Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who is challenging Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to be the next Senate majority leader, said Friday he wants to abolish the filibuster and ruled out a potential presidential run in 2028.
Van Hollen, speaking to reporters at the What’s Next conference in Denver, argued that legislation should pass the Senate with simple-majority votes and that the filibuster, which requires senators to muster 60 votes to pass most legislation, is “undemocratic.”
“My personal opinion is that we need democracy in the United States Senate and that means allowing ultimately a majority of senators to answer the call of the American people, so that means 51 votes,” Van Hollen said.
“My personal view has been all along that the filibuster is an antidemocratic — small ‘d’ — provision. It’s not in our Constitution. It was put in there by senators to enhance their power over the power of the people,” he added.
A constitutional convention is not a viable option right now. 250 years ago, you had statesmen who were interested in doing their job representing the people they were beholden to. That is not longer the case. Virtually everyone involved in a modern constitutional convention would be there to line there pockets and billionaires would be lining up to fill those pockets to make sure the new constitution was structured to help them hold onto and increase their wealth.
I think a modern constitutional convention would need good actors to ensure legislation that helps the people to get passed.
I guess it depends on who calls the convention - if it’s the states themselves calling for it then I feel that it could at least be more likely that we implement legislation with more of a local focus. Our current Congress is already heavily aligned with big businesses so getting money out of politics first is a must if we plan to head into a constitutional convention.
💯 The Koch brothers capitalized on the Tea Party movement to fund state legislature and governor races with the express goal of calling a Constitutional Convention to reshape the country with their anarcho-capitalist ideals.