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Floor Speech
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Mr. LEE. Madam President, the Senate is, indeed, a peculiar institution. Despite what some might expect, and despite how it might be portrayed from the outside, Senators genuinely strive to be collegial, even when--especially when--they hold strong political and policy disagreements. In fact, the Senate rules have strict prohibitions on insulting the character of another Member or a State. That is because debate is a fundamental part of the Senate. I mean, it is part of our culture in this institution. That is how this institution earned the moniker as the world's greatest deliberative body.
Some in this body, unfortunately, want to change all that. They seek to trample over more than two centuries of precedent, procedure, and politeness. They are attempting to break the rules that require a two- thirds supermajority--67 votes--to change the rules. They want to ignore that requirement and stiff-arm this historic institution in a way that would obliterate the requirement that those in the majority hear the voices of and work with those in the minority.
That requirement--sometimes colloquially referred to as the filibuster--is one of the most powerful constraints or checks on human nature, not only in the Senate but in the entirety of the U.S. Government. If the filibuster were removed, everything from regulatory structures to tax rates, the size of the Supreme Court, the makeup of the military, the criminal code, and much, much more could change drastically every few years. Keeping track of the law and its fluctuating requirements would be impossible for the most capable of lawyers, let alone the average American subject to all those laws. Our business landscape would be obliterated under the ever-changing commands of the Federal Government. Americans would be worse off in almost every sense I can think of. In countless ways, the American people would be harmed by this unfortunate decision.
Our system is designed specifically to control those whims and those passions, to make sure that their impact on the law doesn't cause the law to become this ever-changing, ever-fluctuating creature that can't be anticipated.
Our Constitution was designed to protect the rights, the voices, and the influence of those not in the majority. Laws that significantly impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people should, in fact, be difficult to pass.
In fact, the Senate has applied these principles into almost every mechanism of the institution. Most laws pass by unanimous consent or by simple voice vote after hearty consideration and frequent amendments through a process known as the hotline. That would essentially cease to function if the minority had no significant influence. Opportunities for amending these often smaller and somewhat less controversial bills would be foreclosed, crippling the careful consideration needed. Bills would have to be forced through often on party-line votes over the objection, suspicion, or protest of the minority.
But beyond building consensus and maintaining the function of the Senate, the filibuster serves as the keel on a very large ship. It prevents the waves and passions of each new election from drastically changing the laws of the country. It is a stabilizer of sorts, one that prevents our Nation's course from being jerked around to oscillating extremes.
I was asked recently if the Senate is broken. I responded by saying that the only sense in which I think the Senate is significantly broken, or at least undermined in the way that it is supposed to operate, is in its neglect of substantive debate and opportunities for amendments for each individual Member. The filibuster protects the remaining debate, amendment, and consideration available to Members of this body, whether those Members are of the majority party or of the minority party.
So removing the filibuster, on the other hand, would irreparably render the Senate beyond recognition. The partisan vitriol and disregard for opposing Senators would eat away at this place, at our norms, our customs, and, ultimately, our Republic.
Now, at least until recently, many Senate Democrats--most, in fact-- held these beliefs as well. In 2017, 27 of them, including now-Vice President Harris, signed a letter urging the preservation of the filibuster. Many of those Members still serve today, and I encourage them to consider their past advice.
By the way, that was a letter I signed, along with nearly every Member of the Senate from the Republican Party. We signed on to that notwithstanding the fact that Republicans held majorities in the Senate and in the House and a Republican President was serving in the White House. We did so because even though some short-term gain could have been achieved by nuking the filibuster then, we all understood what I think we still all understand today, which is that it would inflict irreparable harm on the Senate, and even more than the Senate, on those represented here. It would irreparably harm the American people to do away with it.
Senator Schumer, the leader of this destructive current effort, has himself in the past given grave, dire warnings about what this tactic-- making the filibuster a thing of the past--would mean. We heard many quotes today, and in one that sticks out in my mind in particular, he said that attempts like that to nuke the filibuster are ``what we call abuse of power.'' He also said in that same quote that even if you have 51 percent of the vote, you still don't get your way 100 percent of the time. He is absolutely right. That describes the Senate, it describes its rules, and it describes so much about how our system of government works. It even describes the system of checks and balances built into our Constitution.
The vertical protection of federalism says many of our laws--in fact, most of them--are supposed to be made at the State and local level and not within Washington, and the horizontal protection--that of federalism--says that we are going to have one branch that makes the laws, one that enforces them, and one that interprets them.
In that same document, it gives both Chambers of Congress the authority to set our own rules. Even though the 60-vote cloture standard is not itself mandated by the Constitution, the authority to add it, to adopt it, as the Senate has, is in the Constitution, and its ends, more importantly, are entirely consistent with this principle of checks and balances, with this notion that Senator Schumer eloquently referred to. The mere fact that you have 51 percent of the vote doesn't entitle you to get your way 100 percent of the time. Now, this circumstance is particularly poignant given that he doesn't even have 51 percent of the votes in this Chamber, no. This is deadlocked 50 to 50.
He is also right that this is what we call an abuse of power. Indeed, breaking the rules to grab power is an abuse. This attempt is so transparent that even Senator Schumer has told the media that his Members are concerned about losing their elections and the majority if they can't use this tactic to federally take over our election system. It is sad, it is tragic, and it is unacceptable.
I warn them that the American people see through this ploy. They know what is happening, and they know why. They were promised a return to cordial statesmanship. They were promised unity. This attempt mocks both of these promises. It mocks the U.S. Senate. It mocks our system of checks and balances. Most tragically, it mocks the American people.
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