Kill the filibuster
We have been hit recently with a number of seriously, a-historic calls from the left to kill the filibuster. Funny how that comes during a period of “unprecedented” attempts at government control of….well pretty much everything. I mean if I had heard someone stating a year ago that Obama would buy General Motors and give it to the UAW, well I would have called them loony. If you had told me that we would own a good chunk of the biggest banks and insurance companies outright and there would be a czar telling them how much they could pay their people, I would have said “shut up”. Add in the idea of the House passing an energy tax in the midst of a global recession and a brazen attempt to nationalize our health care system, and you would have had me calling you a nuttah. And yet.
The crazy thing is all of this in less than a year is not enough for the left and so we get the learned scholars of the Juicebox Mafia calling for the end to our bicameral legislative system in favor of a mobocracy and the tyranny of the majority. Now uneducated knuckledragger that I be, I am loathe to question these young smarty pantses, but I will soldier on. We have Juicebox senior correspondent Ezra Klein’s call for Progressive Dominance Senate reform here but I am going to take the Fisking hammer to The American Prospect’s Tim Fernholz’s call for a Congress Carol. Now I met Mr. Fernholz at the journalism seminar earlier this month, and he is a nice, smart guy, just a tad blinkered on the history and consequences of removing what he and Klein see as an impediment to the righteous imposition of progressive policies on a country in dire need of them. Well, unless you ask the people, ‘cuz they are not down with all of this big government takeover. And that is kinda the whole rationale behind a filibuster and an upper House designed to stop wild-eyed dreamers from exploiting short term majorities. Lest I be called partisan for my support of a tool used now by Republicans, I am not in favor of killing it so that a Democratic minority can’t derail Republican radicalizations when the tables are turned. I want a firm brake on the Parliament of Hoors regardless of which collection of swine is running it.
To the Fisking.
Conrad, of course, hit the nail on the head. The problem is indeed the filibuster, and a chorus of voices has been raised against it, as it becomes increasingly clear that the filibuster is no longer being used as a tool to slow debate and, as George Washington put it, “cool” legislation. Instead, there’s now a near-formal requirement that every bill be passed with a super-majority of 60 votes. That is not quite what the founders suggested.
The reason it exists is not simply to cool some legislation, but to ensure that a simple majority can’t bully the rest into major changes. The Founders wanted to ensure that a broad consensus, including the other team sees a need for the radical changes proposed. From Congresslink:
In Federalist No. 10, James Madison commented that one of the problems to be solved by a new government was “that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an overbearing majority….. The Senate as the “cooling factor”—the House boils the water and makes the tea, but the Senate allows it to cool. This is a concept that students understand, and it is an idea that is completely consistent with the framers’ view of the Senate.
Is the Senate often slow-moving? Yes.
Does the Senate slow down the legislative process? Yes.
Does the Senate often force compromise to gain legislative success? Yes, and that’s just what the framers designed it to do.”
Back to my man Fern.
Republicans in the Senate are dead set on acting as obstructionists, not opposition. They act to prevent bills from even being voted on — Republicans have filibustered health-care reform four times, if you count their filibuster of the Iraq and Afghanistan funding bill, which their party didn’t even oppose but merely used to delay a vote on health reform. (And still Republican aides have the temerity to complain about working on Christmas eve.)
Now one of the biggest complaints about the filibuster recently is that the Republican majority uses it more often than previous Democratic minorities. Now that may be true but couldn’t it also be true that the Democratic majority has a whole raft of crazy-ass ideas about how to turn the US into a Euro-style social democracy and facing these down requires use of the very tool they descry. Filibuster on people, if that is what it takes to keep this country from becoming a nanny state, carbon-taxed, equality of outcome mandating, terrorist-coddling crap hole, filibuster on.
This has real consequences. For one, the decision to obstruct everything makes the chances of bipartisan legislating impossible — Republicans working on the instructions of leadership to prevent forward motion have little incentive to find constructive solutions to national problems.
