Repeal of the CLASS Act, which the President signed. Repeal of the medical device tax, which has enough support in the Senate to pass if Reid would bring it to a vote. Repeal of the business mandate, which the President won’t fully implement anyway.
And if the amendments were stupid, why not just vote them down? Because a lot of those “stupid” amendments would be tough votes for Democrats. Reid’s trying to protect what’s left of his majority after 2010’s fiasco.
Sure, let’s lower revenue and then blame Obama for needing the debt ceiling raised. If you don’t think Obama is going to implement the business mandate, why bother repealing it?
Reid bends over backwards to accommodate the opposition party compared to Agent Orange Boehner.
I don’t believe the medical device tax should be repealed. I believe the business mandate should be enforced.
This is because I believe ACA should be 100% implemented as written, especially since Democrats resist all proposed changes to it. So let them live with the consequences of full implementation. Make them lie in the bed they’ve made.
They are happy to do so, as you might know, and for very good reason.
Of the examples you gave, only one is not a “Repeal Obamacare” amendment. But congratulations for finding one, even though CLASS is related to it as well.
Repealing the medical device tax or even the business mandate does not repeal ACA. Both are fairly minor parts of the law.
IF ACA is supposedly a smashing success without the business mandate being enforced today, it will be a smashing success without it being enforced tomorrow. And it won’t be enforced tomorrow, because an election is always just two years away.
Ok, Mr. Gold says this but I don’t see absolute numbers. Lobohan’s quote gives us some actual numbers:
I suspect that it is differing timeframes that are causing the discrepancy. Perhaps someone who cares can pick comparable time frames and do an apples to apples comparison.
Again, “actual numbers” don’t tell the story. As the article goes on to say, 35 of those “allowed” amendments came from one session where they were on non-binding resolutions. Reid does (well, did, recently not so much) allow amendments when they were innocuous and didn’t cause inconvenience to his party’s senators’ voting. But any amendments that would cause problem votes for Democrats he blocks. And, as I showed you in the article, he blocks them using a particular maneuver that has not been used nearly as much before. Kinda like the complaint Democrats have about the filibuster. So - good for the goose…
Typically, the amount of amendments allowed for consideration is capped at eleven. However, Reid has completely usurped the power of other senators by consistently using his right of first recognition to “fill the tree,” which means to fill all amendment slots with his own amendments, thereby locking out other senators from submitting their own amendments.
Filling the tree is not unprecedented,** but the amount of times Reid has used the tactic is extraordinary.**
… and
Before [Reid], the most amendments any previous majority leader had been responsible for was Sen. Bill Frist, who accounted for 7.5 percent of amendments in 2006. The average over the 25 years or so before Mr. Reid took office was slightly more than 2 percent. […] Mr. Reid’s numbers are just the opposite: In 2007, his first year as leader, he accounted for 3.2 percent of amendments. That jumped to 12.4 percent in 2008, 5.3 percent in 2009, 19.3 percent in 2010, 14.2 percent in 2011, 18.4 percent in 2012, 12.8 percent in 2013 and a stunning 33.6 percent so far this year
I think hoping to PROVE it might be a bit overly ambitious… but I think that there are at least parts of the situation that it’s at least hypothetically possible to look at with some level of objective analysis. For instance, while you might have issues with the precise way the data is presented in the graph of filibusters I linked to, that’s at least one place where it IS possible to gather meaningful numbers. And even more amorphous things like “are the democrats getting more extreme” are potentially subject to some level of analysis. For instance, we could take any issue which has a number attached to it, and graph the slope of that number. Currently demoracts are pushing for a minimum wage increase, something I’m sure they’ve done many times before. It’s presumably possible to graph their requested minimum wage over time. If suddenly the minimum wage they’re requesting is 3 times higher than it ever has been before, correcting for inflation etc, that would be evidence (although not proof) that they have gotten more extreme.
I agree that it’s fairly unlikely that someone is going to do that level of work and post something really convincing IN THIS THREAD, but (a) I think it’s interesting to discuss, and (b) there’s at least some chance that some very smart person who is professional political scientist or journalist has already assembled a bunch of data related to this issue, and someone might link to it.
