Harry Reid Predicts Senate Will End the Filibuster: ‘Not a Question of if But When’

Ending the Senate’s legislative filibuster is inevitable, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said in an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid.

“The filibuster is on its way out,” Reid said. “It’s not a question of if but when. It may not be tomorrow or six months from now, but the filibuster is doomed for failure. You can’t have a democracy that requires 60 percent of the vote on everything.

Reid famously spent years quibbling with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) over the Senate’s filibuster, which permits the minority party to block votes unless the majority can come up with 60 votes to end debate. He ceased honoring it on federal court nominees in 2013, when he accused Republicans of blocking former President Barack Obama’s appointees. McConnell reciprocated in 2017, overriding Senate Democrats to confirm Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The filibuster, which has been a parliamentary option since 1806, is still in place for legislative items, but Democrats have called for eliminating it. Obama called it a “Jim Crow relic” last year and said his party should end it in order to add Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico as states. President Joe Biden said Tuesday he wanted the chamber to begin requiring members to continue speaking in order to uphold filibusters, rather than simply assuming they would do so.

“Here’s the choice: I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster, you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” Biden said. “You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking.”

Watch above via MSNBC.