Yeah, pretty much there’s no way to fix the govt by fixing the filibuster.
Our government was designed with the idea that mature adults who wanted what was best for our nation would be representing it.
If we elect a bunch of immature brats, there is no way for mere senate rules to make it work.
Agreed, and we should also look at how other democracies deal with the problem.
In most democracies it’s much easier for a majority to implement their policies than in Americas. This means the immature brats are either an irrelevant minority with no power, or if they are a majority, the system lets them actually pee on the electric fence and have their bad policies blow up in their faces. The idea of being afraid that letting a majority run over a minority in a democracy is necessarily a bad thing leaves out an important detail - the majority’s ideas might be good or bad. If a majority has good ideas, you want to let them overrun a minority. If they have bad ideas, it’s obviously never a good thing that they get to implement them but if there is nothing stopping them, the voters can attribute the bad results to the party with the bad ideas and vote them out.
derail - It absolutely astounds and infuriates me that I’ve so little faith in the American voter that even if Pelosi/Schumer painstakingly make clear, ad nauseum, that their legislation is being obstructed by the GOP, said voters would not register this in their thick fucking skulls even if bolt guns were pointed at them, and just throw up their arms (heh, figuratively) over what they’d moronically percieve as dem’s toothlessness and failure.
(back to scheduled filibuster programming)
Agreed. Especially if it gets into Green Eggs n’Ham territory. Determining this, however, could get blurry if a filibusterer brings out a book/pamphlet to read from that just barely pertains to the subject at hand, from which a debate might then break out, from there, over the material’s relevance to the legislation.
I’d assume it would be a point of order, where I think whoever is presiding would rule, and maybe majority vote can overrule the presiding officer? I think.
So, best keep pretty on topic, because the majority can cut you short if you stray.
Just not following trends isn’t enough. If Democrats do as well as Republicans did in 2002, which was a shocking result that required a massive terrorist attack a year prior, they’ll lose the House by a substantial margin if there aren’t major reforms to redistricting.
I’d quibble that that’s a change to the rule about what a bill that affects the deficit is. Of course, by manipulating that rule, they did in end-run around the filibuster. But since the Senate behaves like there’s still a filibuster on regular bills, there still is.
The number of immature brats matter. Right now, 41 immature brats can stop any regular bill. By removing the filibuster, it’ll take 50 or 51 brats to stop a regular bill. That’s a significant difference.
You know, I don’t want to act like I’m some sort of political Svengali or anything, but . . . Greg Sargent (paywall) has a column up today proposing what I raised – i.e. nuking the filibuster just on organizing resolutions. Of course Manchin’s being a moron pissing away his leverage by saying that he wouldn’t support it. But if come March he hasn’t gotten to chair any committee hearings he may feel differently about it.