Certainly, I think “have the Republicans in the senate gotten more obstructionist” is something we’re more likely to be able to “objectively” analyze than some other classic topics for SDMB debating, such as “would we be better off if Romney had won the election”.
I think saying “it’s impossible that there could EVER be an uncontroversial way to interpret the evidence gathered” is a fairly extraordinary claim.
That might be a more meaningful and “fair” graph, but it’s certainly not more straightforward. If someone sets out to make a graph of filibusters over time, the most obvious direct starting way to do it is exactly the way that graph is. So call that the level 1 version. Then some more thought might indicate that it should include additional relevant information, namely, who controlled the house (and the presidency). Call that the level 2 version. You then seem to be implying that a nefarious liberal-oriented graph maker deliberately excluded that information, realizing that the graph seemed more damning without it, leading to the level 3 version. But I think the far more likely explanation is that the graph is just the level 1 version as it appears to be.
I don’t see how that additional information makes the graph any less damning towards Republicans. There have been 3 basic times when the rate of filibusters increased dramatically… from 1969-1974, from 1986-1994, and from 2008 to the present. All three were during Republican-minority senates. There may be additional data points which ameliorate that somewhat, but unless for whatever reason the same configurations of house/senate/prez that would lead either party to filibuster more happen ONLY to Republicans and NEVER to democrats purely by change, I can’t see how that does anything other than reflect badly on Republicans.
Unfortunately, the filibuster graph I linked to doesn’t distinguish 2007 and 2008. But if Republicans have one obstructionisty-y tactic (filibustering) that they’re using at an unprecedented level, and Reid has one obstructionisty-y tactic (not allowing amendments) that he’s using at an unprecedented level, I think it would be very interesting to see which of them shot first. Sure “he started it” is usually rejected as an excuse on the schoolyard, but as far as I can see the data we have fits just fine with the original liberal narrative as described at the beginning of this thread, with the modification of “and once the Republicans had been being obstructionist for a long time, Reid got pissed off and started being a senate-rules-lawyer right back at them”.
It would certainly be interesting to get maybe a historical month-by-month breakdown of filibusters vs. Reid’s-percentage-of-amendments.
I think there was some implication at some point that Dems were proposing things that were deliberately extreme or incendiary just to make Republicans look bad. And while I don’t think there’s some ethical purity that would prevent Dems from doing so, I just think that, prima facie, that’s far less likely than just about any of the other alternatives as to why Dems would propose something and Reps would oppose it.
I don’t see why that would be the case at all. If filibusters and 41 senators are all you need to stop any law ever, but it was only ever used sparingly in the past, but you can use it now to stop ALL laws, why would you need any other tactics?
I think there’s a very important temporal factor. If from day one of the dem-controlled senate the Republicans were already cranking filibusters up to 11, and then after a while the Dems started poking around looking for various never-before-tried quasi-legal ways to combat said filibusters, it’s still the Republicans who are clearly responsible for the obstructionism, even if the Dems are now treading brand new ground.
In any event, as that doesn’t seem connected to anything I’ve been discussing I’m going to pass on continuing.
I think you need to take a step back and ask why it is that filibusters have not historically been used the way they are today. Technically it was always possible. But the way these parliamentary systems work is that there’s a sort of gentleman’s unspoken agreement to keep to certain procedures in place, and to not “abuse” the procedures that are in place. It’s a system that works for both sides, so each side adheres to it in order to keep the other side doing the same.
When one side takes a step that was previously considered to be something that “you just don’t do”, that breaks down the system.
So that, for example, the Bork nomination was the first to involve intense ideological warfare against a judicial nominee and took a lot of people by surprise. It’s not something that you could point to chapter and verse and say it violated any technical rules. But it was something that was previously “not done”, and once it was done, that genie was out of the bottle and others were going to do the same. Similarly the Towers nomination surprised people by political opposition to a former senator - again, nothing wrong with that, but it had been something that “wasn’t done”. Same for the other examples cited earlier - these were things that were technically OK but violated the understanding of the players and thus both changed the “rules of the game” and raised partisan feelings.
By contrast, simple numbers of filibusters are incremental and evolutionary. One side does 10, the other side does 20, the other side does 25, and so on. Yes, each one will reach an unprecedented new level, but it’s only part of a pattern of increasingly high levels, and not the same impact as crossing a previous red line.
