Is this how math works in Massachusetts?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the fire-breathing Democrat with Native American cheekbones, has made ostentatious outrage her calling card in American politics, but in an interview after Wednesday’s Senate vote on national abortion legislation, she advertised her contempt for voters’ intelligence even more.
And she put the dishonesty of her party and its mainstream media supporters on full display in the process.
Speaking to reporters after a vote to advance a bill that would make Democrats’ most extreme abortion legislation a matter of federal law failed by a vote of 51 votes to 49 votes, Warren twisted both the results and the English language to make her misbegotten point.
“I believe in democracy, and I don’t believe that the minority should have the ability to block things that the majority want to do. That’s not in the Constitution,” Warren told CNN’s Manu Raju during a hallway scrum.
“What we’re talking about right now are the individual rights and liberties of half the population of the United States of America. I think that’s enough to say it’s time to get rid of the filibuster,” she added.
.@SenWarren: “I believe in democracy, and I don’t believe the minority should have the ability to block things that the majority wants to do. That’s not in the Constitution. […] It’s time to get rid of the filibuster.” https://t.co/2tBTIfvv2q pic.twitter.com/UwZuKxrotg
— The Hill (@thehill) May 11, 2022
Yeah. Well, as most Americans are probably aware, the Senate is made up of 100 members. As most speakers of the English language are aware, a “majority” means “a number or percentage more than half” of a given group.
Do you think the Supreme Court is going to overturn the Roe decision?
That being the case, the 51 votes against the disingenuously named “Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022” pretty clearly constitute a majority of the Senate.
The context of the bill is obviously the very real possibility that the Supreme Court is going to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
But while it’s often described as “codifying” Roe, the bill actually goes much further. The text of the bill guarantees the legality of aborting children in the womb at any point in pregnancy with the aid of a “the good-faith medical judgment” about the pregnancy’s effect on the woman.
It’s a license to kill, and its extremism was the reason West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, one of the few Democrats with character in the whole Congress, stood with Republicans to oppose it.
But none of that stopped Warren — as full of her normal vitriol as she was devoid of logic — from condemning the vote in the name of “democracy.”
From there, she jumped to the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes for most legislation to advance from the debate stage to the voting stage in a “cloture” vote. Wednesday’s vote was on a cloture motion, but since the bill got nowhere near the number of votes necessary to end debate, the “filibuster” talk was deceptive, and Warren had to know it.
“What we’re talking about right now are the individual rights and liberties of half the population of the United States of America. I think that’s enough to say it’s time to get rid of the filibuster,” she said.
The comments might have passed without contest in that hallway interview, but they got plenty of attention elsewhere.
One of those watching was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of Warren’s colleagues in the upper chamber, and a man who clearly has more respect for the principles of mathematics, as well as English, than Warren does. (Cruz is a Harvard alumnus. Warren is a former law professor there.)
Um, a bipartisan MAJORITY of the Senate just voted down the Dems’ radical abortion bill.
51 is greater than 49, even using Harvard math.
You don’t get to call the losing side the majority just because you agree with it. https://t.co/dDGCW34TSp
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 12, 2022
Hmmm 51 votes is a majority isn’t it? I know that we lawyers have a reputation for being bad at math, but even I know that the 51 Senators voted against the bill which are more than the 49 who voted for it.
— Howard Slugh (@HowardSlugh) May 12, 2022
We have a serious education problem in this country when Senators think that 49 votes out of 100 constitutes a majority.
Then again, mathematical illiteracy explains a lot of Warren’s economic policy proposals. https://t.co/zEemtB9mtI
— AG (@AGHamilton29) May 11, 2022
Warren isn’t exactly known for her commitment to honesty. In fact, a woman who spent much of her career pretending to have Native American heritage, based on nothing more than what she claimed to be “family lore” and high cheekbones could be accurately termed a “liar.”
Americans who follow the news know that. Her Massachusetts constituents know that. Expecting truth from Warren at this point would be like expecting Bill Clinton not to leer at his waitress. Old dogs stick to old tricks.
The bigger problem is that Warren isn’t exceptional at all for the leadership of the Democratic Party, which currently controls the White House and both houses of Congress and has turned into a vehicle committed to destroying the freest, richest, most powerful and most generous country the world has ever known.
And in this one quote, she exposed the fact that she has no fear – because she is a member of that political party – of spewing her baseless bile about her colleagues, while at the same time mangling both the Senate’s parliamentary process and her own native vocabulary.
The arrogance is monumental.
But while she’s obviously arrogant, dishonest and reckless with her rhetoric, Warren isn’t stupid.
She knew she could say what she wanted because she and her party are supported by their enablers in the left-leaning mainstream media, where lapdogs like Raju can be trusted not to cause problems.
It’s not like Raju is unaccustomed to questioning senators. As CNN’s chief congressional correspondent, he spent so much time badgering Manchin about the Build Back Better bill it became a running joke. (National Review’s Kyle Smith did a masterful parody job on it. It’s still funny.)
It’s not like he can’t do elementary math, like knowing what more than half of 100 is.
He just accepted, in lapdog fashion, the nonsense Warren was mouthing without a challenge – or even asking for clarification.
In the Warren world, and in the Beltway bubble that surrounds it, a “majority” is 49 out of 100, if those 49 are Democrats. The “filibuster” is an evil Republican tool now, but it’s one Democrats used routinely during the Trump administration.
In short, “truth” is what Democrats say it is, and the mainstream media outlets nod along like Manu Raju – when they’re not outright attacking the right themselves.
No one who follows American politics or the mainstream media with an eye toward honesty didn’t know that already, but that Elizabeth Warren quote, and the fact that it went unchallenged, showed it as clearly as it can be.
But with any luck, with the grace of God and the intelligence of the American voter, the midterm elections should bring about a new balance of power on Capitol Hill.
And if every conservative and Republican turns out to the polls with the dedication the cause deserves, not even Massachusetts math will be able to change what “majority” means then.
