President Joe Biden said Wednesday that scrapping the filibuster would “throw the entire Congress into chaos” and that “nothing at all will get done.”
During a CNN town hall in Cincinnati, the president was repeatedly pressed on his stance on the legislative filibuster, which establishes a 60-vote threshold to move most bills through the Senate. Biden deflected when an audience member asked him if abolishing the filibuster is the logical next step to address the attack on voting rights — what Biden has called the “most significant threat to our democracy since the Civil War.
When pressed by CNN’s Don Lemon on why the filibuster is worth protecting, Biden said keeping the filibuster is not more important than protecting voting rights. He said that he believes his administration and Congress can pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act without axing the Senate rule — one Biden has agreed, as former President Barack Obama put it, is a “relic of the Jim Crow era.”
“There’s no reason to protect it other than you're going to throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done. Nothing at all will get done. And there’s a lot at stake. The most important one is the right to vote,” Biden said. “Wouldn’t my friends on the other side love to have a debate about the filibuster instead of passing the recovery act?”
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