End the filibuster?

[lpetrich]

The US Senate filibuster is an obstructionist tactic that Senators have accepted for well over a century. It consists of talking and talking and talking until one quits or else one's opponent quits. In recent decades, it has become a "hold" - a Senator only has to threaten to do the original kind of filibuster.

It's like the fake war between Eminiar VII and Vendikar in ST:TOS "A Taste of Armageddon". Those planets' inhabitants fight a fake war done by computer simulation, and they meekly report to disintegration chambers when tagged as casualties in it. They do so because they are afraid of starting a real war.

Currently, a filibuster can be ended only by a "cloture" vote with at least 60 Senators agreeing to shut it down. That is not quite as bad as what Poland had in early modern times, before its neighbors divided that nation between them. Its Sejm or parliament had a rule, the "liberum veto", where anyone could stop something by a negative vote, thus effectively requiring unanimity.

President Obama Is Right: To Save Our Democracy, End the Senate Filibuster by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-OR.

The history of America is one of struggle between those who want our democracy to represent the many, and those who would prefer it only to represent the privileged and powerful few.

Arthur Schlesingers I and II had identified cycles of US history, where one tendency dominates and then the other tendency dominates.

Emancipation, the 14th and 15th amendments, the right of women and Native Americans to vote, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act—all of these were major victories for the many. But for the last several decades, the powerful few have been working diligently and successfully to reverse this progress.

They have wiped voters from the rolls by the tens of thousands. They have passed discriminatory voter ID laws and closed polling stations. They have drowned our elections in dark money and expanded gerrymandering. They have stolen a Supreme Court seat and packed the Court, successfully gutting the Voting Rights Act that John Lewis bled for.

And they have clung to the vestiges of disenfranchisement that still exist in our system—the undemocratic Electoral College and the lack of representation for American citizens who live in D.C. and the territories.

All of these actions have undermined government of, by, and for the people, silencing the voices of the many to accentuate the power of the few. And, in the worst tradition of America’s exclusionary and racist history, they disproportionately disenfranchised Americans who were young, low-income, disabled, and people of color—especially Black Americans.

The Founders wanted a simple majority, because they had experience with requiring more. About the US's first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, 10 reasons why America’s first constitution failed - National Constitution Center - among them, requiring a supermajority of 9 out of 13 states: 69%.

 

[lpetrich]

 Filibuster in the United States Senate - its use was rare until around 1970, and it has steadily increased since then. Back to the article.

But in the last four decades, the use of the supermajority has become the default threshold for any significant vote on policy, which Republicans have used to kill good legislation on health care, housing, education, labor, the environment, and equal opportunity for LGBTQ Americans. At the same time, Republicans have changed the rules to make their priorities – cutting taxes for the wealthy and packing the court – subject only to a simple majority. In short, the rules of the Senate are rigged for the powerful over the people. It is our responsibility to change this!

And the rigged rules add to demographic imbalance. 41 Republican senators representing states that comprise less than a quarter of America’s population can veto Democrats’ legislation for the people.

When the Democrats filibustered some Republican appointments in the mid-2000's, the Republicans threatened the "nuclear option", abolishing the filibuster. The Democrats then backed down. They should have stood their ground and dared the Republicans abolish it.

Obama meekly let the Republicans obstruct his administration with filibuster threats, and that did not make them one bit more conciliatory. Only late in his presidency was it partially abolished.

If Republicans are willing to use simple majorities to take unprecedented measures to benefit the powerful few, we must be willing at the very least to use a simple majority to unrig elections and restore our democracy for the millions of ordinary families across the United States.

As President Obama put it in his powerful eulogy for Congressman Lewis: “If all this”—referring to restoring democracy for the people—“takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.”

More like the Democrats being unwilling to filibuster.

 

[SimpleDon]

A more important block to legislation passing in the Senate today is the requirement self-imposed by the Republicans that no bill will come up to a vote unless it has some un-quantified support in the Republican caucus. This means that the still large Tea Party contingent in the Republican ranks, about 20 or so, can block any legislation from even being put to a vote.

This faction of the Republican party is the most conservative branch of the party and they embrace the very worse ideas of libertarianism, movement conservatism, corporatism, and religious fundamentalism.

 

[SimpleDon]

And yes, the filibuster should be discarded.