Or you could say that every substantive offering i.e. tort reform, has been summarily dismissed by the not-at-all-interested in bipartisan collaboration Dems. Seriously dude, there are plenty of places compromise was possible, but the left drove the train and they didn’t leave any room for right of center ideas.
More broadly, it means that pressing concerns, like the rising costs and dropping quality of health care and the impending dangers of climate change, are much harder to address.
More broadly, it means that when a majority tries to nationalize 1/6th of our economy it should be much harder to address. And when they decide to tax energy in the midst of an awful recession, based on “settled science” that isn’t, and relying on fixes that no one knows the results of, well once again, it is harder to address.
It also strikes at the foundation of our democracy by making political institutions unaccountable to voters: When Americans elected the Democrats, they expected them to pursue their agenda, but now they’ve seen that even electing majorities in both Houses won’t result in policy changes, leading to both anger and apathy.
What fucking copy of the Constitution do they keep over at the American Prospect, the Karl Marx annotated version? FFS, accountability comes every six years in the Senate and every two in the House. Just because the Founders were smart enough to know that activists would want to go apeshit when they had the gavel and wrote in some impediments doesn’t make our democracy unaccountable.
The answer is to change the Senate rules. Sens. Tom Harkin and Joe Lieberman — of all people — proposed such a change in the mid-1990s, which would allow for a series of descending cloture votes: First, debate could be stopped with a 60-vote majority, but if that failed, another cloture vote could be brought after a period of several days with a 57-vote requirement. This would continue with diminishing number of votes needed for cloture until the bill came to a vote or it became clear that it could not pass, all while serving the “cooling” purpose envisioned by the founders. Congress could also limit the number of procedural points where filibusters could be deployed so that a piece of legislation could not be filibustered multiple times.
So your cunning plan is to make sure that any change to the very fabric of our society must simply wait a few weeks until 51 Senators can make it so? Do you recall why we have a bicameral legislature? Your next suggestion shows that you don’t. You have mentioned the “cooling” comments, which Washington may or may not have made, twice but you miss the fact that sometimes the cooling would lead to freezing over-reaching, radical changes as the Framers had correctly wanted.
Some will worry that this will create an overly majoritarian chamber, where party and committee leadership hold too much power. But the limited membership of the chamber – as well as other rules, including the reliance on unanimous consent agreements for much of the Senate business — still gives great power to individual senators; they simply shouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of a basic majority.
Yes they fucking well should, that’s the whole point of having a Senate. If we wanted to simply allow major changes to American life based on a temporary majority, then we could have had just the House and let the good times roll. But the Founders knew that was folly, I would have assumed they touched on that during your time at Georgetown. I suppose you can’t imagine a time when the Republicans will again control one or more Houses of Congress, but trust me it will happen. Do you really want them running roughshod over all of your beloved progressive ideals? You shouldn’t and neither do I. But the shortsighted, naive calls by far too many lefties to crush the filibuster or the Senate as a whole, only reinforce the wisdom of the Founders in organizing against such majority tyranny. There is more to fear from temporary majorities pounding their agendas through than there ever could be from the planned and vitally necessary brake an Upper House was designed to play. Sorry about the inability to socialize the country in less than a year. Maybe you should try a Constitutional Amendment? Oh yeah, supermajority again. Damned tricky Founders.
Tags: congress, filibuster, juicebox mafia, parliament of hoors, politics
We’ll see how serious the Juicers are when the tables might be next turned as has happened in the past and now potentially might again in the upcoming 2010 elections.
Also, does anyone recall how well “W’s’ Judicial choices for the federal bench fared with Dems preventing up or down votes on many of “43’s” nominations?
Perhaps there’s more than just a brief lapse of memory regarding our nation’s history. I hesitate to say that something more sinister is at play here but that could be the case. Oops, shucks, I’m now late to my anti-sinister league action force 1775 drill and coffee date.
