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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is leading an effort in the Senate to peel back the filibuster after fiercely defending the 60-vote rule as a way to bring "balance" to the upper chamber.

Schumer in 2003 when the Senate had a very narrow GOP majority gave a spirited defense of Democrats using the filibuster on President George W. Bush's judicial nominees. He made the case that since Bush didn't win in a landslide, the actions of the Senate should reflect the ideological middle of the country.

"The bottom line is this. We are defending the Constitution, we are saying there should be some balance," Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a 2003 floor speech. "President Bush didnt win by a landslide. This Senate is not 62 to 38, or 70 to 30. This country is narrowly divided, and that means when laws are made they move to the middle."

He criticized the Republicans for trying to bend the rules to get the result they want. Schumer said the minority party's role in filibustering is nothing new, but "whats new is the view on the other side that if they dont get their whole way they want to change the rules."

CHUCK SCHUMER ON THE FILIBUSTER IN 2017: IF YOU CAN'T GET 60 VOTES, 'YOU SHOULDN'T CHANGE THE RULES'

His comments came as Senate Republicans were frustrated with Democrats for filibustering Bush's judicial nominees.

"What my colleagues have done is taken the result they want and then come up with an argument that all of a sudden filibusters are bad," Schumer said.

It's the latest example of Schumer's defense of the filibuster when Democrats were in the minority and wanted to stall the GOP agenda and judicial appointments.

Schumer fought hard against Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell's decision to roll back the filibuster to approve President Trump's Supreme Court nominees, saying at the time if a "nominee doesn't get 60 votes, you shouldn't change the rules- you should change the nominee," Schumer told NBC's Chuck Todd at the time.

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SCHUMER TARGETS FILIBUSTER REFORM TO PASS VOTING RIGHTS LEGISLATION

Also in 2017, Schumer took to the Senate floor to say there should be a "firewall" around the legislative filibuster.

"Let us go no further down this road," Schumer said. "I hope the Republican Leader and I can, in the coming months, find a way to build a firewall around the legislative filibuster, which is the most important distinction between the Senate and the House."

Now, however, Schumer is leading a charge in the Senate to take a vote on rolling back the legislative filibuster by Jan. 17 the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Schumer wants a carve out to the filibuster to pass voting rights reforms by a simple majority that would set national standards for running elections.

Republicans are squarely against changing the rules for voting reforms they view as radical and a federal overreach.

MCCONNELL SLAMS SENATE DEMOCRATS FOR INVOKING JAN 6 TO PUSH FILIBUSTER CHANGES: 'SURREAL'

"The so-called voting rights acts they are pushing are a liberal Democrat federal takeover of our election systems which constitutionally reside with the states," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Twitter Thursday.

Schumer's office pointed to an interview he gave Monday with MSNBC's Joy Reid to explain his evolving opinion on the filibuster.

"Even a paragon who believed in the Senate rules, Robert C. Byrd, changed the rules nine times and he said, and I think I have his quote pretty accurately here, When circumstances change, the rules have to change,'" Schumer told the ReidOut.

"Well, let me tell you something: circumstances have changed dramatically with Donald Trump, the Big Lie, the violence of January 6th and all the efforts to take away voting rights," Schumer continued, referring to Trump's repeated false claims that he won the 2020 election instead of President Biden.

And last year, Schumer said Democrats were justified in using the filibuster against Trump's agenda and argued what Republicans are doing now with stalling President Biden's agenda is different.

"The big difference is that we were always willing to negotiate in a bipartisan way," Schumer told reporters at a press conference in March 2021. "Mitch McConnell isnt. The bills he puts on the floor, even when he calls them bipartisan, arent."

Fox News' Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report.

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Flashback: Schumer slammed Republicans for attempting to change the rules on the filibuster in 2003 - Yahoo News

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Being our semi-regular weekly survey of whats goin down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin gets done and where everybody knows shes the brains behind Paw.