So if - and I concede that this is my perception based on the examples cited and others - the Democrats have consistently been the ones who have been willing to boldly go where no man has gone before while Republicans have tended to shy away from crossing the line, then it would suggest that Democrats are the more partisan of the two, and are the ones more responsible for the present environment.
Abe Fortas.
That’s a good point.
Nonetheless, I think it’s a bit different, in that the Republican/Democrat fault lines were not as sharply drawn at that time (19 Democrats voted against cloture and 10 Republicans voted for it) and considerable time had elapsed from Fortas to Bork.
In any event, as a practical matter the Bork nomination was seen at the time as a break from then-standard practice, and in retrospect as a harbinger of a new trend of more contentious battles over judicial nominees.
Bork’s mass of later public statements make it clear that rejecting the nomination was simply what a responsible Senate needed to do. The intense ideological warfare started with the nomination, not the hearings or the vote.
Although again, this is kind of he-said she-said. The stereotypically Republican view would be “Bork was a nominee no different than any other, the Democrats suddenly ratcheted up the level of partisan rancor by opposing him”, the stereotypically Democratic view would be “Bork was a nominee who was WAY more extreme and conservative than was the norm, leaving us no choice but to oppose him, so the fault lies with those who nominated him”. I’m not sure we get anywhere by just stating that our preferred view is the correct one.
In any case, that was so long ago now that I think it falls outside the statute of limitations (although the wikipedia article does say that some scholars and political scientists point to it as in some ways being the beginning of the current era of rancorous divided discourse).
None of that “both sides are guilty” shit now. That *really *doesn’t get us anywhere.
Some reference material on Bork’s views, if you’re going to persist with that line. One such is his preference for an amendment that would allow Congressional super-majorities to override Supreme Court decisions. His book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, blaming the liberals for letting kids on his lawn, should help shake you loose a bit too.
I agree about Bork, but then came Clarence Thomas. The Anita Hill thing was the headline news, but Joe Biden was going nuts over Clarence Thomas’ constitutional views, which while not mainstream among judges at the time, were not particularly radical. If the President wants to nominate a justice who thinks like a 1920s justice on constitutional interpretation he’s well within his rights to do so, and prior to Thomas, such a justice would have been approved easily. Maybe many were voting against him over Anita Hill, but I suspect the real issue was that he was so conservative, and not in a weird way like Bork.
This thread seems to have petered out, but I do want to add one piece of information… I have a close personal acquaintance who is a reporter for a well-respected branch of the mainstream media covering congress. I asked this person (being vague here for reasons of confidentiality) about the overall GOP-is-obstructionist narrative and the Harry-Reid-is-not-allowing-amendments thing, and got the following verbatim response:
“Basically both are true. With the midterms around the corner Reid is trying to protect democrats from having to take tough votes and has pretty much shut down the amendment process. That’s probably a more recent development than republican obstructionism and filibusters, which are driven in part by the growing tea party bloc.
It doesn’t help that Reid and McConnell loathe each other personally.
I would have trouble trying to say who is more at fault, although the tea party folks are certainly making things tough, including for fellow republicans.”
I don’t think that that alone really helps us prove anything, but it’s interesting, and certainly supports Fotheringay-Phipps general description of what Reid has been up to.
(I guess the question then is… what amendments were the Republican proposing that caused Reid to start acting the way he is? The pro-liberal side of me wants it to be the case that they were wasting everyone’s time by tacking repeal-Obamacare amendments onto everything, or else amendments that everyone including the amendment proposers knew were never going to pass but whose sole function was to be bandied about like “My opponent voted against cutting your taxes 723 times in just one year!!!”.)
(I’m also a bit unclear why having a tea party bloc makes the Republicans MORE obstructionist. If anything, you’d think that having a large seismic split between two wings of your party would make it HARDER for you to work as a unified whole…)
Kinda like today’s Democrat scheduled vote in the Senate (not sure yet if it is going to happen) on the “Senate Joint Resolution 19”? Everyone knows it has no chance of passing, but Reid is hoping to use the votes against Republicans.
Doesn’t it support the general sense that the issue is resistant to objective analysis?