I reject the premise that precedents and written rules are on equal footing.
Nobody but the Senate itself has jurisdiction.
If they had principles maybe they would have.
~Max
I would be interested in looking at a breakdown by state. In a rush now but I didn’t see that on Pew’s press release - they had aggregated all the voters in states that don’t allow it by party, but I’d want to look at what the majority opinion is in each state, without regard to party.
~Max
I’m not sure the consequences were unintended. A Senate without a filibuster should be a goal of the Democratic Party, since they are the larger party. Removing the filibuster entirely was too difficult. But a small step starts the snowball rolling. The Republican Party pushed it further, which might’ve made sense in the short term, but in the long term makes it easier for the Democrats to take the next step. Sooner, rather than later, there will be no filibuster, to the long-term advantage of the Democrats.
That does seem to be a tricky way to get one’s way. It probably will have many unintended consequences.
No, to make it easier for people to vote.
Is stopping that part of either Voter rights bill?
The filibuster is and has always been a terrible and anti-democratic idea, and the sooner it’s eliminated entirely, the better. I believe this follows from the basic principles of democracy, and partisan considerations don’t change that. But even with the partisan considerations, a filibuster favors the party who wants government to be dysfunctional and incapable of accomplish anything, and disfavors the party who wants government to be good.
It seems extremely unlikely that, in the next handful of election cycles, any Democratic candidate, aside from perhaps Manchin (due to his uniqueness as a bright red state Democrat), will ever win a senatorial primary without promising to kill the filibuster. If so, that means it’s just a matter of time. At some point the Democrats will have 50+1 Senators in support of killing the filibuster. Its days are numbered.
The problem is that if you’re Harry Reid in 2013, you don’t have the option to go back to how things worked for most of those 40 years. For most of the history of the 60-vote threshold, parties would not use the filibuster to the point McConnell was using it; the point at which the federal judicial system was going to be further and further understaffed. So he had the choice of either changing the filibuster rules, unilaterally disarming, or allowing the number of judges to keep declining. Saying that the course of action he took led to negative consequences is an incomplete analysis - he didn’t have the ability to just go back to how things worked in the 90’s.
I disagree with you about whether going nuclear constitutes a dishonest practice.
However even with your view, do you think that there are things that the senate does that are essential to the government? Presumably confirming federal judges would have to be.
Likely they would have used the same approach they used once they were in a Senate majority and Obama was still president. There were some confirmations but they left a ton of vacancies open.
If he neither did this nor found a way to get the Democrats to confirm his picks, that would also be colossally stupid. The endgame for the previous status quo is a hollowed out court system. That means that there would be no way to rein in a president from the opposite party to do whatever he wants, which isn’t good for either a Democratic-led legislature facing off against a Republican president or a Republican legislature facing off against a Democratic president.
Your interpretation of how sacrosanct the written rules legislatures have for themselves are is very far from the Washington consensus (for better or worse) but even if we did go by every single rule to the letter, indefinite filibusters could be essentially removed.
The 3/5’s rule only applies to debate, and there is a senate rule that debate must be relevant to the question being given to the Senate. So once the filibusters run out of legitimate things to debate about a given piece of legislation, their filibuster could be broken.
The “Pastore Rule” only requires debate to be germane during the first three hours of a legislative day. It requires another Senator to raise a point of order to enforce, and the speaking Senator does not lose the floor as long as he or she return to the topic at hand. In practice, it is almost never enforced.
I’m engaging with the hypothetical that every senate rule must be followed exactly. The fact that it’s never enforced, and the fact that the remedy is to return to the topic are conventions, not in the actual text.
It’s true that it only applies for set periods, which is all that would be necessary to break the filibuster.
I don’t think it would be that difficult to stay on topic for three hours. Of course, the Chair could simply rule an objection valid based on his or her own interpretation of what constitutes “germaneness” (which would be subject to a point of order against his or her ruling, requiring a majority vote to overturn). In which case the next filibustering Senator can stand up and take over.
Sure, and then you might have to go back the next day and the next until they run out of relevant arguments, and have an interpretation that repeating the same arguments that have been discussed previously is not germane.
Hey look, everyone: Sam is trying out the conservative strategy of simply declaring something to be true and inarguable!
I think the vast majority of Senators would be loath to get into a position where they’re routinely judging the “germaneness” of their colleagues’ remarks. Almost every Senator regards the ability to stray off topic onto whatever’s on his or her mind to be a God-given right.
Procedurally what you’re saying is possible, but practically it’s very unlikely given the above and that today’s Senate apparently doesn’t have the same concerns as @Max_S about the propriety of the nuclear option.
In my view, it is irresponsible to go nuclear except as a last resort. If this voting rights bill is so important to government, then you should be willing to sacrifice Senate business for a week or two.
From what I’ve read about the '60s they would do this - if the Senate majority leader had a bill he thought was super important, and he had the votes to pass it, it would come to the floor and tie up all of the Senate’s business. They would try to negotiate in the interest of bipartisanship, to avoid a filibuster - but when negotiations fail they move up the vote and the filibuster actually happens. Perhaps more important than tying up other Senate business, all of the Senators have to be ready at a moment’s notice for the filibuster to end and the vote to take place. The filibuster is a game of chicken: who will cave first? Will the majority party finally decide the bill isn’t so important after all, or will the ones holding the floor decide it isn’t worth it to hold up the Senate any longer?
The threat of a filibuster has held up countless legislative agendas, permanently. But the filibusters a party musters for any particular bill never last more than a couple days themselves.
~Max
Sure, I’m referring to the “nuclear option” as making changes to Senate rules and/or norms so that a Senate agenda item can’t be indefinitely blocked by a minority caucus. I personally don’t care if that means talking filibuster, carve out or just getting rid of it, as long as the results are that essential government functions can’t be blocked forever.
If talking filibuster would work in the sense that it was possible for the Senate to do things that we agree are essential, possibly with a delay, that would still constitute using the nuclear option.
So presumably if the Democrats went back to a talking filibuster, and the net effect was that the GOP didn’t have a practical avenue to outright block voting rights legislation, that would be OK with you?
No, it wouldn’t. I fully support a talking filibuster and strongly oppose the nuclear option until, at the very least, you try forcing a talking filibuster first.
If you want to unilaterally categorize both as “nuclear options”, whatever name you use for the procedure used under Reid and McConnell regarding cloture, I’m strongly against that as an immediate step.
~Max
I mean the practical effect is what matters. If the practical effect of a talking filibuster is that the minority caucus can’t use the filibuster as a veto, that is the same as if the filibuster was completely removed.
The practical effect of a return to the talking filibuster depends on the resolve of individuals in the Senate, something which hasn’t been tested since 1970. It may well turn out that the Republican Senators today have excellent morale and, by chaining filibusters, can speak for 30 days straight before giving up; and that Democratic Senators today will give up if they have to stick around the floor for more than two days straight. (With margins like we have today, it is a weakest-link-in-the-chain situation for Democrats.)
~Max
If the Democrats become a minority in the Senate, their enthusiasm for killing the filibuster will diminish considerably, certainly to the point where it’s extremely unlikely to be any sort of litmus test for their candidates (even in the unlikely event that it would otherwise be so).
But right now there’s overwhelming support in their caucus for it, with - AFAICT - only a couple of holdouts. So if they increase their margin by a couple of seats it’s very likely to happen even with the current incumbents.