Photo: Joe Madison
On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke with SiriusXM’s Joe Madison “The Black Eagle,” about the Senate considering voting rights legislation and passing the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act:
“Raphael Warnock said it best.. he said the Freedom to Vote Act is when your house is on fire and they send a fire truck over and put the fire out. John Lewis Voting Rights Act is you build a first class firehouse in your neighborhood so the fire doesn’t occur again. We gotta pass both of them and we’re working very hard to do it,” said Schumer. “Every one of the 50 senators supports the bill, but we’ll never get Republicans. And we’ve proven that to Joe Manchin, and everybody else because we gave Joe a couple of months. And said, Hey, we have a bill, all Democrats support, including you, but we couldn’t get Republicans.”
Schumer also shared his thoughts on the filibuster and explained what it’s going to take to get these bills passed:
“Some of us think the filibuster is a turkey, but the bottom line is this, that it has been changed in many ways. Now, Joe Manchin has said he doesn’t wanna abolish the filibuster. So we have said, okay, there are other ways to change the rules where we could still only need 50 vote to pass both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. There are lots of ways to do it.
“In fact, the mentor of Joe Manchin changed the rules I think it is nine times because he said his quote..‘when circumstances change, the rules have to change.’ So there are things we can propose. We can propose a talking filibuster. Let him talk for a period of time, but then we close it with 50 votes. We could say, okay, we guarantee I would as majority leader guarantee, that there’d be a whole number of Republican amendments allowed on the floor, but then we close the debate with 50 votes. There are various rules changes that are not abolishing the filibuster that would allow us to get to our goal. And as we speak, there are members, the rules committee and others exploring this with Joe Manchin.”
“You said if you became the majority leader, which you are, you said, hold our feet to the fire..We’ve been asking people to call, there have been marches, meetings. What is it we should be doing to make sure that this happens?” Madison asked.
Schumer replied: “Keep up the drum beat..we need all of the anger and the protests, et cetera, that have occurred here. They’ve had an effect on the whole Senate and on the whole country. The whole country as a whole, wants to undo these horrible Republican laws. So now we’re in the final stages and we’re asking people to keep up the pressure, calling their senators, telling them how important this is. I don’t care, Democrat or Republican. Telling them we have to get this done, telling them democracy is at stake.”
From SiriusXM’ and Joe Madison “The Black Eagle”–who is now on the 45th day of a hunger strike to protest the lack of federal voting rights legislation as Republican voter suppression laws mushroom around the country in state legislatures.
