Both United States senators from Massachusetts want to eliminate the filibuster.
It wasn’t long ago that they wanted to keep it in place.
U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Malden) and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Cambridge) are vocal advocates for ending the U.S. Senate filibuster. They want to make it so that the Democrat-controlled Senate can pass major pieces of legislation with a simple majority of 51 votes. Due to the filibuster, however, it often takes 60 votes for those kinds of bills to pass.
At a time where President Joe Biden struggled to get much of his legislative agenda done, the two Massachusetts Democrats think this reform to pass the kinds of progressive bills that republicans in Congress will never support.
Back in October, Markey tweeted of the filibuster, “We must abolish the filibuster so that Democrats who were elected into the majority can begin to operate like the majority.”
Meanwhile, Warren explained her stance on the filibuster in an interview with Teen Vogue last August.
I have been fighting for a long time to get rid of the filibuster. And I want to see Congress do that. I think it’s the right thing to do. The founders of this nation figured out when a supermajority should be necessary and when it shouldn’t. They said that for regular legislation, that a majority in the House, a majority in the Senate, and the president who will sign the bill means it should become law. The exceptions they created were for treaties that overruled state law and impeachments. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives Mitch McConnell a veto over what Congress does. I would like to see us do this immediately.
In 2017, when Republicans controlled the presidency and the U.S. Senate, however, they didn’t want President Donald Trump act with just a simple majority.
Both Markey and Warren were unhappy that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell invoked the nuclear option for supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch.
Markey even promised that the Democrats would restore the 60-vote threshold for Supreme Court justices when they got back in power.
“We will ensure that for the Supreme Court, there is that special margin that any candidate has to reach because that is essential to ensuring that our country has a confidence in those people who are nominated,” Markey said in an MSNBC interview on April 10, 2017. “Rather than just someone who passes a litmus test.”
It came after the Supreme Court voted 54-45 to confirm Gorsuch. He replaced Antonin Scalia on the court. This came after the Republican-controlled Supreme Court refused to hold a hearing for Merrick Garland in 2016 — the justice nominated by then-President Barack Obama.
Meanwhile, Warren said that there should be broad support for a Supreme Court candidate on March 21, 2017.
“If they think it’s OK to leave it open for a year, why not leave it open until the FBI investigation is completed?” she said at an event hosted by the Democratic National Convention, according to Boston.com. “If the nominee can’t get 60 votes, you don’t change the rule, you change the nominee.”
The FBI investigation that Warren was referring to was the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The press offices for Markey and Warren could not be reached for comment on Friday.
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