We begin in Florida, which is unfair to the other 49 states and all the territories that never can erase the long lead Florida has in crazoid political events, but here we are. At issue is the erratic public schedule of Governor Ron DeSantis, on whom Politico called a putt a little too early. First, DeSantis simply vanished for a couple of weeks at the end of the year. The governors office said he was taking time off to tend to his wife, who recently was diagnosed with breast cancer. OK, so we give him the benefit of the doubt there. That he withdrew from the public eye just as the Omicron surge was breaking over the state is his own tough luck, since he has made a political meal out of defying all reasonable public-health precautions dealing with the pandemic, even the ones dedicated to handling the most recent variant. This week, after emerging from whatever seclusion he was in, DeSantis held a press conference in which he was clearly laboring to speak and breathe at the same time. This led to all kinds of speculation, as you can imagine, as Floridas tally of COVID cases left the stratosphere. In any case, the presidential timber talk has settled down for a while.

We move along to Wisconsin, where they are still futzing around with the 2020 presidential election and theres no end in sight. The investigation by former state supreme court judge Michael Gableman was supposed to be over by now, but, as we know from Benghazi, Benghazi, BENGHAZI!, as well as from dozens of other examples, when American conservatives get their teeth into something like this, theres no prying them loose. Gablemans work has been so slipshod that even David Clarke, the maniac former Milwaukee sheriff, has pronounced himself disgusted by it, and State Senator Kathy Bernier, a Republican, called it a "charade." Gableman responded by telling Bernier she should resign. It should be noted that Clarkes major complaint is that Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin state assembly, is a very incompetent ratfcker. To be fair, Clarkes not entirely wrong. From CBS58:

Oh, OK. Lord, this state is a mess.

Andy ManisGetty Images

But, if they really want to look for election irregularities, they should look south toyes, Florida. Every presidential cycle, we all visit The Villages, a sprawling retiree community that dominates a certain slice of that state not far from Orlando. Sometimes, the folks entertain us with golf cart parades. But they are also enthusiastic, allegedly, about voter fraud. From News6 in Orlando:

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma. Blog Official Transient Friedman of the Plains is off on his annual gig in the Bahamas, to the bafflement of the venerable Jack, but he is closely monitoring developments back home, and sends us yet another tale of the long reach of the Big Lie. From Public Radio Tulsa:

This brother is a real prize. Again, from PRT:

Here at the shebeen, we periodically plead with our fellow citizens: Look, vote for conservatives if you must, but for the love of speed-skating Christ, stop voting for morons. Thank you.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

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Multiple Registered Republicans in The Villages, Florida Accused of Voter Fraud - Esquire

Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan said on Sunday said the GOP has "no alternative" to supporting former president Donald Trump.

Meijer made the remarks on NBC's Meet the Press with Chuck Todd when asked about why and how Trump has maintained a grip on the party despite being openly condemned by many Republicans following the January 6 insurrection.

"There was no alternative. There was no other path. And given how President Biden, when he was elected into office, you know, said he would be moderate and look for bipartisan solutions. But then after, and frankly, I blame the former president for this, after we lost the two senate seats in Georgia and the Senate flipped, it became an exercise in trying to be an LBJ or FDR style presidency and enact transformational change in the absence of any compelling mandate from the American people to do so," Meijer said.

"So that gave the rallying signal. That created a very steep divide, and at the end of the day, there's no other option right now in the Republican Party, and that's a sad testament," Meijer added.

Todd pushed back when Meijer blamed the divide on Biden, asking why it isn't up to Meijer himself, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, or Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to "kick their Trump habit."

"If you have one party plummeting into the depths and the other just uses that as an excuse to go further, to go more to an extreme, to go more away from any sort of governing consensus, and towards trying to enact whatever the will of the most extreme constituency they have is, that is a recipe for both parties to drive further away from anything that resembles serving the American people as a whole," Meijer responded.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, Republicans like McConnell and Sen. Lindsay Graham distanced themselves from Trump. On the Senate floor following the attack, Graham said, "Enough is enough."

