I’m not a moderator, I’m just saying that this board doesn’t tend to adopt the common incoherence of many other message boards.
If one person steals 65 cars, and another person steals 140 cars, are you not willing to say that the second person is a worse thief than the first? Look at this chart again and tell me there’s no difference between the two thieves.
I must be misunderstanding the process.
I thought Unanimous Consent was used to set aside procedure to help expedite some things (which makes sense…I am sure there is a fair bit of normal, non-controversial housekeeping the Senate has to do and they do not want to go through lengthy routines if unnecessary). It also makes sense that one person can stop it. You are side-stepping the usual rules for expediency but to stop someone slipping stuff by just one senator can hit the brakes.
When that it done the whatever-it-is in question marches through the usual procedures of the senate. It is here where the filibuster is applied.
I do not see how Unanimous Consent = the same as requiring a unanimous vote to pass a bill.
Interesting.
For future reference, when is it permissible to look to what the Founders’ take on something was?
I dont want to sound crass but, so… Consider me a non-conformist.
No, in fact, I think he was a better thief then the first. He was able to jack more cars.
In the end, they both got caught, so they couldnt be all that good at it.
Well, if you are unwilling to measure things, then I guess it is easier to throw your hands in the air and decide that everything is equal.
Bad is bad. In the example given, I dont see a hell of a lot of difference between two thugs who boosted cars. 65 to 100, just means one was better at it or had more opportunity. They are still thugs to me.
What youre asking for is a perceptive judgment. In this case presented (and in the case of political parties abusing the law), I see little difference in the character of the participants. I see them both as vile.
Im sorry, I dont partake in the red or blue kool aid.
Im not a Rep Bad, Dem Good believer (or a Rep good Dem bad for that matter)
Based on the history of each party, they are both vile politicians who will fuck the hell out of all of us to make themselves rich.
Don’t you hate it when Coburn interrupts the program?
In real life, two groups are never equally bad. All you do by equating the two and becoming apathetic is to take away a vote against the worse of the two. Figure out which one is the lesser evil, and use their desire for your vote to affect change.
And, anyway, if they are equal, then the only thing the fillibuster changes is that change happens more slowly. Since you aren’t satisfied with the current system you should want change.
I’m not wrong. Whatever parliamentary procedure any body happened to have, the filibuster today is a de facto supermajority requirement. A rule on motions to close debate isn’t the same as a rule on supermajorities unless and until the daily passage of legislation depends on it. Which is the case, today, in the Senate, but not in the House of Commons, now or then, and never in the Virginia House of Burgesses, or the Massachusetts Great and General Court, or any other legislature of which the Founders had experience. (Not the Constitutional Convention, either, for that matter, which had no provision to close debate at all, but still managed to report out the Constitution.) In reality, today, the U.S. Senate has a supermajority requirement to pass any piece of legislation – that’s not consonant with the understanding of the legislative power as understood by the Founders at the time.
Irrelevant. The Founders specified quorum rules in the text. As I said, they could have written whatever rules they wanted about passage requirements, as they did about make-up, quorum, number of Chambers, even their names. But where they didn’t specify a rule, then they must have meant the thing to function as things of that type always functioned.
–Cliffy
Then why did they need to say that each House can make its own rules?
Whenever it is relevant.
I was responding to other posters discussing what parliamentary procedure was which both sides were suggesting is relevant to the discussion (I think it is a worthwhile data point…interesting if nothing else).
So my post was to note that, whatever parliamentary procedure is or was the FFs had an opinion on supermajorities. I figured it was a worthwhile data point too.
The filibuster started out as a mistake, because the revolutionaries apparently didn’t know how to write rules for a legislature. It was a loophole that became a tradition. It now is yet another roadblock to reform.
The President has veto power. That’s fine, as it is his job to enforce the law, and having to sign something he cannot in good conscience enforce is an invitation to accusations of executive hypocrisy. But note that even his veto can be overridden.
The committee chairs in both chambers can hold up bills, which is a kind of veto power.
Now a 40+% minority of one chamber claim a sort of veto power.
(Soon the Nullifiers* nouveaux* may get their way and give states veto power over the federal government and the federal government veto power over the states. Somehow laws will get passed, but only by the Nullifier party leadership.)
Put all this together and you have a lot of legislators who feel impotent. One of hundreds in the chamber, blocked at every turn, then blocked again, no real power to be had. What is there to do but line your pockets, feather your nest, and retire from the farce that claims to be public service with a nice pension?
Would abolishing the filibuster diminish the incentive to political corruption? No. But it would increase the incentive to actual legislating–to statesmanship. Congressmen’s jobs would matter just that little bit more. And the balance of incentives would therefore change a little.
In a way, Senators’ jobs would matter just that little bit less; but they would have to vote, not just support a hold behind the scenes, so maybe not that much less.
Wouldn’t it decrease the initiative to statesmanship and compromise? Right now, the majority has to compromise with the minority to get things done, because if there’s some bill that’s too offensive to the minority party, they can stage a filibuster and try to stop it. Remove the filibuster, and the majority can do whatever they want.
Always permissible, never dispositive.
More accurate to call him a Dixiecrat.
The word “filibuster” originally meant “pirate” and came to mean something even worse, BTW. And I don’t mean any parliamentary tactic.
Another fact from Ezra Klein: The number of fillibusters from 1840-1900: 0! BTW, I have no problem with a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”-stlye fillibuster, but the way it’s done now ensures gridlock and chaos.
The filibuster stops good as well as bad laws from being passed. It also stops good as well as bad laws from being repealed. It is anti-legislative, anti-change, and gives the impression that our system is designed to be conservative–which is not true, as the filibuster is a historical accident. We have a surfeit of ideological anti-reformism in this country, and the filibuster contributed to that.
The filibuster might be useful to a country with a different constitution. But on top of bicameralism, I think it gives us too much of am anti-reform bias.
How’s that workin’ for ya lately? Right now, with the painless filibuster, the minority doesn’t have to let *anything *pass. And they don’t. Their stated goal is to defeat Obama, and that means making him fail; never mind that it means making the country fail too.
The painless filibuster also lets the minority be obstructive without penalty - since there’s no Mr. Smith drama happening in the chamber, the similarly-irresponsible Beltway media doesn’t report on it. Instead, they can stick with their comfortable, lazy lies about “both parties do it, tsk tsk” and return to their cocktails. They see themselves as the permanent power in DC, with administrations and Congressfolk coming and going on either end of performing for them.
This suit is not intended to win in court; don’t be silly, people. It’s about forcing the Beltway media to report on the filibuster-abuse problem, and indirectly that the irresponsibility is the Republicans’.
That is also a good reason to abolish the U.S. Senate, and that of of every two-house state legislature. A unicameral, or dromedary, legislature can respond to change faster and correct its mistakes more readily than a bicameral, or Bactrian, legislature.
