, the filibuster should remain to allow for extended debate. The procedure forces the majority party to listen to the minority party, and to back-bench members of its own party,” Darling wrote. “The filibuster is a procedure, not a policy. It serves an important purpose to lengthen debate and to slow legislation in a way that forces the parties to compromise and come to agreement on controversial issues.
“The debate over the filibuster is coming up again because Democrats are confident that they can take the White House and secure a working majority on abortion issues in the Senate. Democrats think they can get to 51 votes on legislation to codify Roe, but they would fall short of the 60 needed to shut off debate,” Darling said. “That same position would likely be adopted by Republicans if former President Donald Trump wins and the GOP picks up enough Senate seats to give them a working pro-life majority, enabling them to move forward legislation limiting abortion. But controversial legislation should not be railroaded through Congress on party-line votes.”
In The Washington Examiner, Tiana Lowe Doescher wrote “Harris still wants to blow up the legislative filibuster because her values have not changed.”
“The bill [Harris] is referencing here, the Women’s Health Protection Act, would not merely codify Roe in federally legalizing abortion through the point of fetal viability, now as low as 21 weeks of gestation. The WHPA, which she and Biden have backed, would federally legalize abortion through the end of pregnancy,” Doescher said. “Harris isn’t just pledging to transform the Senate fundamentally and further federalize politics, but she’s also doing so in a way a more radical Republican than Trump could reverse by accruing 50 votes to ban all abortions at any time in all 50 states.”
“Politicians are indeed capable of evolving, even doing so on occasion in a way that isn’t purely cynical politicking, but has Harris provided any evidence of an authentic ideological journey that would inform her total reversal on criminalizing fracking or nationalizing the entire energy and healthcare industries,” Doescher wrote. “When Trump jests he wants to be a dictator for a day, the media would have us take him seriously. When Harris tells us she wants the federal government to encroach upon states’ rights permanently and blow up a guardrail of democracy in the process, we must take her literally.”
What the left is saying.
- The left says eliminating the filibuster is unlikely but argues Harris’s position has been consistent.
- Some suggest the filibuster is an undemocratic rule that should be removed.
- Others say Harris’s comments were short-sighted.
In New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore wrote about “the odd backlash to Kamala Harris’s support for filibuster reform.”
“There’s been a lot of media attention paid to [Harris’s] reiteration of her long-standing position, and it’s certain to draw fire from Republicans as part of their defensive effort to label Democrats as the “extremists” on abortion, even though it’s Donald Trump and his Supreme Court nominees who put the country in this position in the first place,” Kilgore said. “As long as Republicans are willing to repledge allegiance to the filibuster (which, ironically, Trump has long opposed) and forswear any carve-out of their own for legislation to ban abortion nationally, this could give them an argument to make, though it would probably still be prudent for them to change the subject to immigration or the economy.”
“In a battle of 2025 hypotheticals, it’s unclear how much of a chance Democrats would have to do what Harris has promised to try to do. For one thing, the odds of Democrats hanging onto the Senate even if they retain the White House are low,” Kilgore wrote. “We’ll soon know if Republicans decide to make this a presidential campaign issue or instead continue to follow Trump’s lead in bobbing and weaving and lying and changing the subject when asked about abortion policy. But for all the talk of Kamala Harris changing policy positions, this is one on which she has been very consistent.”
In MSNBC, Zeeshan Aleem criticized Manchin’s “terrible” reason for not endorsing Harris.
“Manchin’s announcement was peculiar in that Harris has called for modifying the filibuster in order to pass abortion rights (and voting rights legislation) for years… But on a more substantive level, Manchin’s conception of the filibuster as ‘the Holy Grail’ of democracy is, well, perplexing,” Aleem wrote. “The bedrock principles of democracy are popular representation and majority rule. The filibuster, however, has effectively become a way for the minority party in the Senate to thwart simple majority rule. It is an idiosyncratic procedural tool designed to delay or block a vote on a bill.”
