Does Kyrsten Sinema’s Exit Doom the Senate Filibuster?
Democrats want to kill the 60-vote rule so that one party can pass, well, everything it wants without compromise.
By The Editorial Board
March 7, 2024 5:31 pm ET
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said this week she won’t run for re-election, and a question for voters to ponder before she departs is whether the Senate filibuster will probably go with her. If Democrats keep control under President Biden after November, there’s a real prospect the answer is yes. Then comes the progressive deluge.
Ms. Sinema was elected as a Democrat in 2018 but had an Arizona maverick streak. When Bernie Sanders tried to more than double the national minimum wage as part of a Covid relief bill, Ms. Sinema voted no. She resisted raising tax rates, arguing it would harm competitiveness. In 2022 she left the Democratic Party and re-registered as an independent.
Winning re-election this fall could have been a challenge, though three-way races can be unpredictable, and Ms. Sinema might have tried to run up the middle. The presumptive Democratic nominee, Rep. Ruben Gallego, supports Medicare for All and is nobody’s idea of a moderate. The Republican front-runner, Kari Lake, is a Stop the Steal enthusiast who lost the 2022 governor’s race. She recently got the state GOP chairman to quit, after the press was provided with audio of him in an unflattering conversation that she had secretly taped.
Mr. Gallego supported “filibuster reform” in 2021, urging Democrats not to “let a Jim-Crow era Senate procedure stop us from passing legislation to protect our democracy.” He has company: California Rep. Adam Schiff, who won his Senate primary this week, is campaigning on ending the filibuster to pass “a national right to abortion,” a 35% corporate tax, union favoritism, and more. With Ms. Sinema gone, and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin also retiring, there isn’t another certain Democratic vote against killing the 60-vote filibuster rule.
Ending the need for Senate compromise, so that one party acting by itself could pass everything it wants, would raise the political stakes dangerously high. If Democrats could guarantee abortion and mail voting nationwide, Republicans could abolish them the next time they control Congress and the White House.
Preventing such extreme swings could be accomplished only by never losing an election. Is that what Americans want? The filibuster is on the ballot in Arizona, as well as Montana, Ohio and beyond.