 

[laughing dog]

An actual filibuster - where someone speaks for hours and refuses to yield the floor - was and is still rare. There is no reason to abolish that type of filibuster.

The real problem is that the Senate treats the threat of filibuster as the same as an actual filibuster. If senators were required to physically hold the floor for hours, the frequency of filibusters would return to its pre 1920s frequency.

 

[Jayjay]

In principle, I think requiring a supermajority could help curb the most controversial laws and appointments. But as it stands, filibuster itself is just a senate rule that can be removed with a simple majority. It's nothing more than a political convention that can be set aside whenever the majority feels like it, just as has been done already for judicial nominations. It wouldn't hurt to bury it altogether.

 

[lpetrich]

Filibuster reform gains steam with Democrats | TheHill - Jun 29

Senator Jeff Merkley D-OR has long championed reforming the filibuster, and some other Senators have become sympathetic, like Tim Manchin D-WV and Christopher Coons D-DE. About TM:

His willingness to review filibuster reform is a reflection of how frustrated Democrats — and many Republicans — have become with legislative gridlock.

Some of that frustration was on display last week after a motion to proceed to a GOP police reform bill failed after a 55-45 vote fell short of the 60 needed to advance. Manchin was one of the handful of Democrats who voted in favor of proceeding.

...
Merkley noted that in Federalist Paper No. 58, James Madison rejected a proposal for requiring more than a majority for a legislative quorum because it would reverse “the fundamental principle of government.”

“It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority,” Madison wrote.

The other big change in the Senate over the years, Merkley said, was that it’s become “routine” to require “supermajority” 60-vote thresholds to move legislation, even items that are relatively uncontroversial.

The article didn't go into detail about Sen. Merkley's proposals, however.

 

[lpetrich]

Democrats Furious As Dianne Feinstein Demurs on Packing Supreme Court

Here's what she said about ending the filibuster:

"I don't believe in doing that. I think the filibuster serves a purpose. It is not often used, it's often less used now than when I first came, and I think it's part of the Senate that differentiates itself," Feinstein said.

NBC News national political reporter Sahil Kapur pointed out on Twitter that the use of cloture motions in the Senate has significantly increased since the mid 1990s.

I checked on  Dianne Feinstein:

• 1933 June 22 - born in San Francisco, CA
• 1955 - graduated from Stanford University with a BA in history
• 1960 - appointed to the California Women's Parole Board
• 1969 - SF Board of Supervisors
• 1978 Dec 4 - succeeded George Moscone as SF mayor after he was assassinated
• 1983 - elected SF mayor
• 1992 Nov 3 - elected to US Senate in a special election
• 1994, 2000, 2006, 2012, and 2018 - re-elected to there

 Filibuster in the United States Senate - it's grown more common since around 1970. There was a burst around then, then a burst around 1992, then one around 2007, with an increase since then.

Sahil Kapur on Twitter: "FEINSTEIN on ending filibuster and expanding SCOTUS: “I don't believe in doing that. I think the filibuster serves a purpose. It is not often used, it's often less used now than when I first came, and I think it's part of the Senate that differentiates itself.” ht @DanielPFlatley" / Twitter

Showing a graph of cloture motions over time with DiFi's Senate election marked on it. An increase, not a decrease.

 

[lpetrich]

Senate Democrats lukewarm on killing the filibuster - Business Insider

• Former President Barack Obama urged Senate Democrats last week to eliminate the filibuster, which he called a 'Jim Crow' relic.
• But several Democrats told Insider they would not vote to end the old rule that they view as an important check on the majority's power.
• Nixing the filibuster would reduce the Senate to a 'glorified' version of the House, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said in an interview.
• 'I think it's a part of Senate tradition, which creates a sobering effect on the body, which is healthy,' added Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.
• The filibuster requires a 60-vote threshold for most bills and was used extensively by Republicans to block the Obama administration's agenda on big issues like climate change and gun control.

...
Still, some of the senators interviewed said they remain reluctant to take a position on eliminating the 60-vote threshold. A few cautioned though that they could change their minds if the GOP repeated the same playbook used during the Obama years to block another Democratic president's priorities.

"I suppose Republican intransigence could ultimately provoke me to that," said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, adding that it's premature to make a decision now.

What might they prefer? Weakening the filibuster without ending it?