These AssHats also go along with The Jokers assumption that the Constitution is “just words”. The Joker believes the Constitution to be a “living document” to be molded in his likeness. Well f.u. very much.
The Joker and all his Czars have by-passed the Constitution along with both houses of Congress and is doing whatever he damn well pleases.
These AssHat progressives are our enemy.
To use the words of George W., a real leader of men……..
“We will not waiver, we will not tire, we will not falter, we will not surrender”, until these progressive AssHats are in the minority.
The Joker and Janet “Bozo The Clown” Napolitano can’t even figure out who our enemy is. Even though the Islamic radicals declared war on the USA and have killed or planned to kill many Americans on American soil, since The Joker came into office. What an f-ing disgrace!
Leaders like these we do not need.
I love how the left likes to call the right “obstructionist.” It sounds bad so the reflexive response of any sane person would be to say, “I’m not an obstructionist because if I was that would be bad.” We’re taught this kind of thinking on the playground during grade school.
Instead, if the Republicans were truly conservatives, they would embrace the claim of “obstructionist,” and say, “Damn straight I’m trying to block the total and complete take-over of this country’s market system. Damn straight I’m trying to obstruct the push of the complete and total social agenda and Europeanization of the U.S.” Instead, these so-called conservatives try to debate by saying, “now, now. Let’s not get into name-calling.”
I also find it hypocritical of the left to want to abolish the filibuster. If Newt would have brought that idea up in 1993, I’m pretty sure the left, and the state-sponsored media would have been crying out “fascist! he’s trying to overthrow the will of the people.” F’n libtards.
Jimbo, you said, “I mean if I had heard someone stating a year ago that Obama would buy General Motors and give it to the UAW, well I would have called them loony. If you had told me that we would own a good chunk of the biggest banks and insurance companies outright and there would be a czar telling them how much they could pay their people, I would have said “shut up”.”
I’m pretty sure you, and many of us, were saying a year ago and more, “Do you know what The Obama will do to the country if he gets into office?! He has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. He will try to pack our courts with judicial activists. He will try to dismantle our free-market. He will impose tax-paid mandatory healthcare. He is a socialist and he will try to make the U.S. just like Europe.”
Doug Wright said, “Also, does anyone recall how well “W’s’ Judicial choices for the federal bench fared with Dems preventing up or down votes on many of “43’s” nominations?”
You’re absolutely right. I guess the Democrats really were nothing more than the Party of “no.” You might call them……obstructionists.
I’d recommend a few changes to the legislative body and their internal workings … for the House 3 terms – 6 years of “public service”
For the Senate 1 term of “public service”
a mandated 2 year cooling off period between ending their time in the House before attempting to run for the Senate, or the other way round. Not more than 12 years in the Congress of the USA. We can begin by giving Conrad, Dorgan and Pomeroy an immediate vacation.
Mr. Chris,
I should agree with you that there were many folks warning that Obama’s true colors were socialist, and I shared the thought that was his base beliefs. I just didn’t think there was any chance he and the Dems would be this blatant. Thank God they have as it completely lost them all the independents and conservative Dems. 2010 should be a watershed year for taking back Congress.
Cordially,
Uncle J
I’d think it would be worthwhile to review the comments on “consensual democracy” v. “a democratic system” from the Kurdistan panel we had at UMD. They apply here in spades.
The Constitution set up the Senate, and the Electoral College, precisely in order to create a system to which smaller, rural states could consent to belong. A purely democratic system is biased towards urban states and populations, simply because there are more people with the same interests in one place. As the price of creating a stable union between urban and rural states, the Founders put into the system clear checks and balances to ensure that rural interests were not routinely ignored.
