Some are reporting that Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t after an “FDR-sized” presidency. But Harris herself contradicted that on the campaign trail when she became the first presidential candidate in history to campaign on filibuster reform as a means to enacting a transformative policy agenda. Harris is pursuing a very specific and practical kind of F-D-R presidency: filibuster reform, democracy legislation, and reproductive rights. She has made clear that she’s got a real plan to deliver these priorities, and there are three simple steps she has to take to get there.
First, Harris must create an electoral mandate for the legislation and reforms she wants enacted as president. There’s a reason Barack Obama‘s signature legislative accomplishment was health care, and why President Joe Biden‘s was COVID recovery and infrastructure. They spent months talking it up on the campaign trail, and when they won the presidency and a Democratic Congress, they had an electoral mandate for those policies.
Harris is doing the same thing now for her top issues: democracy reform and reproductive freedom. Harris has committed to passing the democracy reforms to ban gerrymandering, get money out of politics, and protect voting rights. On reproductive freedom, Harris started the campaign season with a nationwide tour and a commitment to restore these rights is part of just about every speech she gives.
Vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris walks across the tarmac to pose for a photo with staff at Bishop International Airport in Flint, Michigan, on, Oct. 4.
GEOFF ROBINS/AFP via Getty Images
But Harris is going a step further by becoming the first presidential candidate in history to campaign on reforming the filibuster. This would be an odd move for someone planning to play smallball as president, but it’s a perfectly reasonable move for a presidential candidate who is pragmatic and strategic about how to fulfill her legislative vision.
Without filibuster reform, much of her legislative agenda is impossible, for the simple reason that Republicans—even in the minority—could effectively veto it. Republicans in the Senate will not give Harris the votes to codify abortion rights; to protect IVF and birth control; to end gerrymandering; to get money out of politics; to project and expand voting rights. Nobody should pretend otherwise. Similarly, raising the minimum wage, preventing gun violence, protecting union rights and LGBTQ+ equality don’t fit neatly into the annual budget process and are all DOA in the absence of filibuster reform.
This brings us to Step 2: winning a Democratic Senate. Regardless of the presidential candidate’s position, filibuster reform won’t happen if the votes aren’t there for it in the Senate. Former President Donald Trump supported eliminating the filibuster in 2018, but then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rebuffed him (McConnell did amend the filibuster to pack the courts, but he kept it in place for legislation). Biden supported filibuster reform to pass democracy reform and reproductive-rights legislation, but then-Democrats Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema sided with Mitch McConnell to kill the proposal. Reform requires 50 votes, and if you don’t have the votes, you don’t have the votes.
So, is it even possible for Harris to get this done?
The answer is yes, and the math is simple. In January 2022, Democrats got 48 votes for filibuster reform. In November 2022, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) won his election, bringing the pro-reform vote count to 49. If in November Ruben Gallego successfully replaces Sinema, as he is favored to do, that makes 50. Every single candidate running in a competitive Senate election against a Republican this cycle—in Montana, Ohio, Florida, Texas, and Nebraska—is publicly running on filibuster reform. All of those are tough races, but none of them is impossible. As Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), one of the key architects and historians of filibuster reform, told me in an interview earlier this year: if Democrats hold the Senate, we’ll have the votes for reform.
Finally, that brings us to the third step: actually passing legislation. In the event Harris wins and Democrats retain the Senate, the most likely form of filibuster reform is something called the “talking filibuster.” It’s been embraced by Democrats as ideologically diverse as Merkley and Jon Tester of Montana. The talking filibuster allows the minority party to, well, talk! Think Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. With this reform, the minority party is given weeks to make their case as long as they are willing to talk. But ultimately, if the majority party is determined, this process ends with a simple up or down majority vote. In other words, we’d restore the original spirit of the filibuster—the minority can still make their case and try to win concessions but cannot veto the majority forever. The Senate has options here, but the status quo of gridlock cannot be one of them.
This means that if Harris wants to enact democracy and reproductive freedom legislation, she’ll need to work with her allies in the Senate to move quickly after taking the oath of office on Jan. 20. Just those two bills could eat up months of legislative time. And with each passing day, the political capital necessary to move legislation through Congress dwindles.
Eight decades ago, President Franklin Delano showed the importance of the first 100 days in office. Ending the filibuster, shoring up democracy, and enshrining reproductive rights would make a first 100 days to long be remembered.
Ezra Levin is the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
