I just read the latest Thomas Sowell column where he claims that no good has ever come to the United States as a result of a filibuster.
Anybody disagree?
I don’t know. That was some good movie.
I thought Smith was a boob of the first order; totally unsuited to a post in the U.S. Senate. What he should have done is announced that he’d sell all his holdings in and around Willet’s Creek to the federal government for the purpose of setting up a national boy’s camp, for the price of one dollar. Have another Senator draw up the papers and legally witnessed by the Vice-President and if the goons in his home state keep insisting Smith owns the land he can rightly say “If I ever did, I don’t any more.”
I like Mel Gibson’s second version better. “All in favor… say DIE!”
Robert Griffin of Michigan, used the filibuster to scuttle Lyndon Johnson’s
nomination of Justice Abe Fortas to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
What that a good thing or a bad thing? It depends on your opinion, or columnist Sowell’s opinion, of Justice Fortas, I suppose.
To say that no good thing can come of a filibuster is sophistry I think. If you oppose the nominee and can use the filibuster to derail the nomination it is a good thing.
Since the filibuster, by definition, prevents something, it’s hard to point to any tangible good stemming from it.
For instance, I think it’s a very good thing that it has allowed Democrats to block a few of Bush’s most objectionable judicial nominees. But we’ll never know for sure what specific bad outcomes it prevented. The best thing we can do is look at judges who could have been filibustered but weren’t, and the bad decisions they’ve made, and say, “Wouldn’t it have been great if his confirmation had been prevented by the filibuster?”
Prevention of anything bad is a tangible good.
Not really; if they get confirmed, and then make bad decisions, we can point to specific bad outcomes. But if they don’t get confirmed, we won’t be able to say what bad things we’ve prevented, because even if the same cases come through that would have had they been there, we can’t be 100% certain how they would have ruled. Maybe the judges will have changes of heart once they get on the bench. Maybe the judges that get confirmed instead are even bigger right-wing nutjobs and tools of the establishment, but they’ve managed to keep their mouths shut about it.
My point is only that while the blocking of these judges may be a very good thing–and I believe it is–we won’t be able to point to any outcome in particular and say “This good thing happened because those judges were blocked.”
I’m with BG on this one. Considering that we’ve had this system going for over 200 years, I’d think there whould be some tangible examples of things that the majority was ready to pass, that the POTUS was ready to sign, but that got stopped by filibuster and now we can say it clearly would have been a bad thing. For instance, eugenics was the rage at the beginning of the last century. Theoretically the majority might have passed lots of dumbass laws that 60% would not support. You could go to any era of US history and come up with comparable examples.
If the combined brain power of SDMB-for which I have a geat deal of respect-can only come up with promoting Abe Fortas from Justice to Chief Justice, and some unnamed Bush nominees temporarily derailed, I’m inclined to say that once again, Thomas Sowell is right.
But I’m open. Maybe someone will come up with something else.
Plan B, you don’t understand. Filibusters are good things. Due to the filibuster, Presidents of both parties have been restrained from even bothering to nominate extremist judges because they counted heads before hand and realized that they didn’t have the votes to overcome a potential filibuster. That had a moderating effect on who got nominated. I think when Doctor J said, “It’s hard to point to any tangible good coming from it” he didn’t mean that the filibuster wasn’t good, rather, he meant that it is impossible to disprove the negative. A filibuster’s positive impact is difficult to precisely pinpoint since there are no records or statistics about potential extreme judicial nominees who’s nominations were stillborn in the back office of the White House because the President figured there was no point in nominating someone who couldn’t possibly get past a filibuster.