“That letter was written before one of the largest efforts in the history of this country to disenfranchise voters,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Tuesday. “It wasn’t just an attack on Jan. 6. It was for a particular purpose to disenfranchise 80 million people. This Senate hardly is worth the name Senate if it’s unwilling to respond to something like that.”
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., also said much is different since she signed the letter in 2017, including the GOP’s “tyranny” of continually using the filibuster, the “violent attempt” to overthrow the 2020 election and efforts in places like Michigan and elsewhere to “literally take away people’s freedom to vote.”
“We were not where we are today,” Stabenow said of 2017.
Schumer, who also once fiercely defended the filibuster, is leading the charge in the Senate this week to change the chamber rules to pass sweeping voting rights legislation with a simple majority vote.
He set a deadline of Jan. 17 — the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday — to take a vote on rolling back the legislative filibuster. Schumer wants a carve out to the filibuster to pass voting rights reforms by a simple majority that would set national standards for running elections.
Republicans are squarely against changing the rules for voting reforms they view as radical and a federal overreach. They’ve accused Democrats of trying to break the Senate by upending the 60-vote tradition.