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Sen. Feinstein’s protection of the filibuster is unjust & unacceptable.

The filibuster wasn’t made w/ purpose. It‘s the result of an accident in rulebook revision & bloomed as a cherished tool of segregationists.

Now it empowers minority rule. That’s not “special,” it’s unjust." / Twitter

 Filibuster in the United States Senate -  Nuclear option -  2005 debate on nuclear option (United States Senate)

In 2005, the Democrats filibustered some of George Bush II's appointments of judges, and the Republicans threatened to invoke the "nuclear option", as it was called, meaning that only a majority was necessary for approving those appointments. The Democrats backed off from their filibustering.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Some more information on the filibuster’s history for those interested: https://t.co/etSr7BZawO" / Twitter

The Senate Filibuster Is a Monument to White Supremacy - The Atlantic

In fairness, the filibuster was not explicitly designed as a tool for white supremacists. In fact, the filibuster was not “designed” at all. It was created by accident, part of a sloppy revision of the Senate rule book by Aaron Burr just a few months after his famous duel with Alexander Hamilton. In a careless effort to remove what he thought was redundant language, he cut the “previous question motion,” which would have allowed a majority of lawmakers to end debate and force a vote on a bill.

For more than a century, Burr’s mistake gave even a tiny handful of senators the power to block a bill indefinitely. But in 1917, Woodrow Wilson (himself an ardent segregationist) demanded reform. “The Senate of the United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action,” he complained. “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

Many senators favored eliminating the filibuster altogether, but in the end they compromised and created a new Senate rule: If two-thirds of the upper chamber came together, a speaker could be cut off and a filibuster broken. This was the first appearance of the filibuster in its modern form, though the required number of votes was later reduced to three-fifths. A grumpy trio or quartet could no longer slam the brakes on the entire legislative process, but a faction of senators—a group larger than a handful but smaller than a majority—could still kill any bill it pleased.

But guess who liked the filibuster? Southern segregationist Democrats. Starting in the early 1920's, they filibustered to death nearly 200 anti-lynching measures. They later moved on to filibustering more general civil-rights measures. The longest talking filibuster was delivered by Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1957 in opposition to some civil-rights legislation.

In fact, and somewhat ironically, it was precisely because the filibuster was such an effective tool for defending segregation, and because segregationists in turn became the filibuster’s staunchest defenders, that obstruction on other issues was relatively rare. Most senators didn’t want to legitimize Jim Crow’s favorite procedural tactic.

 

[lpetrich]

As the Georgia Runoffs Arrive, a New Book Says the Senate Is Broken - The New York Times by Adam Jentleson

Jentleson explains how “the world’s greatest deliberative body” has come to carry out its work without much greatness or even deliberation, serving instead as a place where ambitious legislation goes to die.

... “The filibuster,” he writes, “has mainly served to empower a minority of predominantly white conservatives to override our democratic system when they found themselves outnumbered.”

...
Republicans eager to preserve the filibuster have talked about it with such reverence that it’s easy to forget it only appeared after all of the Constitution’s framers had died. Long-held norms against “superfluous debate” meant that even after the Senate got rid of a rule that limited debate in 1806, it was several decades before John C. Calhoun deigned to wield extended speechifying as a political tool, making high-minded appeals to the principle of minority rights.

Not just any minority, though. “Calhoun deployed his concern for the underdog only to help the overdog,” Jentleson writes. The South Carolina senator’s soaring rhetoric about minority rights revolved around protecting the interests of wealthy slavers in the South and their vision of white supremacy. It’s not for nothing that the historian Richard Hofstadter called Calhoun “the Marx of the Master Class.”

Whining about "the tyranny of the majority" as a way of defending the tyranny of their favorite minorities.

“In the 87 years between the end of Reconstruction and 1964,” Jentleson writes, “the only bills that were stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills.” No other issue seemed to motivate obstructionists in quite the same way. The story after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been different, Jentleson says, but no less detrimental to progressive causes. The modern Senate has become so efficient (in one sense of the word) and the filibuster so streamlined that senators seeking to block or delay legislation don’t have to bother with an actual speech; they can silently filibuster a bill, and as if that weren’t enough of an oxymoron, there’s even a “hotline” to do it.