Since then, Graham has changed his tune, saying that GOP leaders must have a relationship with the former president to be effective.

Trump has teased at a 2024 presidential run but has not committed yet. He plans on giving a speech on the anniversary of January 6 of this year from Mar-A-Lago.

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GOP rep says there's no other option right now to Republicans backing Trump - Business Insider

My Twitter accounts pinned tweet is one that says Trump would have elevated his reputation if he had conceded the election quickly; it concludes now people just hope he croaks. The tweet is dated Jan. 4, 2021so elevating the tweet is admittedly a kind of virtue signal: I am not the kind of Trump guy who backed his post-election antics, and Im pleased to have made that clear two days before what one writer aptly called the cornpone intifada.

But the people just hope he croaks line is too vague. The sentiment is shared by never-Trumpers and no small number of once pro-Trump activists and intellectuals who generally approved of his stated policy goals, only to experience a dysfunctional administration that accomplished little. As Ann Coulter (an early and vital Trump supporter) memorably put it, Trump is the opposite of a duck, flailing madly and going nowhere instead of moving quietly ahead in the water.

But it is not shared by Joe Biden, most elected Democrats, and the huge interlocking liberal complex of that makes up the mainstream media: for them, Trump is the best thing ever, someone they can portray effectively as a buffoonish fascist wannabe, while he remains an ineffectual foe with no real sense of how to use power. He is the essential glue and greatest hope of the Democratic coalition, and probably the only Republican a Democrat could defeat in 2024. Indeed, if the Democratic primary electorate moves leftward, as well it might, Trump could conceivably lose to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, ushering in authoritarian socialist rule in the United States by free election.

Of course, Trump is a useful foil to Biden, whose aging communication skills revive when speaking of his 2020 adversary. But the fixation on Trump and January 6 envelops the whole party. How many times a day does one hearfrom the lips of a Democratic official or a CNN or NPR commentatorthat piously pronounced phrase our democracy to connote all that the January 6 rioters and Trump purportedly threaten. The phrase feigns a reverence to American constitutional practices, which is why Democrats are so enamored of it. But almost invariably it is coupled with transformative action agenda that is the very opposite of constitutional regard: ending the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, the replacement of an Election Day where self-governing citizens go to the polls and vote by a rolling election period dominated by mail-in ballots and vote harvesting by activists. Such proposals are self-evidently designed to precisely subvert the mechanisms the Founding Fathers intended to encourage: gradualism and the need for decisive majorities to enact major changes into our democracyin other words, to undermine precisely the institutions which have made the United States arguably the most successful long-standing democracy in the world.

Writing for Unherd, Simon Cottee makes some comparisons between the way neoconservatives deployed September 11 as a lever for their long term agendas of war in the Middle East and the way contemporary Democrats are trying to use January 6. But if the goals of the neoconservatives were fairly tightly focused on the invasion of Iraq (and perhaps later Iran), those of todays liberal establishment are diffuse: for some they involve jettison of the checks and balances built into the American system, for others simply a means for the relegation of every aspect of Trumpismincluding the policy aspirations which remain broadly popular permanently into a realm of deplorable moral oblivion. In actuality, January 6 was a riot involving a few hundred mostly unarmed people whose breach of the Capitol was made possible by almost unfathomably poor preparation by riot control police (a critical factor about which we would surely be hearing much more if Trump and his administration bore responsibility for it). The Democrats seek to turn it into world historical insurrection whose nefarious meaning must be contemplated every day, as the New York Times somberly admonishes.

