If the folks over at Fox News Fox & Friends are any indication, Republicans are absolutely panicked about the potential end of the filibuster, the long-held last-ditch method of preventing legislative votes in the Senate.
The right is so terrified of losing this ability to gum up the works of government that Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt said this morning its elimination will mean Democratic Party leadership of the country "forever."
Earhardt also warned it will turn the country socialist, a claim that makes very little sense.
The comments came in response to Democratic President Joe Biden's recent signaling he supports reform of the filibuster rule.
Originally, a filibuster was a means of opposing legislation by debating a bill with lengthy speeches—for hours and hours—until 60 Senators vote to stop the debate. It was most infamously used in the 1960s by Southern Senators looking to block Civil Rights legislation.
Changes to procedure in the 1970s, however, mean nowadays a mere threat of a filibuster is enough to block legislation, as Republicans frequently did during the administration of former Democratic President Barack Obama.
Biden wants to reform the filibuster back to its original procedure, rather than eliminate it, as many Democrats want to do.
But that nuance, unsurprisingly, was lost on the crew over at Fox & Friends, and Earhardt launched into a hysterical warning about what ending the filibuster would mean.
"If they end the filibuster, the Democrats will rule our country forever. We will become a socialist country."
Earhardt went on to warn about the expanded voting rights that would likely ensue from the elimination of the filibuster.
"So first they'll do, they'll kill the filibuster. Then they'll pass this H.R. 1. So felons can vote, no ID if you go to vote, register everybody, expand mail-in ballots."
H.R.1 is the House's bill to protect and expand voting rights in the face of an unprecedented new wave of right-wing legislation to curtail access to the polls marketed as "election security" laws.
The subtext of Earhardt's and other Republicans' objections could not be clearer: Republicans are terrifiedthey will no longer have the means to impose minority rule and subvert the business of the democratically elected Senate, resulting in more people voting in elections—much like happened in 2020 because of the pandemic.
And we all how that election turned out for Republicans.
On Twitter, people saw right through Earhardt's objections.
Whether or not the Democrats will succeed in reforming the filibuster is unclear: As it stands, two moderate Democrats in the Senate, West Virginia's Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, oppose filibuster reform.
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