“All you have to do is call the cloakroom, tell them the senator you work for intends to place a hold on the bill, and the bill is filibustered,” Jentleson writes. “One phone call, one objection, and the threshold on any bill or nomination goes from a majority to a supermajority.”

Just like that fake war in "A Taste of Armageddon".

Under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans tried to block President Obama’s nominees “with unprecedented frequency,” Jentleson writes, and he offers the numbers to prove it. “All other presidents combined had endured a total of 82 filibusters against their nominees. But from 2009 to 2013, President Obama alone faced 86.”

In “Kill Switch,” McConnell is expressly portrayed as a 21st-century version of Calhoun — infinitely blander, less extravagantly fanatical but more coldly efficient.

This is someone who laughed when he recounted his success in obstructing the confirmation of President Obama's Supreme-Court pick Merrick Garland.

Peter Morley on Twitter: "WATCH: Mitch McConnell has the CREEPIEST laugh after he GLOATS about blocking President Obama's federal court nominees in the last two years of his presidency.

WOW. McConnell is so openly hypocritical. ENJOY it while it LASTS #MoscowMitch https://t.co/R0lqjhePJc" / Twitter

Mitch McConnell laughs at criticism over Congress Covid relief failure | US elections 2020 | The Guardian

 

[ideologyhunter]

It seems crazy to me that, in a country that is so nearly evenly divided, with close Presidential elections being the norm, that we would think that 60 vote margins are a reasonable standard for legislative success. Hope I'm phrasing that coherently.

 

[Jayjay]

With such a narrow majority in the senate, I don't think abolishing the filibuster entirely is realistic. Unfortunately.

 

[ZiprHead]

The Republican senators ended the filibuster for SC judges and since then the picks have been lackluster to full blown nuts.

 

[lpetrich]

When Democrats filibustered some of George Bush II's judicial nominees, the Republicans threatened the "nuclear option", essentially abolishing the filibuster. The Democrats backed down.

Then during Obama's Presidency, the Republicans filibustered like crazy, and in 2014, the Democrats decided to abolish it for all appointees other than Supreme Court Justices. Then when Trump became President, the Republicans abolished it for Supreme Count Justices also. The filibuster only remains for legislation, and if the Republicans filibuster enough there, it may fall for that also.

I'd like to see "holds" abolished and a return to the old days of talking and talking and talking and talking and talking.

 

[blastula]

Manchin would not be down with it.

 

[Jayjay]

When Democrats filibustered some of George Bush II's judicial nominees, the Republicans threatened the "nuclear option", essentially abolishing the filibuster. The Democrats backed down.

Then during Obama's Presidency, the Republicans filibustered like crazy, and in 2014, the Democrats decided to abolish it for all appointees other than Supreme Court Justices. Then when Trump became President, the Republicans abolished it for Supreme Count Justices also. The filibuster only remains for legislation, and if the Republicans filibuster enough there, it may fall for that also.

I'd like to see "holds" abolished and a return to the old days of talking and talking and talking and talking and talking.

... and pissing in a bottle behind the podium, and talking, and talking...

 

[Metaphor]

I hope Democrats do end it. They now have a majority in the Senate, and the House, and they hold the Presidency.

And if Democrats don't fucking end it when they have this opportunity, I never, ever want to hear any apologia again about not having 'total control' supermajorities.

And actual filibustering - endless talking on the Senate floor - is what needs to be ended, not just the threat of it. Democracy should not hinge on the physical stamina of loners.

 

[blastula]

I hope Democrats do end it. They now have a majority in the Senate, and the House, and they hold the Presidency.

And if Democrats don't fucking end it when they have this opportunity, I never, ever want to hear any apologia again about not having 'total control' supermajorities.

And actual filibustering - endless talking on the Senate floor - is what needs to be ended, not just the threat of it. Democracy should not hinge on the physical stamina of loners.

See.

Manchin would not be down with it.

 

[Metaphor]

I hope Democrats do end it. They now have a majority in the Senate, and the House, and they hold the Presidency.

And if Democrats don't fucking end it when they have this opportunity, I never, ever want to hear any apologia again about not having 'total control' supermajorities.

And actual filibustering - endless talking on the Senate floor - is what needs to be ended, not just the threat of it. Democracy should not hinge on the physical stamina of loners.

See.

Manchin would not be down with it.

So: they're not going to end it, and the endless bullshit will go on.