Establishment Senate Candidates Go Shaky On Filibuster Reform

Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) opened her campaign for the Pine Tree State’s must-win Senate seat by declaring her support for the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold in the Senate most progressives view as an archaic barrier to progress.

Mills may not be alone among leading Senate candidates in wanting to defy Democrats’ relatively newfound consensus on the issue and keep the filibuster in place. Other establishment or moderate Democratic candidates for the Senate are hemming and hawing on the question or ignoring inquiries about it, even as most candidates in competitive primaries rush to declare their desire to scrap it.

Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) dodged a question on the issue in a local interview earlier this year, and former Gov. Roy Cooper (D-N.C.) did not respond to a HuffPost inquiry. Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) and Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek (D) also didn’t respond.

Both parties have chipped away at the filibuster over the past 15 years, removing it for federal officials and judges and carving out other exceptions. But it’s Democrats who have come to largely believe that removing the 60-vote barrier is necessary to pass key parts of their agenda, including restoring the abortion rights protections once guaranteed by Roe v. Wade and government reform measures like limiting the influence of money in politics.

“Any flirtation with maintaining the current dysfunction of the U.S. Senate is out of step with not just progressives, but Democrats of every type,” said Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive activist group. “It’s a commitment to tie your hands before you even get into office.”

Mills, who announced her campaign earlier this month, was accepting the endorsement of another candidate in Maine when she told reporters she supported keeping the filibuster. “I would certainly want to retain the filibuster,” she said.

She then proceeded to get facts about the current state of the filibuster wrong, suggesting she could use it to slow down Trump’s judicial picks. The filibuster has not been in use for most judicial nominees for more than a decade.

“When it comes to Trump appointing 200 judges with very questionable qualifications, I would want to have a say in those judgeships, for instance,” said Mills, who is running with the support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Graham Platner, the progressive Maine oysterman now under fire for offensive posts on Reddit and an at-best questionable tattoo, who is Mills’ highest-profile primary opponent, said he supports ending the filibuster.

“Graham wants to get rid of the filibuster so the Senate can actually get stuff done,” said Joe Calvello, a spokesman for Platner.

Jordan Wood, a former congressional aide who is also running in the Democratic primary, took a shot at Mills while declaring his support for ending the 60-vote threshold.

“Governor Mills appears to think we’re still playing by the old rules,” he said. “Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are ignoring the Constitution and breaking all political norms, so the idea that Mills thinks the filibuster is anything but an impediment to progress is extremely worrisome.”

Most other Democratic candidates running in competitive primaries took stances opposing the filibuster. In Michigan, Rep. Haley Stevens, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and progressive physician Abdul El-Sayed all said they supported ending the practice. Same with Rep. Colin Allred and state Rep. James Talarico in Texas, and with Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Rep. Robin Kelly in Illinois. In Massachusetts, both incumbent Sen. Ed Markey and his more moderate primary challenger, Rep. Seth Moulton, have long supported ending the filibuster.

There could be a split in Iowa, where both state Sen. Zach Wahls and businessman and Marine veteran Nathan Sage said they supported ending the filibuster, while Turek did not respond to requests for comment.

In Minnesota, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan referred to an interview where she said she would support ending the filibuster “under a Democratic majority.” While Craig did not respond to an email requesting comment, a single 2022 social media post indicates she would support it at least to pass voting rights legislation.

“The Senate is broken. One of the reasons it’s broken is the filibuster. We’ve passed it in the House. Let’s get this done in the Senate,” she wrote, with a link to a story about then-President Joe Biden endorsing a filibuster exception to pass voting rights legislation.

Biden’s endorsement of filibuster reform, however limited, represented the culmination of Democratic work to build consensus around it, stymied only by now-former Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona’s opposition. Almost every Democratic presidential candidate except Biden, himself a creature of the Senate, backed eliminating the filibuster, as did most of the party’s Senate candidates in 2020 and after.

While most polling on the question is years old, the public has been largely split along partisan lines about eliminating the filibuster, and it’s generally thought to be difficult to get voters to cast ballots based on procedural issues.

Republicans, led by Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and his replacement as GOP leader, John Thune of South Dakota, have been steadfast in their rhetorical support of the filibuster and seem unlikely to do away with it entirely, even as they’ve taken steps to severely weaken to pass tax cuts for the wealthy and confirm Trump appointees en masse.

With Democrats are unlikely to hold full control of Congress and the executive branch until at least 2028, there is little reason for urgency on the issue, with some progressive operatives suggesting candidates like Mills, Pappas and Cooper could shift their thinking after experiencing the frustrations of life in the Senate. Pappas, in local interviews, has sounded of two minds about the issue.

“I think people have a frustration generally with the pace [at] which, pace in terms of how Washington works to address issues. And at the end of the day, this has to be about how we translate the will of the voters into action in Washington, D.C., and I’m committed to doing that,” Pappas said in an early April interview on WMUR.

But in an appearance later that month on the same network, Pappas called the filibuster “an important opportunity to push Republicans and Democrats together to solve problems” and said it currently serves as “an important tool to be able to stop bad policy from being able to go through Congress.”