Senator Mark Warner, D-Va., on Sunday said he regrets Harry Reid's filibuster change in 2013 but signaled that he would back a “small carve-out” on the filibuster for voting rights legislation.
“I would wish we wouldn’t even have started this a decade ago," Warner told “Fox News Sunday” host Martha McCallum.
"When the Democratic leaders actually changed the rules, I don’t think we would have the Supreme Court we did if we still had a 60-vote margin on the filibuster, but we are where we are. And the idea that somehow to protect the rights of the minority in the Senate, we’re going to cut out rights of minorities and young people all across the country – that’s just not right to me.
“I don’t want the Senate to become like the House. But I do believe when it comes to voting rights, when it comes to that basic right to exercise and participate in democracy, I get very worried what’s happening in some of these states where they are actually penalizing, saying if you give somebody water waiting in line to vote, or in states like Texas where they’re saying a local government can overcome the results of a local election. That is not democracy, and if we have to do a small carve out on filibuster for voting rights – that is the only area where I’d allow that kind of reform.”
In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Reid of Nevada used the nuclear option, which lowered the threshold from 60 to 51 votes in order to confirm most presidential nominations, other than for the Supreme Court. In 2017, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., expanded the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominees as well.
Now, with majorities in the House and Senate, many Democrats want to abolish the filibuster altogether. However, President Joe Biden argued in a CNN town hall last week that doing so would “throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.”
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