The Party of No continues its work. This time, they refused to give a single vote for cloture on the Small Business bill that Sen. Mary Landrieu is trying to usher through the upper chamber. First they made the Democrats strip out some aid to farmers because Mitch McConnell doesn’t think farmers run small businesses. Then they continued to refuse to allow a vote because they weren’t allowed to offer an endless number of impertinent amendments. Agriculture is unrelated to small business, but their poison amendments are.
Reid and McConnell are in negotiations over amendments and this bill still might pass. But this is causing more pointless delay. And delay is central to the Party of No strategy. The longer we spend debating a bipartisan bill that should pass easily, the less we can get done on other matters.
This is why we need filibuster reform.
Jonathan Bernstein doesn’t think we will get the opportunity to do real filibuster reform until Jan. 2013, and that advocates should focus on smaller reforms for Jan. 2011.
I agree that reform to the senate rule needs to do a lot more than just reduce the number to break a filibuster from 60 to 55, 51 or whatevery. There’s a ton of things in the senate rules, from holds, to the way amendments can be inserted, to other fun minutia that needs to get changed. I think heading into the midterms we need to campaign on senate rule reform, framing it as “modernizing” and “breaking gridlock.” If our caucus doesn’t have the guts to do it (and by that, I really mean, Reid and Obama don’t want to expend the political capital to force the conservative members of our caucus to go along with it), im fine with just the minutia passing. Again, poll after poll confirms that the public doesn’t understand the senate rules and doesn’t really care. OMG THE FILIBUSTER RULE IS CHANGING is probably going to kick up enough dust in DC that regular folks notice it and if the politics start to look bad, the leadership can go with a stealth plan b that deals with all the other stuff in the senate rule book that causes delay and mucks up our political institutions.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the Republican Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Satan, Inc.
what we need and what we’re going to get re: filibuster reform are two distinctly different things.
if this report from the hill is an accurate presentation of the situation…
prepare yourself for another major disappointment…cause it ain’t gonna happen. they may tinker around the edges a bit with things like secret holds, but they like the situation just as it is thank you very much.
And the only chance of it changing is when they are more afraid of the populace then of their corporate benefactors. Just look at Chris Dodd. Even to the last, he’s a corporate toady.
This is why we need filibuster reform.
Tell that to Jon Tester.
And Feinstein and Akaka and Pryor and Nelson and Landrieu and Rockefeller and Feingold and Baucus. And those are just the ones who’ll go on record about it.
I think it’s more likely that you’ll get all the Democrats on board with a “you need 41 votes to sustain a filibuster” change to the rule than a lowering of the votes needed rule. Even that is dubious, but it would be a good change – it puts the onus on the filibustering side to actually round up votes to sustain it rather than just counting empty seats as adding to the filibuster.
But I wouldn’t even count on that. The autocrats in the Senate hate anything that smacks of democracy and won’t have it in their Chamber if they can help it.
By that I mean, is the problem really the Senate rules or is it the current state of the GOP? Consider the parallels between 2000 and 2008. In 2000 the dem presidential candidate won the popular vote. The GOP managed to win the electoral votes in FL, and hence the presidency, through some unprecedented actions in terms of manipulating electoral institutions in FL, as well as unprecedented actions and maneuvering in the legal power struggle in the weeks that followed the disputed election. The Republican dominated supreme court that decided the case and the election even went so far as to use some pretty twisted legal logic to decide a case of which they said would have absolutely no precedential value.
Fast forward to 2008, dem president, and huge majorities in congress and everyone expects a new progressive era of legislation. Then the GOP takes the unprecedented step of blatantly manipulating senate rules to stall and water-down the agenda.
The pattern is clear. Our political institutions are not just governed by written rules, but norms that dictate how those rules should be followed. When the GOP lose elections they always have as their fall back the complete abnegation of normative behavior. Its a brilliant strategy and its worked flawlessly- follow the rules to a T and ignore the informal norms completely.
What I’m throwing out there is that even if we take the informal norms that the GOP senators should be following and make them formal rules, then my fear is that they’ll just move on to some other accepted norm and reject that. There’s always going to be another rule out there that can be manipulated provided you have no sense of fair play or morals. I think we’re potentially missing a golden opportunity here by saying “the rules” of the senate are flawed (even though they are) rather than pointing out that the GOP are being a bunch of cheaters/sore losers.
Well, technically the GOP isn’t cheating. They are following the rules, just not, as you point out, the norms. But they don’t have to follow the norms if they don’t want to. And their base of support doesn’t want them to.
More and more, I think the only way out of this nightmare is for reform to occur in the GOP itself. But I don’t know how that happens.
Agreed- that’s my main point- the GOP is the problem, not the rules. The only way to “reform” the GOP is to keep beating them until demographic shifts in the electorate make their current political positions untenable. Not sure we have 10-20 years to wait to address issues like climate change though.
I’d argue though that flaunting informal norms is widely considered cheating, or at least what we would call “foul play” in most sports. When sports players do things that are technically allowed, like punch a sure goal out of of a soccer net with their hands, every single neutral fan would call that cheating.
Another negative aspect of the “foul play” you describe is that it takes the fun out of sports. It’s not fun to play if you feel like the other side is going to have bad sportsmanship, bend the rules, gain all their advantages from technicalities, etc. Sports is fun when it’s two teams matched up against one other fair and square, and each one wins or loses on the merits: on the strength of their players, their game strategies, their heart.
I think the same analysis applies to politics. The Senate rules are technicalities which the GOP has unfairly but legally abused throughout this Congress. Their bad sportsmanship has gotten to the point that even the small Democratic victories (like unemployment extension) are grinding, brutal affairs. Our big victories (like health care reform) are drawn-out nightmares. And plenty of times (as on climate change and today, apparently, the small business bill) we lose even though by all rights we should win. Like watching a 0-0 soccer game that is eventually won in triple overtime on penalty kicks: none of that is any fun, and it’s dispiriting. We want our team (the Dems) to have the chance to fight it out on the Senate floor with Team GOP – may the best players (politicians and their staff), game strategies (policy ideas and political moves), and heart (broad ideals of the party, engaged activists) win. Instead it’s always, always this knockout affair that’s unpleasant to watch, and even the victories feel like losses to a lot of folks. I can’t imagine it’s very much fun for the Republicans either, at least the sane ones who recognize that we have actual problems and the GOP is being stupid and irresponsible by saying no to absolutely everything.
Good points all. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s many neutral fans out there anymore. Dems hate this game and Republicans love it because they are winning. In another time the media would probably be looked upon to serve as the “referee” or at least a knowledgeable, unbiased sports announcer to explain what’s going on, but we live in strange times. The media actually LOVES the process stories, the drama created by all these tactical maneuvers and posturing. Its good for ratings. To return to the soccer analogy, the media would rather a 0-0 ugly overtime game than an 8-0 drubbing, which is what the current dem domination in Congress and the executive would look like if the GOP didn’t abuse senate procedure. Of course, after 8 years of failed policies and the Bush recession, the 2008 elections certainly were a strong mandate for democratic policies. But that’s an inconvenient fact for the media.