Welcome to Beg to Biffer the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation

across the political spectrum from center left to center right. I'm Mona

Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork and I'm joined by our regulars

Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal,

Damon Linker of the Week, and Linda Chavez of the Niskanid Center.

Our special guest this week is New York Times columnist Thomas Edsel.

Welcome Mr Edsel, welcome one and all.

Let us get rolling with what is happening with the voting rights on Capitol Hill.

I'm going to start with Bill Galston this week.

Bill, there was a, the Republicans

filibustered an attempt to have a discussion about S1, and so it didn't happen.

And Chuck Schumer has kept saying that failure is not an option. My question to you is, didn't it just fail?

You know, it remains to be seen whether success is an option, unfortunately.

And there are a lot of moving parts here.

Senator Manchin managed to put together a compromise proposal that attracted some interest across the aisle.

I'm not sure what would have happened if Senator Schumer had tried to open

discussion on the compromise proposal as a freestanding piece. We may never know the answer to that question or we may find out the answer

in the fall. This actually raises a broader question. I think that I'm probably in favor of maintaining the

filibuster on final passage of bills you know as a way of stabilizing the Republic. But I am quite sure that I am against a 60-vote

threshold to allow issues to be discussed on the floor of the United States Senate.

I happen to believe that discussing issues is a way of informing not only one's colleagues in the Senate, but also the American people

directly or indirectly, and I do not see why a minority should be allowed to

...