Look, guys, you don’t have to (10 page PDF) use meaningless facts, or just plain make shit up, in order to slam GOP Senators; they’ve done plenty to deserve it. All you’re doing is ruining your own reputation.
The nut of CAF’s claim is that (a) the number of cloture votes is indicative of how obstructionist the minority party is, and (b) there have already been more cloture votes in just the first year of this Congress than there have been in any previous entire two-year Congress since they started keeping records of cloture votes, so (c) the present group of Senate Republicans is the most obstructionist group of Senators during that 35-year timespan. They make a number of other points, but that implication is the heart of the linked report. (See the graphic on p.2.)
Only trouble is, it’s a considerable exaggeration, because the number of cloture votes doesn’t mean diddly.
Some cloture votes pass nearly unanimously. (Found one a couple years back that literally passed unanimously, 100-0. Damned if I know who was obstructing what by calling for that vote, or why they needed it to begin with. Senate vote #103, 109th Congress, 1st Session. You can look it up.) A lot of them pass by pretty hefty margins. Some more of them successfully clear the 60-vote threshold needed to end debate, but not by much: one party tried to block cloture, but failed.
At the other end, some cloture votes get almost no support from either party. (Found one cloture vote with zero votes for cloture. I don’t understand that either - didn’t the guy who made the cloture motion vote for his own motion? Be that as it may.) In other instances, cloture is blocked but you wonder why they bothered - unless Senators who favored the bill were voting against cloture, which would be unusual, the bill didn’t have the votes anyway.
The ones that matter are, pretty obviously, where there was a majority ready to vote in favor of a bill, but they didn’t have the 60 votes necessary to pass a cloture motion and end the debate, so the minority blocked them by voting against cloture. It’s how many bills you block that had majority support.
Did the GOP do this 62 times this year? No, it didn’t. How many times did it happen?
- That’s how many bills the Senate GOP minority defeated through cloture motions, even though a majority favored the bill.
That’s a hell of a lot less than 62, isn’t it?
And is that a record for any Congress from 1973 to the present? Not exactly. The GOP Senators of the 110th Congress still have to catch up with the Dem Senators of the 108th Congress (2003-04), which blocked cloture 35 times, though only on 25 different bills. (The GOP decided to beat their head against a wall and unsuccessfully moved for cloture on three of them over and over, 13 times altogether.)
The GOP Senators of the 110th Congress may overtake the Dems of the 108th sometime next year, but it hasn’t happened yet.
But you wouldn’t know that from CAF’s paper, because they pretend that a meaningless stat (the number of cloture votes) is indicative of the degree of obstruction by the minority party.
Here’s some quick stat from the current Congress:
19 cloture votes passed with 75 or more votes. (Can’t say that either party was trying that hard to block anything.)
On 11 cloture votes, the GOP tried but failed to block a Dem majority, which had between 60 and 74 votes for cloture.
On 19 cloture votes, the GOP blocked cloture, holding the Dems to less than 60 votes, even though a majority of those voting, voted for cloture.
On 7 cloture votes, the GOP blocked cloture, even though the Dems couldn’t even get a majority of those voting to vote for cloture.
On 1 cloture vote, the Dems tried and failed to block a mostly GOP majority, which had 60+ votes for cloture.
On 2 cloture votes, the Dems blocked cloture, holding the GOP plus a few Dems to less than 60 votes, even though a majority of those voting, voted for cloture.
On 2 cloture votes, the Dems blocked cloture, even though the GOP couldn’t even get a majority of those voting to vote for cloture.
And 1 cloture vote got 0 votes for cloture. (Don’t ask me.) That’s all 62.
CAF could have done this bit of counting (took me ~3 hours to do from 2003 to the present, since it involved opening and giving a quick glance at a different web page and jotting down the vote total for every cloture vote, but surely they have interns for that), but apparently they didn’t bother. But they should have if they were going to publish some bullshit, because those are the numbers that tell you something. As you can see from the breakdown, ‘62 cloture votes’ means nothing. It’s lumping a whole bunch of disparate votes together, and in effect pretending that all 62 are like those 19 where the GOP blocked cloture, frustrating a Dem majority.
And then there’s stuff they say that’s just plain wrong. Take this sentence, for instance: “So far in just the first session of the 110th Congress, the Republicans have required cloture votes against filibusters 62 times.”
Sorry, but no. It’s not at all clear that anyone was trying to filibuster in a lot of these instances, particularly the 19 cloture votes that passed overwhelmingly. AFAICT, it was just a procedural step that the overwhelming majority of the Senate was in favor of.
And then, of course, there were the five cloture votes where the Dems were the party either blocking or attempting to block cloture. How exactly did the GOP ‘require’ those? That’s easy - they didn’t. So that statement is false. Period.
Of course, the CAF has things to say in their report that are true. The GOP is being obstructionist, even if they’re not setting records yet in that department. The mainstream media isn’t characterizing their use of blocking cloture as negatively as they did when the Dems were using that technique. And so on.
But besides the fact that dishonesty is simply wrong, dishonestly overstating a strong case is just stupid, because it renders everything else you say less credible. If I catch somebody telling whoppers once, I’m gonna feel a need to check up on what they say the next time, rather than treating them as a credible source.