“What makes the filibuster even worse is that it is used in a legislative body that already shuns the principle of popular representation and disenfranchises millions of Americans because it overrepresents certain communities (people in small states and rural areas), while essentially making the votes of people in more populated states and areas count less,” Aleem said. “The filibuster is not in the Constitution, and it was not some key part of the Founding Fathers' vision for America… One indicator that it wasn’t deliberate is that the first live filibusters didn’t take place until decades after the rule change that allowed them to even emerge as a legislative strategy; it was discovered as a way to block legislation by creative lawmakers.”
In The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus said “Harris is wrong about eliminating the filibuster for abortion rights.”
“Senate Democrats made a mistake when they eliminated the filibuster for lower court judges in 2013. They’re making the same mistake again — except this time with a far less certain payoff,” Marcus wrote. “I would love to see a federal law that gives women nationwide the ability to decide for themselves whether to continue an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy. Harris’s solution is, unfortunately, the wrong way to do it.”
“This is not an easy call. The filibuster is an infuriating, undemocratic impediment to progress — except, that is, when it is a welcome guardrail against extremism… But it takes self-restraint, and an ability to see around corners, not to junk the filibuster when your party is in power,” Marcus said. “It would clear the way for Senate Democrats to enact all sorts of progressive legislation — if they retain the majority, if they retake the House and if they win the presidency. Great, but imagine the frightening things that could happen when the tables are turned and Republicans regain power. Gridlock looks a lot more attractive then.”
My take.
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- I think Harris is making a mistake to push for something that could so easily backfire.
- It’s also bad politics to bring attention to another area where she’s flip-flopped.
- She’s supported eliminating the filibuster for a while — as has Donald Trump — but that doesn’t mean pushing for it now is a good idea.
It's hard to know where to start; but I'll say this: Harris reaffirming her position to abolish the filibuster is bad policy and terrible politics.
We did a deep dive on the filibuster back in 2020 (before I had a team of editors!), but it’s worth revisiting today. Democrats have repeatedly tried to abolish the filibuster since then. While my views on a lot of issues change and evolve over time, my opinion on this one has only wobbled without really moving much. Simply put: I believe it is an effective and useful check on one-party rule. I've never bought the argument that the filibuster produces more spirited debate, though there are some good examples of it producing bipartisan cooperation and acting as a moderating force, which I also view as a good thing.
Harris's position here is obviously self-defeating. On policy, it reads like an own goal; if she wants to abolish the filibuster to pursue the Women’s Health Protection Act, and she succeeds, that would mean the next Republican president with a majority in Congress could pass a federal ban on abortion access. She'd open the door to a much worse situation than the pro-choice movement has right now (not to mention the measures Republicans could take up on other issues that progressives would abhor). Unless you are very confident Democrats can keep the White House for the next four to eight years, at a time when they appear to be struggling to beat Donald Trump, then this is a very, very bad idea.
Stumping on rolling back the filibuster is also politically toxic. It reminds everyone about a position Harris has flip-flopped on, and one that does not look like authentic evolution but political expediency. It helps Republicans label her as a radical who would blow up an old Senate rule to steamroll her agenda through Congress with a thin majority. She's promising to do it to pass a bill that legalizes late-term abortions, which Republicans will use as a cudgel to further cement her image as a radical. And, on top of all that, it provoked a promise not to endorse Harris from Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) — one of the most recognizable politicians among the moderate, conservative, middle-aged, white voters that Harris needs.
Of course, her statement comes with caveats: Harris has openly wanted to get rid of the filibuster since 2019, so it's not as if this should come as a shock. Trump, too, has been pushing to kill the filibuster since 2017 and Republicans expect him to lobby for its end if he is re-elected. So if respect for the filibuster is a key issue for you, that isn't a great reason to vote against Harris. I’m sure there are Democratic strategists who think her pushing for this will maximize the upside of the abortion issue; perhaps promises to rid the Senate of this tradition will fire up the progressive base who wish Biden had gotten rid of it in 2021.
One caveat that I don’t think Harris and her supporters can claim is her insistence that her plan is to pursue a "carve out" only for abortion. This isn’t the same as removing the rule for confirming federal judges or Supreme Court justices; ridding the filibuster for only “certain types of legislation” is not how this works. Once someone breaks the dam, it's over. And if you think this change might improve the Senate as a deliberative body, just look at the House of Representatives: Simple majority rule and few incentives to work together has helped produce one of the most dysfunctional democratic bodies I can think of.
