A Filibuster Fix
By NORMAN ORNSTEIN
NYT
Washington
AFTER months of debate, Senate Democrats this summer broke a Republican filibuster against a bill to extend unemployment benefits. But the Republicans insisted on applying a technicality in the Senate rules that allowed for 30 more hours of floor time after a successful vote to end debate. As a result, the bill — with its desperately needed and overdue benefits for more than 2 million unemployed Americans — was pointlessly delayed a few days more.
The Senate, once the place for slow and careful deliberation, has been overtaken by a culture of obstructionism. The filibuster, once rare, is now so common that it has inverted majority rule, allowing the minority party to block, or at least delay, whatever legislation it wants to oppose. Without reform, the filibuster threatens to bring the Senate to a halt.
It is easy to forget that the widespread use of the filibuster is a recent development. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the average was about one vote to end debate, also known as a cloture motion, a year; even in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights debates, there were only about three a year.
The number of cloture motions jumped to three a month during the partisan battles of the 1990s. But it is the last decade that has seen the filibuster become a regular part of Senate life: there was about one cloture motion a week between 2000 and 2008, and in the current Congress there have been 117 — more than two a week.
(More here.)
NYT
Washington
AFTER months of debate, Senate Democrats this summer broke a Republican filibuster against a bill to extend unemployment benefits. But the Republicans insisted on applying a technicality in the Senate rules that allowed for 30 more hours of floor time after a successful vote to end debate. As a result, the bill — with its desperately needed and overdue benefits for more than 2 million unemployed Americans — was pointlessly delayed a few days more.
The Senate, once the place for slow and careful deliberation, has been overtaken by a culture of obstructionism. The filibuster, once rare, is now so common that it has inverted majority rule, allowing the minority party to block, or at least delay, whatever legislation it wants to oppose. Without reform, the filibuster threatens to bring the Senate to a halt.
It is easy to forget that the widespread use of the filibuster is a recent development. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the average was about one vote to end debate, also known as a cloture motion, a year; even in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights debates, there were only about three a year.
The number of cloture motions jumped to three a month during the partisan battles of the 1990s. But it is the last decade that has seen the filibuster become a regular part of Senate life: there was about one cloture motion a week between 2000 and 2008, and in the current Congress there have been 117 — more than two a week.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
The author will remember that during the Constitutional Convention that the Senate was said to be needed in order to 'cool the passions of the House of Representatives'. In other words, the Senate being the body of the legislature not based on population, would not be governed by a simple majority - that the Senate would serve as the check on the majority. This is why the Senate has a filibuster and typically requires 60 votes to get legislation through.
Think about it, if you have two bodies in the legislative branch that both operate on a simple majority, then what is the point of having two Houses of Congress?
These kinds of suggestions - the filibuster fix and electing the president on popular vote to name two - would make the Senate a redundant body. The Senate is even more important to checking the power of the majority in the 21st century because our government has evolved from a limited form of government chained by the Constitution to an unlimited form of government that ignores the Constitution to the point we merely have a spoil system and and a subsidy machine that allows 50.1% to ride roughshod over the other 49.9% so long as you can get a simple majority in both Houses of Congress. Does the author really want what he is suggesting should the shoe be on the other foot?
I have a sneaking suspicion that if the Republicans were in the majority and governed the way the Democrats have for the past four years, Mr Orenstein would be praising the need and importance of the filibuster to preserve the necessary checks on the majority. But, because the Democrats are in the majority and the Rpeublicans use the filibuster, well, we can't have that and we need to change the rules and rig the system even more in favor of the Democrat Spend Machine.
Mr Orenstein, give it a rest. The system works exactly the way it should. And you only started to piss and moan after the Republicans gained the filibuster when the Democrats had absolute 100% total control for the first year of the Obama Administration, so please, spare us the crocodile tears. Why don't you grow up, for Pete's sake.
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