For the Democrats, every day that we talk about January 6 is a day where we are not talking about soaring rates of crime brought about by the progressives war on cops, or inflation accelerating to 1970s levels, or the months of rioting, egged on by prominent Democrats, including then candidates Biden and Kamala Harris, that followed the George Floyd killingrioting far more deadly and destructive than January 6. And every day of January 6 is a way to keep Trump in the spotlight, and in a way keep his persona central to the Republican Party. Its a goal which corresponds perfectly with Trumps own insatiable quest for the limelight; He seems to believe, perhaps correctly, that if he had (as he should have) conceded that he lost the election, albeit one held under unusual covid circumstances, his role as a future party leader would be diminished.

This reinforcing mutual self-interest of two campsthe Democratic establishment and Trump himselfnow constitute a real force in American politics, and possibly a barrier to any kind of enlightened leadership emerging from Republicans for the 2024 presidential race. The easiest way out one doesnt want to say out loud, but it does involve actuarial tables and the fickle finger of health.

Scott McConnell is founding editor of theAmerican Conservativeand author ofEx-Neocon: Dispatches from the Post-9/11 Ideological Wars.

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Why Liberals Secretly Love Donald Trump - The National Interest

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If the Trudeau Liberals want us to believe them when they insist they wont tax your home, they might want to stop talking about the issue and funding studies on it.

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The Liberals are testy and on edge once again as members of the public, pundits and politicos point to the latest call for a tax on homes.

This week a study funded by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, a federal Crown agency, put forward a proposal to tax homes worth more than $1 million. More shockingly, the tax proposal wasnt a standard capital gains scheme this proposal was to tax your home while you are living in it.

They propose an annual surtax on homes of between 0.5% and 1% per year to raise $5.8 billion annually for the government. That money, according to the report, would be used to provide benefits to renters.

All of this is the brainchild of Dr. Paul Kershaw who runs what is called the Generation Squeeze Lab at the University of British Columbia. His study, paid for by CMHC, seeks to fundamentally alter Canadian housing and to a large extent the Canadian economy by attempting to use government policy to encourage rental housing and co-ops while discouraging home ownership.

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There is no doubt that there is a home affordability crisis in much of the country driven by a number of factors, including policies of the federal, provincial and municipal governments. The solution funded by the Trudeau Liberals though is to tax homes, discourage home ownership and make that dream less affordable for many.

A home worth $1 million may conjure up images of mansions for some but the reality in places like Toronto, Vancouver and their suburbs is that this is a normal home price. The report even points out that 13% of homes in Ontario meet this criteria while in British Columbia its 21%.

Taxing these homes wont make it easier for the next generation to buy a home, it will simply be a wealth transfer from homeowners to renters.

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The Liberals should reject this idea in the strongest terms and tell CMHC to stop studying ways to tax homes. Otherwise, no one will believe them when they say they dont want to do so.

This isnt the first time the Liberals have toyed with the idea while claiming its not on their radar.

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In late 2018, the Liberals put together a series of policy proposals to be considered for the coming budget and the 2019 election campaign. Then Toronto MP Adam Vaughan tabled a proposal that called for taxing any gains on primary residences at 50% for a home sold after one year of ownership going down to a 5% tax on homes owned for five years.

The Liberals didnt proceed with it but they did consider it, something Vaughan denied in a tweet aimed at me and filled with abusive language on Friday.

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Thats a lieI wrote the memoits explicitly identified as an idea advanced to Govt by outside advocatesits a briefing note to Caucusnot a policy proposal& was definitively rejectedYoure lazy & being very dishonest, Vaughan tweeted.

The problem for Vaughan is that the paper he wrote is clearly labelled at the top, Policy Proposal 2 and even if they rejected the policy, they did consider it.

The Liberals keep flirting with this idea of taxing peoples homes, their primary residences, and then get extremely defensive when called on it. They must know the idea isnt popular with Canadians and will cost them votes but they still keep flirting.

Until that stops, I and the millions of homeowners across the country will continue to keep a close eye on what the Liberals are doing.

blilley@postmedia.com

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LILLEY: Liberals keep flirting with taxing your home while denying it's on the agenda - Toronto Sun