Well, since you’ve backtracked from a sweeping claim about “obstructing the agenda” and narrowed it to “obstructing most GOP legislation” outside of the budget reconciliation process, and entirely ignoring judiciary appointments, then yes. For now, the legislative filibuster is there, and it gives the Democrats some obstructive power. I’m not sure who is saying it doesn’t.
We can’t really say exactly what that impact is, because McConnell isn’t going to waste his time and political capital by bringing loser bills to the floor. But we can assume some things are getting killed due to an assumed filibuster threat.
Yep, reconciliation is simple majority. Democrats alone don’t have the votes to obstruct reconciliation bills, it depends on Republican defections. They only get to use it something like 3 times (complicated rules here), but as we saw with the tax bill and Obamacare reform, the Republicans have the will and ability to ram through major legislation with a simple majority.
I think that’s why people are skeptical of attempts to shade the situation as Democrats has having a great deal of power in the Senate. The legislative filibuster gives them a bit of power, but it’s 1 step away from having no power at all in the current federal government.
My apologies for the revival, but I did not see this question earlier.
Without going into an a highly tangential treatise on my personal view of American politics, I’ll say that I favor evidence-backed policies and programs that incorporate useful metrics to evaluate how they perform in actuality versus how some talking head with an agenda thinks it ‘should’ work. The problem with adhering to any particular ideology is that one inherently looks for evidence that supports it and rejects facts that don’t, a sorry state of affairs that we are currently experiencing and not limited to any one political party or movement.
In terms of government, I think it should be as small and efficient as possible so as to not serve as a jobs-creation mechanism (unless there is actual merit in doing so, such as the Rural Electification Administration or AmeriCorps, which serve very specific and focused efforts in the public interest) but needs to be large and well-supported enough to do the things that only governments can afford or have will to do, such as maintain public infrastructure, engage in long term basic science research and technology development, and provide for the public welfare (security, law enforcement, consumer protection, protecting natural resources for public use, et cetera). If we want to reduce goverment waste, as the Republican party in particular has championed, I think it makes sense to look at the major ticket items first, and the Department of Defense and Department of Energy spending on weapon systems of questionable need and often dubious efficacy is where the main focus should be, rather than gutting the comparitively paltry budgets of the Department of Education, Department of the Interior, or Department of Health and Human Services.
As for Sanders, while I respect that he has at least the putitive interests of Americans, and particular young students who are vulnerable to being victimized by predatory lending and ill-advised guidance by an education system looking to maximize tuition profits, “with all due respect” he appears to know fuck-all about public financing, and the notion of free four year degress for everyone regardless of interest or academic ability is exactly the kind of blind pointless advocacy which has undercut the very necessary labor-oriented middle class that has left this country with a dearth of employable people in the skilled trades such as welding, pipe-fitting, electricians, and millwrights, as anyone who has worked in the fabrication or construction industries is well aware. We don’t need every fucking high school student to aspire to four year college or graduate degrees; we need people who are willing to do the hard work of building and maintaining the critical infrastructure of the nation who are respected for their work and are paid a better-than-just-getting-by wage for doing so.
We need educated, literate people, but honestly, the post-secondary education industry has turned to largely churning out people with surprisingly uneven educations and even more limited practical experience while we have become highly dependent upon those so-reviled immigrants to provide basic labor in exchange for the opportunties to make a better life for themselves and their families. Sanders offers what appears to be zero attention to or observance of this problem while providing a ‘solution’ that lacks particulars in any way. He is essentially the extreme left-wing response to Trumpists; burn it all down and replace the system with something in his image, which is guaranteed to attract the vultures and carpetbaggers. This kind of reform-from-without has never, in my knowledge, worked in any society, anywhere.