Showing posts with label rules. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rules. Show all posts

Friday, November 22, 2013

GOP Cries "Tyranny!" as Reid Nukes the Filibuster

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Harry Reid is giving them hell in the Senate! But Honey Badger Don't Care!

The change we propose today would ensure executive and judicial nominees get an up-or-down vote on confirmation – yes or no. This rule change will make cloture for all nominations other than Supreme Court nominees a majority threshold vote – yes or no.
The Senate is a living thing. And to survive, it must change. To the average American, adapting the rules to make Congress work again is just common sense. This is not about Democrats versus Republicans. This is about making Washington work – regardless of who’s in the White House or who controls the Senate. To remain relevant and effective as an institution, The Senate must evolve to meet the challenges of a modern era.
~ Senator Harry Reid, D-Nevada, Asking for Filibuster Reform on Floor of the Senate, 11-21-13





From Huffington Post
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pulled the trigger Thursday, deploying a parliamentary procedure dubbed the "nuclear option" to change Senate rules to pass most executive and judicial nominees by a simple majority vote.
The Senate voted 52 to 48 for the move, with just three Democrats declining to go along with the rarely used maneuver.

From now until the Senate passes a new rule, executive branch nominees and judges nominated for all courts except the Supreme Court will be able to pass off the floor and take their seats on the bench with the approval of a simple majority of senators. They will no longer have to jump the traditional hurdle of 60 votes, which has increasingly proven a barrier to confirmation during the Obama administration.

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I realize that neither party has been blameless for these tactics. They developed over the years. But today’s pattern of obstruction, it just isn’t normal. It’s not what our founders envisioned. A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to refight the results of an election is not normal, and for the sake of future generations we can’t let it become normal.
~ President Obama in remarks after the Filibuster Change





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Neither a Democratic president or a Republican president should face this level of obstructionism in exercising their Constitutional responsibility. They have a right to get an up or down vote on staffing the administration and on judges. Now a Republican president of the future will not face this unacceptable obstacle, either.
. . . The filibuster has been used to wage continuous warfare on the presidency. The Senate said today that’s not acceptable. A huge thank you to the leadership team.
~ Senator Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, to Greg Sargent on The Plum Line, WaPo

. . . Reid never would have used the “nuclear option” without the lemming-like behavior of Senate Republicans. Less ideological GOP members could have voted more frequently to break cloture and force an up-or-down vote, as members of both parties have done, even as filibuster use has increased. They could have stopped the unprecedented number of filibusters of presidential nominations, given that the president has a clearly defined constitutional responsibility to appoint people. They could have stopped blocking duly passed laws. But they didn’t.
So Republicans decrying filibuster reform as “dictatorial” or “a day to be sad” or other hyperbolic claims should look in the mirror. No one forced them to turn filibusters from a rarity to an oft-used tool for nullification and unprecedented obstruction. They have only themselves to blame.
~ James Downe on Washington Post










































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Monday, November 26, 2012

Filibuster Fight Club in Senate ~ "Minority Rights" vs. "Naked Power Grab"

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Scary Graphic from Politico

America believes Congress is broken. Once again the only ones who disagree are Mitch McConnell and Republicans in Congress.
. . . To stomp a filibuster on a motion to proceed to a bill, to take 10 days to just get on a bill — I don’t think that’s good and we need to change that.
. . . He [McConnell] keeps talking about not following rules. We’re following the rules. We’re following the Constitution of the United States to make these changes and that’s certainly appropriate.
. . . If they want to filibuster stand and talk about it, not be in your office some place
~ Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid D-Nevada

What the majority leader is saying is he will break the rules of the Senate in order to change the rules of the Senate. It has been the case in the past that it took a super majority of 67 which of course meant that most rules changes occurred because the two leaders agreed to them and were proposing them jointly, instead what the majority leader is saying is that he will propose to change the rules with 51 votes, meaning his side gets to decide what the rules are.
. . . I hope that Republicans, and hopefully many Democrats who care more about this institution than some temporary exercise of raw partisan political power, will come forward over the next few weeks and speak out against this naked power grab.
~ Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell R-Kentucky




It will shut down the Senate. It’s such an abuse of power.
~ New Senate GOP whip, Senator John Cornyn R-Texas

I think the backlash will be severe. If you take away minority rights, which is what you’re doing because you’re an ineffective leader, you’ll destroy the place. And if you destroy the place, we’ll do what we have to do to fight back
~ Senator Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma

“The minority voices the Senate was built to protect.”
Oh, enough of this old saw. The idea that you need a two-thirds vote to change the Senate rules doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution, and some scholars even think it’s unconstitutional. It comes from the 1975 deal in which the total votes needed to break a filibuster was lowered from two-thirds of the Senate to three-fifths. As for the filibuster itself, it didn’t emerge until decades after the founding of the Senate.
The American system of government was built to protect minority voices, but the Founding Fathers explicitly rejected designing the Congress around a supermajority requirement. In Federalist 22, Alexander Hamilton savaged the idea of a supermajority Congress, writing that “its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junta, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority."
~ Ezra Klein, Washington Post Wonkblog "Mitch McConnell’s five biggest whoppers on the filibuster"

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We cannot allow the Senate to be dysfunctional by the use of filibusters. We’ve had over 300 filibusters in the last six years — it’s unprecedented. What we’re talking about is very basic — you want to start a filibuster, you want to stop the business of the Senate, by goodness’ sake, park your fanny on the floor of the Senate and speak. If you want to go to dinner and go home over the weekend, be prepared, the Senate is moving forward.
~ Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Illinois

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Think of the cross marketing promotions though! "This 13th Hour of the Republican Filibuster brought to you by No Doz." And, much later, "This 27th Hour of the Republican Filibuster sponsored by Depends."
~ comment by ontheleftcoast on Daily Kos

Right now, all the general public really knows of the filibuster is what they've seen in either/or/both:
1 -- Jimmy Stewart's character in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"
2. -- "The Stackhouse Filibuster" episode on "The West Wing."
Both, much loved "traditional" understandings of the filibuster and both exemplifying "lovable/likable" fictional characters, espousing noble causes...
Let these GOPuckers actually have to show up and defend their preference for the current "lazy filibuster" process...
~ comment by Marjmar on Daily Kos

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Those republican gasbags will have to LISTEN TO EACH OTHER bargling on and on, ad nauseum, for hours and hours, and HOURS! And the best part is WE CAN TURN C-SPAN OFF WHILE THEY DO! Hah!
And is this the first time I've ever heard Sen. Coburn being concerned about the rights of minorities?
~ comment by conniptionfit on Daily Kos

Here's an idea. Senate Rule XXII, which controls the filibuster, originally required two-thirds of all senators present and voting to break a filibuster. In 1975 this was changed to three-fifths of all senators duly chosen and sworn. But what if we went back to the present and voting standard?
In that case, the majority would still have to hang around, so there's a cost to trying to break a filibuster. But the minority has to hang around too. At any point, if too many minority senators have gone home or skipped town, the majority can call a vote and break the filibuster as long as they have three-fifths of all the senators currently on the floor.
~ Kevin Drum on Mother Jones

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