Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris alarmed lawmakers on Capitol Hill when she stated during a radio interview Tuesday that “we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe.” Experts say the statement was made purely for political gain, and that the action would in practice undermine America’s constitutional order and create the potential for mob rule.

The U.S. Senate’s filibuster rule allows for senators to debate a bill indefinitely in order to delay or prevent a vote on a bill, a tactic that has been commonly used by both Republicans and Democrats since the very first session of the Senate in 1789. In order to end a filibuster and force a vote on a bill, known as “cloture,” 60 votes are required.

On Wisconsin Public Radio, the vice president remarked that getting rid of the Senate’s filibuster rule could potentially allow for the passage of legislation that would nullify the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed individual states to pass pro-life protections. “[Ending the filibuster would] get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris contended.

Harris’s position echoes what Senate Democrats have been urging for months, many of whom see the filibuster as a roadblock to pushing through what they see as urgent legislation like the codification of Roe and a bill that would abolish state election rules.

But former Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) quickly denounced Harris’s remarks Tuesday.

“Shame on her,” Manchin stated. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.” The senator, who will retire at the end of the year, went on to add that the filibuster “stabilizes our democracy, promotes bipartisan cooperation, and protects our nation from partisan whiplash and dysfunction. I have always said: ‘If you can’t change your mind, you can’t change anything,’ and I am hopeful that the vice president remains open to doing just that.”

In light of Harris’s position on the filibuster, Manchin told CNN that he will not endorse her for president. “That ain’t going to happen,” he declared. “I think that basically can destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology. … I think it’s the most horrible thing.”

Sinema concurred, posting on X that Harris’s proposition could backfire by “enabl[ing] a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide. What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea.”

MaryBeth Waddell, director of Federal Affairs for Family and Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, warned of the ramifications of eliminating the filibuster.

“Should the filibuster be gutted on life policy, it will most likely begin the unraveling of the filibuster as a whole,” she told The Washington Stand. “The filibuster is a critically important tool to ensure the Senate remains the greatest deliberative body in the world. It ensures that the law will be stable and not reactionary. Without it, every change in power will create a seesaw of laws especially regarding policy on life, family, human sexuality, and other such social policy. This would be detrimental to society and the very fabric of our constitutional republic. Our Founders were very concerned about the harms of majority or mob rule, and that would be the result of carving up the filibuster.”

FRC Senior Fellow Joseph Backholm added that the Democrats’ past history of changing Senate rules for short-term political gain has not worked out well for them.

“There’s a great deal of evidence that abortion is the highest of all values for the Left,” he told TWS. “They’ve already changed the rules for confirming judges in a way that allowed the current Supreme Court to be nominated and for Roe to be overturned. Certainly, some of them remember that, and if they were in a position to actually make the decision today, it’s possible cooler heads would prevail because of the potential long-term consequences. But this is election season, not cooler heads season. They aren’t worried about the long-term consequences of what they do or even suggest, they’re just worried about whether the things they say will help them win in November. And they are convinced being all in for abortion is good politics, so they will be all in for abortion.”