(You will hear, at this point, about either slavery or farm subsidies. While it is true that slavery was a key issue for the rural states at the time of the founding, the issue would have been just as important even if slavery had been no issue at all. A similar issue is at work in modern Europe, where Germany and France have the interests of rich central powers, and the states on the fringe are finding their interests widely ignored by a EU that is beholden to the rich and powerful. The stability of the EU over time will be determined in part by whether that imbalance is addressed; and we, likewise, will be stable in the long term only if we ensure that the government’s natural bias toward urban population centers does not mean that rural populations’ interests are not likewise a central concern.)
A third power that is balanced toward the rural states, by the way, is the power to amend the Constitution. It requires supermajorities of both the Senate and the state legislatures, as well as the House; of the three, only the House is what our Iraqi friends call ‘democratic’ rather than ‘consensual democracy.’ The states are also able to bypass the Federal government entirely by calling for a Constitutional Convention; again, each state gets an equal vote, which is biased toward the rural areas.
The filibuster isn’t a constitutional power, but arises from Senate rules. However, it is a key part of what maintains the consent for rural states to remain calm and relaxed as parts of the union. Removing the filibuster may provide a momentary boost to urban interests, but the long term cost is the stability of the Republic. The Tenth Amendment movement, the several states now joining a lawsuit against Obamacare, and a number of other resistance efforts are available to the rural states if the Federal government seems to turn against their interests in a serious way. Chief among these is the Constitutional Convention; if you think abolishing the filibuster is the ‘nuclear option,’ wait until you have to face the threat of having the entire Federal government set aside for reconsideration.
This is an excellent article. I, too, could not have imagined the breathtaking speed with which this beast has risen to its feet. My student loan, for chrissake, is now owned by the Department of Education! I especially like the coolheaded rationality of your concluding sentence…
Linked you, Uncle Jimbo. Are you doing CPAC this year?
Hey Smitty,
I’ll be around, but I am famous for avoiding actual conferences and just leading the way for the evening pub crawls.
Cordially,
Uncle J
UJ, I hear you. I went to the Tea Party in Chicago last tax day ( http://www.down-is-up.com/Main/?p=1086 ). I have seen and felt the grass-roots energy. 2010 could be a watershed year in many aspects. It is hard to be completely optimistic when the Republican Party doesn’t appear to have a strong horse in the game. UBL himself said that when given a choice, people will pick the strong horse.
“May you live in interesting times.”
They’re like a bunch of five year olds that steal their parent’s car keys and proceed to drive the Oldsmobuick into a brick wall.
Uncle J, I’d love to hear your take on the 17th Amendment. Talk about a cooling effect, allowing the several States to have a say in our national government’s actions? Imagine that…
It’s not just the Senate filibuster that the Left thinks gets in the way of efficient running of a modern euro-socialist style state. There have even been serious proposals by the Left to do away with the U.S. Senate altogether. There was an entire book (the title of which I can’t recall) dedicated to the subject.
What’s even worse was the extra-constitutional means the book proposed for abolishment of the Senate, a simple majority vote of the U.S. House! The book suggested that even though such a move would be flagrantly unconstitutional, it should be considered just as acceptable as the constitutional convention which exceeded it’s original mandate to revise the articles of confederation. Yikes!
the kid complains the filibuster only exists “to cool legislation”… what the hell does that even mean in the context of what the kid is writing? He’s proposing “hot” legislation? Nope, he’s just obfuscating so we don’t realize he’s a petty tyrant seeking the power to exercise his tyranny.
He’s just blindly groping for some kind of metaphor he can use to debunk the idea that the structure of Senate voting is designed to put brakes on the tyranny of a majority. He WANTS that tyranny, is AWARE that the public does NOT want it and wants to FORCE it on them by doing away with the minority’s ability to preserve itself.
Which is, gasp, exactly OPPOSITE of what the Senate dems did, and squawked for, before 2006. And if this kid had been old enough then, I”m sure he would have argued the Dem side, even though it’s the opposite from what he’s arguing now.
