Retain Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MORAN. Madam President, earlier this week--in fact, yesterday-- the Senate Democrats attempted an unprecedented power grab in the Senate that, in my view, clearly would have affected the sanctity of our elections and violated our Constitution.

S. 1 was one of the most monstrous bills I have seen during my time in Congress, and it certainly didn't meet my standard of doing things that are constitutional.

In doing so yesterday, the Senate Democrats underscored for me something I thought I knew well, and they reaffirmed it, and that is the importance of maintaining the legislative filibuster, the 60-vote threshold for legislation.

I am sorry we went down the path of changing the rules for judges, then for the Supreme Court, and now, potentially, for legislation. Sixty votes is a good thing. Sixty votes allow--people say they want us to work together--60 votes require us to do that. In the absence of 60- vote rule, everything becomes political. In the absence of 60-vote rule, there is no certainty.

A party in power, one that has the majority of the Senate, the President--the election changes, and there is a new majority, and then we change what we just passed 2 years before. There is nothing good for job creation and economic security. There is nothing good for families and trying to figure out what is next in their life when the law can change every time a new, a different party has the majority in the U.S. Senate and House or there is a new President.

My view is that what happened yesterday was not by design. As a matter of fact, the vote, among others, was designed to fail in order to pressure Democratic Senators into altering the rules of the Senate and render this place a majority-run institution.

Democrats achieved control--the voters gave them control of both Chambers of the Congress and the White House--and are convinced that they have a mandate to erode the governing norms of the Senate. By my count, the Senate stands at an evenly divided, 50-50, and the majority, by a slight number, Democrats have in the House of Representatives. Surely, this is hardly a mandate for a radically progressive agenda, much less changing the threshold for which minority rights are protected and bipartisan cooperation is promoted.

Should the legislative filibuster meet its demise at the hands of this Senate because Democrats decide on a majority vote, that the rules that have been in place for decades should be changed overnight on a whim, the august U.S. Senate will be condemned to a partisan spectacle.

The idea that everything should be decided by one vote means that everything here becomes political and that the American people become even more partisan. If every vote in the U.S. Senate--every outcome--is determined by one person, then politics become the passion of the American people by necessity. The 60-vote rule is designed to moderate both sides of a question, to bring us together, to pull us to the middle in something that is more acceptable to the American people than anything we might decide if we could decide it on our own, Republican or Democrat. It means that every citizen would feel the need to lobby us.

The normal course of life becomes much more about politics. While politics is important to the country and while it is important for the American people to be engaged, they send us here to make decisions. That 60-vote rule allows us to make decisions that are more acceptable to them so they can spend their lives living their lives, not worrying about what, on any given day, the U.S. Senate might pass.

I don't think the motivation by the Senate Democrats is what it may seem to some. The suggestion is that we can't seem to pass any legislation here. I read this week in the Wall Street Journal an editorial, an op-ed piece, by Mike Solon and Bill Greene, and this was a comment that stood out to me:

The movement to end the filibuster is less about a Senate that doesn't work than it is about a socialist agenda that doesn't sell.

The idea that everything is decided on the margin of one means that we become politics, that politics rules in this country. The freedoms and liberties that the American people enjoy every day because they can rely on not radical change but modest change--on improvements day by day, not improvements overnight--means that we have a different country. We certainly would have a different Senate, but a consequence of having a different Senate means America is not what it is today.

Again, I say this in a way that would, I hope, remind my colleagues on both sides of the aisle: I stand ready to work on many issues on which we can bring ourselves together. I hope this week--tomorrow, today--that we learn there is an infrastructure agreement, a bipartisan agreement. This isn't a belief that I have the ability to dominate the agenda of the U.S. Senate or that one party should. It is a reminder that America is better when we work together and that eliminating the 60-vote rule, ending the filibuster, changes America for the worse.

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