That makes perfect sense. Filibusters should delay, not kill, legislation.
I agree, but the real life results are all the Republican leaders (governors and presidents) who can point to “bipartisan results” under their “leadership” when Democrats act like adults, while Democratic leaders can hardly get anything passed because of Republican obstructionism.
Do Democrats really act like adults, or do they cave? I don’t recall much praise of Democrats during the Bush years from the left when they worked with him. I recall a lot of anger and accusations of spinelessness.
Really? You don’t remember No Child Left Behind? Or Medicare Part D?
“The left”, in general, was pretty supportive of those bipartisan measures, as I recall.
Those, yes. I can play that game too. The Republicans provided the necessary votes for Obama’s Afghan surge, and the free trade agreements with Peru and South Korea.
Note that Senators can resign or die while in office. With a simple majority requirement, a single Senator doing so might tip the balance and allow for some hypothetical ultra-partisan legislation to be passed, then repealed again when a new Senator is appointed, etc.
Here’s a List of all US Senators ever (warning: pdf). The membership of the senate changes much more often than at each election. Look at the 111th Congress, from Jan 3, 2009, to Jan 3, 2011: There were 11 changes in the Senate body after the start date and before the end.
I disagree that that’s long enough, though. Lots of laws take more than two years to even implement. Look at Obamacare, which some people are certainly agitating for the repeal of. Whether or not you’re in favor of the law, I think it’s a serious mistake to allow for it to be repealed with a simple majority before it’s even really gotten started.
On the other hand, the health care act is taking so long to get started because the threshold is too high: If it were simple majority, Congress could have just passed the bill the majority wanted, without having to compromise on things like the implementation time to get those last few votes.
I guess what I’m wondering is, and I don’t like the Republican filibuster because I like a lot of what the Democrats want to do, but more generally, the minority party doesn’t have the obligation to make it easy for the majority party to pass their agenda, do they? I don’t think they should say, “Oh, your horrible law that’s going to ruin the country has 50 votes, so oh well.”
Also, in this current situation, isn’t the legislative filibuster kind of irrelevant anyway? I mean, with the gun bill example, even if the Republicans had agreed to a straight up and down vote, it still wouldn’t have gotten through the House, would it?
Not likely. Another problem for the Democrats was that they couldn’t have a 50-vote threshold on their gun bill, otherwise it would have ceased to be a gun control bill, but instead a background checks bill along with national concealed carry. That would have probably passed the House and gotten vetoed by the President.
The vote for national concealed carry was 57. Without the 60-vote threshold the parties agreed to, it would have become the law of the land.
That’s not true. No one has to agree with the Republicans for them to throw up a 60 vote block.
Any forty Senators can kill all the progress in the Senate. That’s even worse when 40 Senators can represent something like 10% of the population. Low population states get as much Senatorial representation as high population states. So a coalition of 10% of the most misinformed people of the country can effectively stall all progress.
That’s by design, it’s not an accident. Otherwise the smaller states would never have agreed to the Constitution. We see the same type of structure in the UN and the EU. And while those aren’t directly comparable, not being real governments, in the case of the EU that’s the eventual goal, political union. It won’t be proportional representation there either.
The founders had no idea that there would be a backwards contingent of rural states that want to stop anything and everything that doesn’t comport with their ideology.
The constitution says that 50 votes is what you need in the Senate. That’s all the power small states need to not be steamrolled. It’s already an advantage. Changing it to 60, vastly inflates the power of rural states to stop the country in its tracks. As I said, ten percent of the country can fuck the other 90 percent if 60 is the number to do anything. If the number was 50, it would take 20% of the country to drag it to a halt. Certainly better.
The filibuster, as it currently exists, is a mistake that’s built up over time. It needs to be peeled away to get back to the 50 votes that the founders envisioned. And if it were, the tiny states would still have vastly more power than their population would suggest.
The founders supported federalism. Not coincidentally, so do the smaller rural states. The fact that the bigger coastal states can’t impose their will and take away the rural states’ sovereignty more than they have was an intended part of our system.
Like I said, I do agree with that much. Filibusters should delay, not defeat.
It should still exist simply because at 50 votes the majority can just ram anything through without debate. The filibuster insures that opposition has time to be marshalled against the bill and can be used to persuade the public that the bill is not in their interest.
Or, alternatively, there could be a law that all bills must exist for 90 days and be online before being voted on except for true emergencies, like war or disaster relief. If any amendments are approved, the bill would have to be posted an additional 10 days before the final vote.
This is an interesting statement. When you look at the 44 senators (a minority) who were able to block the most recent gun control legislation, they represent considerably fewer than 44% of Americans (an even smaller minority).
The founding fathers were very smart, but they weren’t clairvoyant. They couldn’t foresee the firepower that people would have in 2013, and they didn’t foresee the filibuster, which was an accident that has become an embarrassment.
It has to be ended, or at the very least significantly reformed, and the only chance of it is if the Democrats continue the insanity and both sides become identically pissed off about it (and likely the Republicans will be the one to have the balls to actually do something).
Well, as far as gun control does, the Senate almost always has a pro-gun majority. There were 56 votes for background checks, but after that the only thing passing is pro-gun legislation.
Again, if there was no filibuster, we’d have national concealed carry on the President’s desk.
Separate the issue of the filibuster from the issue of any individual bill. Maybe different filibuster rules would have made a difference with gun control legislation, maybe they wouldn’t. Either way, the current filibuster rules are silly.
If you can get 50 votes for a bill with no debate, then that’s a very well-supported bill that deserves to pass. On any given issue, you’re going to start with some number of senators who know they support one side, some number of senators who know they support the other side, and some number in the middle who need to be convinced one way or the other. Ordinarily, neither of the known contingents is large enough to get their way by themselves, and so debate is needed to convince enough of the undecideds. It would take quite a popular bill to get over half already in one contingent.
I think that’s very wrong. If a bill is important enough to the party, it’ll get passed without debate or anyone even reading it if it only has a 50 vote margin, and sometimes even if it needs a 60 vote margin(ahem, Patriot Act, DOMA).
Which is why maybe my idea for a 90 day waiting period might be preferable to the filibuster. As well as the Libertarian Party’s Read the Bills law.
Let’s start with the fact that nowhere in The Constitution does it say anything about how many votes are needed to pass legislation and that each House of Congress can make their own rules. All it says is that a majority is needed for a quorum. If you are thinking of the Ballin case, all it really says is that a quorum is sufficient for conducting business i.e. requiring a majority of the whole House to pass a bill is unconstitutional.
And while we are talking about majorities, in a House of 100, a majority is 51 not 50 and if it the vote splits 50-50, then the President of the Senate votes for the 51st vote.
While I’d like to see some filibuster reform, I’m actually sympathetic to arguments on both sides.
What I am not at all interested in is trying to divine the intentions of the founders on either side of the issue (though, from a look at history, it seems like the conservative side makes this argument far more often than liberals). For me, what James Madison might have thought about issue X may be historically interesting, but we live in the here and now and should judge the effectiveness of government structures on 21st century standards, not what we imagine folks from the 18th century would think. Appealing to the founders is quickly becoming the equivalent of medieval scholastics appealing to holy writ.
Well, we don’t have to judge their intentions, we just have to live by the laws they wrote. And the law of the land is that each state gets two Senators, and so yes, 15-20% of the population can stop any bill from becoming law.
This law was so firmly set in stone, that it isn’t even legal to amend the Constitution to change it.
Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.