Washington Governor and presidential candidate Jay Inslee said Wednesday that climate change can't be solved unless the Senate filibuster and the Electoral College are both eliminated.
"I don't believe you can be serious about saying you can defeat climate change unless you realize we need to have the filibuster go the way of history because Mitch McConnell has weaponized the filibuster," Inslee said to a gaggle of reporters after a policy forum in D.C. "You can't be serious about having major decarbonization legislation in any near-term without removing the filibuster."
Inslee's entire campaign is focused on the issue of climate change.
He also joined the growing group of Democrats calling for the elimination of the Electoral College, something that has especially irritated the left after the 2016 election.
"These are archaic relics of a bygone age," he said, according to the Washington Examiner. "We need progress. We also need democracy, which is one person, one vote. I've never understood why people who want to block progress like Mitch McConnell get one and half votes and people who want go defeat climate change only get one. That is a recipe for disaster when it comes to climate change."
Four elections in U.S. history have seen a candidate elevated to the White House who did not win the plurality of all votes nationwide, including President Trump's election in 2016.
In regards to the Senate filibuster, Republicans employed the tactic to defeat a cap-and-trade package in 2010 even though they did not have a majority in the upper chamber.
Conservative politicians and pundits have argued that proposals that seek to abandon time-tested rules of procedure or election protocols only mask an inability by the political left to sell their agenda to more Americans.
"The Democratic argument isn't with any single one of these things: it's not only with the Electoral College, it's not only with the 26th Amendment, it's not only with the state of the Supreme Court, it's not only with equal representation of small states in the United States Senate," Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Matthew Continetti said recently on Fox News. "The Democratic argument is with the Constitution of the United States of America. The argument is because the left cannot win its arguments when they present them publicly, and in order to win, they need to change the structure."
Apart from eliminating the filibuster and the Electoral College, many Democratic presidential candidates have also recently been discussing expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court—a tactic generally referred to as "court packing."
"Sens. Kamala D. Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand, former congressman Beto O'Rourke, and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg have all expressed at least an openness to the idea, and the rest are being pushed by liberal activists to consider it," the Washington Post recently reported.