Turns out there’s at least one area in which U.S. Sen. David Perdue and Democratic opponent Teresa Tomlinson appear to agree: revisiting the rules governing the Senate.
Tomlinson endorsed the elimination of the Senate’s legislative filibuster on Wednesday.
The former Columbus mayor said her opinion was different two years ago because the procedure, which allows a minority of 41 senators to block legislation, “historically encouraged consensus and deliberation.”
“Today, however, it has been weaponized against the American people. So, the filibuster must go,” said Tomlinson in response to a Twitter question about reviving the Voting Rights Act. “We will have to scrap the current Senate rules and come up with new rules that encourage deliberative, effective action on the people’s business.”
Killing the filibuster has been a growing topic of the discussion ever since both parties began chipping away at it to speed confirmation of judicial and executive branch nominees in recent years.
Multiple Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed its elimination to give the party power to pass its most sweeping policy proposals without bipartisan buy-in, which is essentially what the filibuster protects.
Current Senate leaders have so far refused to touch the filibuster as it applies to actual legislation, but the chamber voted along party lines in 2017 to end its use for Supreme Court nominees. That allowed President Donald Trump's first high court pick Neil Gorsuch to be confirmed on a 54 to 45 vote.
Republican incumbent Perdue, up for reelection next year, voted to change the Senate rules for Supreme Court nominees in 2017. And he previously said he was open to reexamining other Senate rules given how gridlocked Capitol Hill has become.
"Quite frankly, I don't think the founders ever meant the rules to allow anybody the ability to totally shut down the United States Senate," Perdue told one of your Insiders in 2017.
Perdue has long bristled at many of the chamber's more byzantine rules and customs, including its complicated committee structure. He's advocated for term limits and overhauling the annual budget process.
Tomlinson’s primary opponent Ted Terry has not ruled out scrapping the legislative filibuster, but said Wednesday he was worried doing so could be a "slippery slope to more hyper-partisanship.”
The Democrat said a larger priority for him was securing representation for the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Native Americans in the House and Senate.
Even though he voted to scrap the Supreme Court filibuster two years ago, Georgia’s senior U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson has called for maintaining the procedure for legislation. The Republican said in 2017 that it’s what makes the Senate the Senate.
"If we move forward as a body that's a rubber stamp of the House, we'll never be the United States of America our Founding Fathers intended us to be," he said.
Insiders note: This post was ripped and expanded from today’s Jolt.
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