A Senate filibuster is a “tantrum rule,” and for years Senate Republicans have been behaving like ill-mannered toddlers – crying, stomping their feet and holding their breaths through filibusters, mostly off-camera.
Enough.
According to U.S. Senate records, 385 “motions filed” tried to end filibusters from 2007-2012. It took the Senate 57 years (1917 to 1974) to TOTAL 100 such votes.
In comparison, when Lyndon Johnson was president there was ONE filibuster, and people knew it happened because it was news – Democrat Robert Byrd talked for 14 hours. (Thanks to Republican Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the filibuster was stopped and the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed.)
Today the filibuster is common and easy – the Senate’s GOP minority filibustered two-thirds of President Obama’s nominations for federal district judges. It’s not unusual for journalists to misleadingly report that 60 votes are needed to approve legislation.
The filibuster isn’t mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, which does provide that each house “may determine the rules of its proceedings.” The filibuster exists in Rule 22 of the Senate Rules, which can be changed on Day 1 of the new Senate term, when all that’s required is a simple majority: 51 votes.
The Senate can and must fix the filibuster.
After all, against most predictions, Democrats added to their Senate majority. Also, seven incoming Democratic senators – Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Tim Kaine (Va.), Chris Murphy (Conn.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) – publicly committed to reforming the filibuster. Further, Independent Angus King, replacing Maine’s moderate Republican Olympia Snowe, campaigned to reform the filibuster, and returning Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) also pledged to change it.
Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, Majority Whip, agrees.
“The Senate is a shell of its former self,” he said. “We need reform that makes a filibuster count. Stick around. Don’t go out to dinner and tell us you’ll be back in 30 hours.”
Once justified as a protection for minority rights, the filibuster is a parliamentary procedure that lets one senator shut down legislation without 60 votes to “invoke cloture,” the procedure required to end a filibuster.
Placing filibusters before debates or votes essentially kills measures by subterfuge. A majority of senators may support something, but 41 senators can choke it to death. It prevents the tyranny of the majority, but it creates a tyranny of the MINORITY.
More than a dozen major initiatives probably would have passed the Senate if Republicans hadn’t used the filibuster to obstruct the process, according to a Washington Post analysis, including the American Jobs Act, the Buffett rule, the Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act, the DISCLOSE Act, the DREAM Act, the Emergency Senior Citizens Relief Act, the Employee Free Choice Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, the Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act, the Teachers and First Responders Back to Work Act of 2011, plus rescinding the upper-income Bush tax cuts and passing a public option in health-care reform.
Filibusters undermine democracy and would shock the Republic’s Founders.
In Federalist Paper #22, Alexander Hamilton praised majority rule, writing, “If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and hence the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good. Its situation must always savor of weakness, sometimes border on anarchy.”
Today, the filibuster is at its historical worst since the practice has been so relaxed that one senator is permitted to merely ANNOUNCE the INTENTION to filibuster and need not actually speak.
The simplest answer is to make the rule what Americans believe it is: Make Senators REALLY filibuster; require they talk if they want to hold up lawmaking. Put up or shut up.
Progressive groups including Common Cause, the NAACP, the Sierra Club, and organized labor are lobbying for change.
Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, said, “The American people need to demand that the majority have rules that mean that key issues of the day are discussed, not buried,”
Democrats aren’t blameless.
“Senate Democrats have been irresponsible in allowing this to continue, because democracy wants the public to be alerted to obstruction,” said Dave Johnson, with the Campaign for America’s Future. “In their wish to get things done and get along with the other side they have been accomplices in the obstruction strategy. The result of accommodating the conservatives is they have enabled a take-no-prisoners minority to just block everything.”
Durbin, Democrats and mainstream Republicans must act like adults instead of surrendering to the spoiled brats: Fix the filibuster; ensure that the majority rules.
U.S. Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) has a web site, Senate Rules: Common Sense Reform – http://www.tomudall.senate.gov/?p=blog&id=1151
[PICTURED: Chart from the Washington Post]
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