And it’s disappointingly perfunctory, this effort he’s phoning in to screen his tyrannical preferences behind some ‘anti obstructionist’ ethic. As if we are ‘obstructionists’ who believe first and foremost that obstructing things is the highest measure of achievement, that we obstruct our kids on their way to school, obstruct fellow shoppers at walmart, obstruct our accountants from figuring out how much we owe in taxes, obstruct obstruct obstruct, that’s us…
Of course, we believe in doing what’s right, and obstructing the doing of what’s WRONG.
What’s in those frickin’ juiceboxes?
The problem with the left is the same problem I had with my kids for years, the desire for instant gratification. I think that deep down they know that a supermajority, which they hold today, is rare as unicorn sightings and they’re in a hurry to make theses final, permanent changes to society so that no matter what, future congress will be unable to repeal their handiwork; because of this they are attempting to ram the entire package through. Shortly we’ll see a concerted effort to implement “comprehensive immigration reform” which will be nothing more than a full blown open borders and world welfare program. We all should be praying that the slow children at the RNC pull their heads out of their asses and move to take some seats back or we’re all f’d forever.
It’s almost amusing how short sighted people can be – assuming it is truly short sightedness and not a smoke screen generating ploy using high sounding phrases to justify a fundamental and alarming change in the Federal Government.
I remember when Reagan had just started his second term. There was all this excitement in the Christian community about starting a grass roots movement to abolish the two term limit of the Office of President. “So we can have this great President for longer!” This from college age folks.
After I pointed out that it was likely that we would get another Jimmy Carter at some point and asked them would they want him for more than two terms … well, they saw the light.
This whole thing is folly…and could lead to some really bad stuff.
But, in my experience, fools have never been known for their clarity of vision.
These guys are on the record calling for the abolition of the filibuster back when the Senate, House, and White House were controlled by Republicans. It’s pretty clear to most that the filibuster intensifies status quo bias – and that inherently favors conservatism. So it isn’t surprising that progressives and liberals (of which I am one) favor its abolition.
My position is that the filibuster is just bad policy. I say we sunset it, after 10 years or something, so that we don’t immediately know which party stands to benefit. Or even the balance of inconvenience by raising the cost of the filibuster. It takes 60 members of the majority to be present to invoke cloture, but only 1 member to minority to actually filibuster.
But I’m guessing we’ll just agree to disagree. And I’ll keep reading the juicebox guys, as well as Blackfive.
Filibusters and Raaaaacism (the forgotten saga of Trent Lott)…
Two weeks ago blogger Uncle Jimbo did a solid fisking of most of these liberal commentators. And after reading his piece, I thought liberals would get their heads back on straight, but apparently not. Today I stumbled upon a New York Times op-ed by Tho…
[...] that Mr. Klein was advocating the death of the filibuster for many of the same reasons he uses to justify his one party system. “My team is in charge [...]
Wow… Uncle J while we have a government that can’t do anything Liberal or Conservative or even with moderation – the European Union and Asia will have all the time in the world to beat us as to “any” National goal from going Green to World domination. Further, corporate America, the Multinationals and monopolies can run amok and kill every last vestige of Free Enterprise and whats left of the Middle Class! I’d rather have 4 or 8 years of fully enacted progressive legislation followed by another 4 to 8 years of fully enacted “anything for big business” legislation (or vice versus) then 8 to 16 years of nothing! This notion that Big Government is always bad is like saying Big Business is always good! Honestly, the need for a perpetual filibuster will in the end destroy this Nation more thoroughly, horribly, devastatingly and irreparably then any bubble gum terrorist act could ever hope to. And I mean that – 8, 10, 20 years or more of the Senate filibuster will turn this country into a non competitive, corporate – Free Enterprise “free zone” and sold to the highest bidder hell. You just don’t get it – any change is infinitely more preferable then sitting in the water like a dead, dead, dead duck!!!
[...] Emperor News and Breitbart for bringing us this episode of short attention span theater. Here is my beatdown of a couple of the juiceboxers for their historically ignorant calls to kill the filibuster. Sucks when you have to play by the [...]