In a follow up to his "dear colleague" letter released yesterday, Senator Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to further discuss his plans to use changes in Senate filibuster rules to pass Democrat-backed elections legislation. In his remarks, Senator Schumer centered on the contention that the Left's radical elections proposals should be passed in response to the events of January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.
.@SenSchumer (D-NY): "Jan. 6, 2021, will be forever remembered as a day of enduring infamy, a permanent blemish in the story of American democracy, and the final bitter act of the worst president in modern times."
— CSPAN (@cspan) January 4, 2022
Watch: https://t.co/VzzzKGNJFK pic.twitter.com/9MLmBdxO2y
.@SenSchumer (D-NY): "If Republicans continue to hijack the rules of the chamber to prevent action on something as critical as protecting our democracy, then the Senate will debate and consider changes to the rules..."
— CSPAN (@cspan) January 4, 2022
Watch: https://t.co/VzzzKGNJFK pic.twitter.com/KQCJjIg6yn
As the National Review's Rich Lowry explained, the actions by those who breached the Capitol on January 6th were inexcusable—but it has little to do with the election legislation that the Democrats are looking to ram through the Senate:
Schumer is pushing to eliminate the filibuster to pass the progressive wish list of electoral non sequiturs (although a few provisions, such as prohibiting the intimidation of election officials, have been added to the Democratic package to address the 2020 post-election fight).
To wrap this push in the bloody shirt of January 6 is opportunistic and irresponsible and can only serve to convince even more Republicans that the outrage over that day is in the service of a nakedly partisan agenda.
Schumer has an uphill climb to convince relatively moderate Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to go along with kneecapping the filibuster. If the New York senator were to succeed, he would have blown a hole in the traditional practices of the Senate and set the precedent for Republicans — should they achieve unified control of Washington in 2024 — to impose all their own favored electoral policies on the states.
This yin and yang wouldn’t do anything to restore faith in democracy, rather the opposite. But Chuck Schumer is on a mission to achieve, and to use, the power to rewrite the country’s electoral rules — justifications and consequences be damned.
Chuck Schumer’s January 6 Cynicism https://t.co/hcgo5TXicB
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) January 4, 2022
Democrats like Senator Schumer, supported by the media, use this argument in an effort to discredit the mainstream election reforms being pursued by Republicans across the country. John Davidson wrote for The Federalist:
[T]he actions of a relatively small group of rioters that day have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly valid efforts of GOP lawmakers to ensure that election rules are not changed at the last minute by unelected judges or public health officials. Equating the two, pretending they share a common cause and motivation, is a way to discredit the valid arguments of Republicans, smear them as “insurrectionists,” and eventually justify efforts to silence them.
Corporate media’s coverage of the Jan 6 anniversary this week will have one simple & unified message: all Republicans are insurrectionists, the GOP is the enemy of the people, and to preserve American democracy only Democrats can win elections. https://t.co/RmmEty550w
— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) January 4, 2022
Democrats will use any excuse to pass their radical federal takeover of our elections. They should be ashamed of their willingness to use an unfortunate day in American history to achieve a partisan power grab.