What Chuck Schumer said about the filibuster when the shoe was on the other foot

“Backside line could be very easy: The ideologues within the Senate need to flip what the Founding Fathers referred to as ‘the cooling saucer of democracy’ into the rubber stamp of dictatorship. We won't allow them to. They need, as a result of they'll’t get their approach on each choose, to vary the foundations in mid-stream, to scrub away 200 years of historical past. They need to make this nation right into a banana republic, the place in the event you don’t get your approach, you alter the foundations. Are we going to allow them to? It’ll be a doomsday for democracy if we do.”

That was what Sen. Chuck Schumer mentioned in 2005, as he efficiently argued that Republicans mustn't change the Senate’s filibuster guidelines to get their approach. Now that Democrats have the Senate majority, with him as their chief, he’s arguing strenuously for sidelining the filibuster to “wash away 200 years of historical past.”