I Pit the Campaign for America's Future for a Dishonest Report About GOP Obstruction

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?

  1. 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.

Well, done, Rufus. Holding your (our, if it comes to that, as I tend to place myself on your side more often than not) own allies accountable for not stupidly squandering credibility points. I’m very glad to see it.

Thanks for taking the time to break things down. My annoyance is the same as yours - it’s such a stupid thing to spend a group’s reputation on.

I have to admit, I’m still wondering how and why a cloture vote would ever be called and then get 0 votes. This is a more interesting question than the others this report brings up. It at least hints at some kind of answer other than simple idiocy.

Thanks. I’d been noticing that people were saying this sort of thing earlier in the year, and I’d click over to the roster of Senate votes, and it wouldn’t look the same, but for one reason or another I didn’t have the time to write about it.

But this time, several bloggers I respect (Digby, Yglesias, and others) picked up the story and relayed it uncritically. I’ve posted some criticism in comment threads (under my current blogosphere alter ego), but mostly before I had the time to dig all the way back to 2003-04, and it was 2003-04 which destroyed any argument that the number of cloture votes were a reasonable proxy for the number of bills blocked by blocking cloture that would have won an up-or-down vote.

Here’s the link. It’s one of those twice-removed procedural votes - it’s a cloture vote on a Motion to Proceed on an actual bill. I think in this instance, we find different questions interesting, not that there’s anything wrong with that - it’s just a bit deep in the weeds of Senate procedure for me.

This is revenge, isn’t it? I’m supposed to start digging and find out who called for the cloture vote, and get him or her to explain why it was called.
Insidious. :wink:
ETA: It’s not so much that I like to know the arcana of the Senatorial dance, I just want to confirm that it was because of some kind of procedural rule that wouldn’t make sense to an outsider, without a long course in said arcana.

I was curious about this, too, so I used my Mad THOMAS Skillz and looked it up. It appears that Senator Biden authored a resolution about Iraq. It seems that the content of that resolution was OBE, and Senator Warner and Senator Levin wrote a different resolution.

Harry Reid tried to cancel the cloture vote already scheduled for the Biden resolution, but Mitch McConnell objected and the vote had to proceed before the Senate could take up the better Warner-Levin proposal. (I’m guessing that McConnell saw advantage in getting everyone to vote against Biden’s resolution which seemed to reflect a controversial, mostly Democratic view of the war… either that or he just wanted to rub it in Mr. Bigmouth Joe Biden’s face.) So everyone voted against cloture on the Biden resolution.

But really, this just proves the point. Republicans objected to cancelling a meaningless vote! Obstructionism!!1!

What a fantastic post. This is the Bizarro World version of a BrainGlutton-type post (who himself has improved considerably, so much so that I feel slightly guilty at the characterization, but I got nuthin else). The substance of a published bit is examined with a critical eye, even though it favors the ordinary leaning of the poster.

Really well done, RT.

Well, no more need for me to beat my head against things I don’t fully understand. Thanks, Ravenman!

Senate business rules are so hopelessly convoluted that you literally need to have the Senate rules at hand to even begin to understand what’s going on.

And I defy anyone to make any sense of that link. Seriously. There are votes on whether or not to vote on voting!

Isn’t it beautiful? :smiley:

And I mean beautiful in a sick-car-crash-on-the-expressway-with-meat-paste-on-the-road-where-you’re-not-sure-whether-it-was-a-human-dog-deer-
or-sasquatch-and-you-know-you-shouldn’t-take-your-eyes-off-of-the-road-but-you-want-to-keep-looking-anyways sort of way.

I’ve tried, and have been able to extract limited bits of useful knowledge, but have generally walked away with great confusion in my head.

I’m also in admiration of Ravenman’s Thomas skillz. That’s one thicket I perpetually get lost in - I’ll find 4 versions of a bill, it won’t be remotely clear to me what the operative version is, and of course the legislation makes no sense unless you have the existing statute handy (which can often be a pile of statutes, scattered far and wide across the reaches of the U.S. Code), and by the end of it, I feel like Groucho being flummoxed by Chico as he sells me a pile of codebooks in A Day at the Races. :stuck_out_tongue:

But the list of Senate votes in each session of each Congress, that’s something I can work with. Maybe not with total understanding, but with enough so I can take that next obvious step that the idiots at CAF didn’t.

BTW, since I took the trouble to come up with similar counts for the 108th and 109th Congresses as I did for the current session of the 110th, here they are:

109th Congress (2005-06):

22 cloture votes passed with 75 or more votes.

On 10 cloture votes, the Dems tried and failed to block a mostly GOP majority, which had 60+ votes for cloture.
On 14 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 1 cloture vote, the Dems blocked cloture, even though the GOP couldn’t even get a majority of those voting to vote for cloture.

On 1 cloture vote, the GOP tried but failed to block a Dem majority, which had between 60 and 74 votes for cloture.
On 3 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 2 cloture votes, the GOP blocked cloture, even though the Dems couldn’t even get a majority of those voting to vote for cloture.

And 1 cloture vote got only 21 votes for cloture. (I’ve somewhat arbitrarily decided on a 75-25 split as the point beyond which an action is bipartisan: if there were 75+ votes for cloture, both parties wanted cloture. If there were 25 or fewer votes for cloture, then neither party wanted cloture all that badly. This one’s clearly in the latter category. Maybe the lines should be drawn in a different place, but you gotta start somewhere. :))

108th Congress (2003-04):

7 cloture votes passed with 75 or more votes.

On 5 cloture votes, the Dems tried and failed to block a mostly GOP majority, which had 60+ votes for cloture.
On 35 cloture votes (though on only 25 different measures), 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 1 cloture vote, the Dems blocked cloture, even though the GOP couldn’t even get a majority of those voting to vote for cloture.

On 1 cloture vote, the GOP blocked cloture, even though the Dems couldn’t even get a majority of those voting to vote for cloture.

BTW, the three measures that the Dems blocked cloture on 13 times during 2003 were the nominations of Estrada (7 times), Owen (4), and Pryor (2) to the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals.

I know this is the (fucking) Pit and all, but it’s threads like this that enticed me to join the SDMB in the first place. Very interesting information. Perhaps the impending demise of the board has been greatly exaggerated…