It’s your big moment. You’re attending a televised town hall meeting in September 2024. You’ve written your specific question on a large index card (there’s no way you’d remember it coherently when the nerves hit), and you’re called on to ask Kamala Harris anything to her face and get her response before she becomes POTUS. Think long and hard because this is the chance of a lifetime. Please put your own question(s) below.
I’ll start. This is what I would ask Kamala.
”Madame Vice President, thank you for calling on me. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for what you’re doing in the United States right now, and I want to see you set up for success. I fully expect that when the smoke clears after Election Day, you will not only have won a decisive, unassailable victory for the White House, you will also be facing a Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress. I believe you will have a rare window to fix a great deal of the mess we find ourselves in.
My question is this: I grew up with this peculiar idea that legislators ought to, you know, legislate, just to stay in practice. Will you commit that in the days—not months, but days— following your rise to president elect, you will approach the Senate leadership and formally request the complete elimination of the fillibuster? It’s time. We need our government to work.
I want them to send you lots of bills; ceiling-high piles of bills for you to sign, and God knows there’s a backlog. Bills that reform gerrymandering and voter roll purges, laws that govern corrupt presidents who own private businesses and Supreme Court justices on the dole of billionaires, laws that mandate transparency for dark money and balance the top courts of the land. Isn’t eliminating the filibuster the first step in doing all of that? I hope your administration will be the end of the absurd idea that it takes sixty votes to pass the Senate, instead of a majority.
I believe that with the momentum of your victory in a month’s time, you could line up all the support you need long before Congress convenes. You will have a unique chance to reform the system so that the movement toward fascism in our country stops dead in its tracks and never happens again. It would also make you a very, very popular president and the Democrats a very, very popular party. People like it when things get done.”
