Which laws should I like? We still have yet to see anyone post even one example of a law that would benefit me that I should be in support of.
For every good law that does get passed there are ten bad ones. There are already far too many laws. We should be removing laws, not adding to them. We’ve got laws banning a weed that grows in the ground. Tens of thousands of gun laws. Tax laws that are a complete mess.
Did you miss the four sentences following the one you quoted?
Can we stop beating me up about judges? I’ve conceded the point and no one is arguing to support that.
Cabinet appointments are another matter. I’ll admit I’m not sure how bad of an issue this is. How many federal departments are unstaffed due to blocked nominations? I know the BATF is, and I cheer that one. That entire agency should be abolished and it’s leadership should be investigated and probably brought up on charges.
I don’t care which ones you like and which you don’t. If you can dismiss thousands of bills with a wave of your hand, I’m not going to hunt for ones I think you might like. I wasn’t commenting on the ones that were rejected anyway. I was saying that if there is ever some day some law you might like, this method makes it more likely it’s going to get blocked even if the public and 59 Senators support it.
Would you care to provide a basis for any of this?
No, I didn’t.
I’m sure you noticed that the nominee for Defense Secretary was filibustered earlier this year and the presumed nominee for Secretary of State was withdrawn because she was going to be filibustered. This is a new thing, and we probably have not seen the last of it.
Maybe some day a Republican President and a GOP-lead Congress will propose exactly that and Democrats will filibuster it. At such time you may assume I’ve died laughing. In any event, you can’t make that happen through any kind of legislative means, so instead, we have this absurd situation where the agency is staffed and Congress approves its funding, but a leader can’t be named. This accomplishes pretty much nothing except that a bad job gets done and money is wasted. If Republicans want the ATF or any other agency done away with, they should have the stones to propose a law to do it.
Why are you folks debating him as if he’s anything but a “my way or the highway” voter? He’s already stated flat out that Supreme Court justices should be approved…unless they disagree with a decision he holds dear.
He has no understanding of democracy (or even republics) and is just another guy who wants to be king and have his way rule.
The filibuster should be allowed to delay legislation, even for a long time, It should not be allowed to stop it.
In my view, the point of the filibuster is to stop a headlong rush to pass legislation before the public can debate it. The health care bill that the President wanted in July 2009 and was actually passed in March 2010(I think) SHOULD have been delayed that long. It was a hugely significant bill and such a bill should never be rushed. The same should occur with the immigration bill and the gun bill. But in the end, after months of delaying tactics, these bills should pass if there are still 51 votes for them. Any filibuster reform should look to achieve those results.
However, I think that’s unlikely to happen. I think politiicans find it more advantageous to either have the 51 vote threshold or the 60 vote threshold. So we’ll probably get one or the other and frankly I’d rather have the 60 vote. I’ve never been a fan of democracy by slim majority rule. Changes to over 200 years of law should require general consensus, although that’s not a constitutional principle, just my view of how things should be done.
Interestingly enough, the Democrats apparently could have passed the background checks bill with a majority vote:
A word, first, about that Senate “minority.” Majority Leader Harry Reidwas free to bring the deal struck by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey to the floor for an up-or-down vote, and this background-checks amendment might have passed. It did convince 54 Senators, including four Republicans.
But under Senate rules, a simple majority vote would have opened the measure to up to 30 hours of debate, which would have meant inspecting the details. The White House demanded, and Mr. Reid agreed, that Congress should try to pass the amendment without such a debate.
Majority rules would have also opened the bill to pro-gun amendments that were likely to pass. That would have boxed Mr. Reid into the embarrassing spectacle of having to later scotch a final bill because it also contained provisions that the White House loathes. So Mr. Reid moved under “unanimous consent” to allow nine amendments, each with a 60-vote threshold.
The bill that he wanted in July 2009 had, by that point, already been thoroughly debated by the public for about a year and a half, and the public had already clearly stated that they wanted it, by electing the guy who ran with it as a major portion of his platform. Despite that, that bill was never actually passed, leaving us instead with a bastardized thing that was further right than what even the Republicans had been proposing, and still got almost no Republican votes.
There’s a big difference between debating a set of principles, which is what Obama set out during his campaign, and actual legislation. Besides which, as you point out, the principles Obama articulated were not all in the bill. And it’s not as if Republican buy-in would have made the bill less conservative. If Republicans had been willing to negotiate, it would have been even more conservative and looked even less like what candidate Obama proposed.
That’s the same excuse immigration reform supporters are using to rush the immigration bill. “We’ve debated this since 2007!” Not the same bill, although many of the principles behind it are the same. The new one has to be debated too.
The problem is, Republicans never think there has been enough debate, and allow it to be voted on. They are not debating in good faith, they are continuing debate solely to prevent a vote on the bill. That is abuse of legislative power, not reasoned debate.
No, there really isn’t. That’s what’s so frustrating. The reason the debates happen is not because people are arguing over the specifics of the bill but because some people are opposed to the very principles the bill is based on.
No Republican fought against the health care bill because they thought a public option was a good idea but they didn’t like the specifics of how it was laid out.
But that is the actual reality. Very few “large” bills are proposed to answer a problem nobody thinks we have. Hell, even the Republicans thought healthcare needed reform - they just wouldn’t commit to exactly what reform. Endless (or even lengthy) debate serves one purpose: Get special interests opposed to the bill to donate shit-tons of money.
It also rallies public opposition, which is essential to democracy. As is rallying public support.
Remember the Bush SS privatization push? In principle, voters were very amenable to the idea. So that means a bill should have been written up quickly and rushed through right? It’s all settled? Well, no. Once we got into some nitty gritty details and Democrats did a full court press with the public and media explaining why it was a bad idea, the public turned against it.
SS privatization is something I’ve supported for a long time, but even I was glad to see democracy work. And it takes more for democracy to work than to just have elections and votes. People need to be involved, and on SS privatization, as well as health care, people got involved.
Well, if you consider the House bill to be closer to what the public wanted, it still wasn’t popular. What the public wanted was simple, what was actually written was a compromise among various special interests.
We’re seeing the same thing with the immigration bill. Why are business and labor hammering out a compromise on a bill? Last I checked, they weren’t elected.
Yes, what the public wanted was simple. They wanted an end to denials based on pre-existing conditions, a free-market exchange, and a public option. In other words, Obamacare. Care to explain why that wasn’t what we got?
Heh. that bill would have been three pages long. Democrats wanted to accomplish a lot more with health care reform than that, and that’s where they ran into trouble.
Yes, absolutely. I think Republicans have penned a new chapter of how to run Capitol Hill, a strategy that has reaped rewards in the form in asymmetric influence and precious votes from the American public. Democrats are attempting to carry on the People’s business in the pre-Newt Gingrich way, this is anachronism and should be abandoned in favor of directly engaging the public in an effort to persuade them.
Republicans have compared the filibuster as a way to encourage bipartisanship, this is a bizarre way to look at it, but it’s comfortable enough that on board with it. Similarly, Democrats should require 60 votes in order to ‘encourage bipartisanship’ should they ever be in the minority. It would be political suicide if they went on with business as usual.
If you think Democrats didn’t filibuster everything out of a sense of justice and fairness, then you’re mistaken. Democrats filibustered what they could during the Bush years. Problem is, Democrats don’t have a unified caucus on many issues, so filibustering becomes impossible. Republicans can always find a few votes on the other side to break it. Unless they want to privatize Social Security or Medicare, in which case that’ll unite the Dem caucus really fast.