This is a bad idea. It's bad politics. And it's badly timed.
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Your questions, answered.
I’ve heard some mainstream conservatives talk about how if there’s a Democrat president and Dem-dominated House and Senate that they will try to add two new states (Puerto Rico and D.C.) to add two new blue states. Is there any chance of this happening?
— Blaze from San Luis Obispo, CA
Tangle: While the majority of Puerto Ricans favor statehood, as do an overwhelming majority of D.C. residents, the short answer is no, there isn’t a real chance of this happening. Not because some Democrats won’t try, but because they’ll need a much wider majority and then an entire party aligned on the issue. There is a slim chance of D.C. being added if there is a Democratic president with a Democrat-controlled House and Senate — and wide majorities in both chambers.
I don’t think there’s as much momentum behind Puerto Rican statehood; but D.C. statehood is a real possibility. And they’ve tried to make it happen before, fairly recently. In 2021, the Democrat-controlled House passed H.R. 51 to make Washington, D.C. a state, sending the bill to the Senate. However, without the necessary 60 votes to overcome the filibuster, the measure never made it to the Senate floor.
In this election — where the House is a toss-up and Republicans are favored to gain control of the Senate — it’s already unlikely that Democrats sweep the presidency and both chambers of Congress. And even if they did, I don’t think there’s any reason to expect that a bill for D.C. or Puerto Rico statehood would fare any better.
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Under the radar.
This week, the Secret Service placed one of its agents on leave after he was accused of sexually assaulting a Harris campaign aide during a trip to plan security measures for a campaign event. According to a report from RealClearPolitics’s Susan Crabtree, the agent committed the alleged assault after becoming intoxicated at dinner and returning to a hotel room with a group of Harris staffers. On Wednesday, the Secret Service confirmed that it had placed the agent on leave and was investigating the matter. The incident comes at a fraught time for the Secret Service, which has faced heightened scrutiny after two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump in the last two months. RealClearPolitics has the story.
Numbers.
- 24 hours and 18 minutes. The length of the speech given by Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the longest individual filibuster in Senate history.
- 60. The length, in days, of the longest multi-speaker filibuster in Senate history, when southern Democrats spoke in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
- 40. The number of filibusters recorded between the first known filibuster in 1837 and the creation of the cloture rule in 1917, according to an analysis by George Washington University’s Sarah Binder and Arizona State University’s Steven Smith.
- 1,586. The number of times cloture has been invoked since 1917.
- 1,249. The number of those clotures invoked since 2009.
- 35%. The percentage of U.S. adults who said the filibuster should be ended in a January 2022 poll from CBS News/YouGov.
- 34%. The percentage of U.S. adults who said the filibuster should be kept in January 2022.
- 56%. The percentage of Democrats who said they opposed the Senate’s current filibuster rule in a June 2022 YouGov poll.
- 23%. The percentage of Republicans who said they opposed the Senate’s current filibuster rule in June 2022.
The extras.
- One year ago today we covered the Bob Menendez (D-NJ) indictment.
- The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the forecast and possible paths of Hurricane Helene.
- Nothing to do with politics: The most pet-friendly cities in the United States.
- Yesterday’s survey: 1,440 readers responded to our survey on how much statements made by candidates outside the campaign trail impact their voting with 74% saying that they matter a great deal. “Most politicians make scripted statements publicly, so it's hard to know what they really believe. If they say something radically different when they think it's private, that says a lot,” one respondent said.
Have a nice day.
Papua New Guinea, an island nation in the Pacific, has experienced an increased level of ethnic violence and worker exploitation by international companies. While on a tour of Southeast Asia and Oceania earlier this month, Pope Francis traveled to Vanimo, Papua New Guinea, a remote area that lacks running water and has little electricity. The pope brought medicines, clothing, toys, and musical instruments with him as gifts to the residents of Vanimo, while urging local leaders to improve the treatment of workers and address the recent spate of violence. “[We must] put an end to destructive behaviours such as violence, infidelity, exploitation, alcohol and drug abuse, evils which imprison and take away the happiness of so many of our brothers and sisters,” Pope Francis said. Reuters has the story.
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