NRSC Chairman John Cornyn says that the Republicans will not be able to take over the Senate tomorrow, and that is hopefully true. But it doesn’t mean what you might think. Unlike every other democratic body known to man, the U.S. Senate doesn’t operate by majority rule. On every issue not directly related to passing the budget, it requires 60% of the sitting members to agree, or consent, for the Senate to move to a new piece of business. That is why dozens of Obama’s nominees have not received a confirmation vote. That is why we couldn’t pass the health care bill that the president campaigned on. That is why the Wall Street reforms were weaker than they should have been. That is why the stimulus bill was smaller than it needed to be to fix the economy and significantly bring down the unemployment rate. That is why we couldn’t get a vote on climate legislation or immigration reform. That is why we couldn’t pass a Defense Appropriations bill that contained the DREAM Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. On a whole host of issues that have been upsetting to both progressives and the electorate at large, the Republicans thwarted the majority in the Senate and demonstrated that they had effective veto power over the president’s agenda. And this was in spite of the fact that for most of the last two years the Democrats had 58%-59% of the votes in the Senate. If it had not been for a brief period between late September and mid-January when the Democrats actually had the 60 votes required to move from one issue to the next without the consent of the Republicans, there would have been no health care reform at all.
It’s still important to have the majority because the majority gets to chair the committees that mark up legislation, and the majority gets to set the agenda. But having the majority doesn’t mean that you can actually do anything if you don’t have 60 seats. The Democrats currently have fifty-nine. Most experts predict that come next January the Democrats will have between 52 and 55 seats. There hasn’t been a contentious bill that passed through the Senate over the past two years that had more than three Republican votes. What this means is that we should not expect anything to pass that isn’t basically crafted by the Republicans. We should not expect anyone to be confirmed unless they are pre-approved by the Republicans.
So, when John Cornyn says that the GOP will not be able to win a majority of seats in the Senate, he is probably right. But it doesn’t mean that they won’t have won control of the Senate. They had near-control of the Senate for most of the past two years. They will now have near-total control of the Senate.
And that means that regardless of what happens in the House, our country is going into a prolonged holding pattern. We will fight each other, but solutions to our problems will have to wait.