I think it needs 67, not 75. But yeah, I was thinking a law.
That said, yeah, it would only pass if seven members of the GOP voted for it. Which in this environment, with their ideological lockstep, is pretty close to impossible.
Ah yes, 67 - 75% is the state legislatures part. And no, it would not pass if seven GOP senators voted for it. Do your math.
But I suspect no GOP senators will vote for it. I wouldn’t expect any of them to vote for a speech-suppressing piece of crap that Democrats submitted. But it is nice that the Senate will be “discussing” this for the next week instead of doing more political theater by voting on more bills that Democrats will submit that have zero chance of passing.
Which illustrates how this is a GOP obstructionist move, right?
I mean, you admit they’re doing this to keep from talking about other stuff, and have no intention of passing it…
Nope. Submitting a bill that you KNOW will waste time is the obstructionist move. The GOP’s fun vote today just prevents a few more of such obstructionist moves by Democrats.
Again, the Dems want this to pass. It would pass if the GOP would vote for it. A few members of the GOP likely would vote for it, if they were allowed to vote their personal consciences, but because of crazy people in the GOP primaries, they must keep their heads down and not break ranks.
Putting something you want to pass up for a vote is hardly obstructionism. Obstructionism is voting for it so you can drag out the conversation in order to keep the actual business of the state from being done.
Again, if it were reversed I’d find the Dems at fault. I suspect that if it were reversed you’d still find the GOP in the right. Or is that an unfair guess on my part?
I don’t think that submitting a bill that has zero chance of passing is automatically obstructionist. For instance, if a congressperson from a very liberal state had proposed a bill to legalize gay marriage 20 years ago, knowing with absolute certainty it would not pass, or heck, if Rick Santorum today proposed a bill to outlaw all gay marriage nationwide, I would not consider that prima facie obstructionist.
However, resubmitting that same bill over and over again and repeatedly proposing it as an amendment to every other possible bill, is a different matter. There’s also a temporal context… if congress is going to shut down in 2 days and everyone knows that they need to pass a budget or else there will be a shutdown, that’s not the time to be proposing purely symbolic bills, even ones you really believe in.
Aye. Also worth noting: this one bill stacks up to the 50-odd proposed “repeal obamacare” bills how, exactly?
I come here not to teach, but to learn. What I want to learn from you, Terr, is how much you know about how the billions spent by these Departments are spent?
Amen.
Proposing one politically motivated non-starter of a bill is not obstructionist, proposing 50 is obstructionist.
Rejecting one nominated SC Justice is not obstructionist, filibustering 80 of a president’s appointments is obstructionist.
Saying you’re going to challenge the president on this bill or that bill is not obstructionist, saying you’re going to challenge every bill, before he’s even in office, is obstructionist.
Got any counterexamples? No? Then pointing out a fact helps clear away the bullshit, does it not?
You’ve lost me.
5 pages of this and nobody’s mentioned McConnell filibustering his OWN PROPOSAL?
Got any good examples of Republican opposition that haven’t been fundamentally based on “Fuck Obama”? If not, then you can take your pious tut-tutting elsewhere, please.
You’re missing the entire point of this thread. I agree that the vast majority of Repubilacn opposition has been fundamentally based on “Fuck Obama”. BUT… I’m made uncomfortable by the fact that I don’t have any objective evidence of that. So if I say to Republicans “your senators are all being obstructionist, they have no grounds for that other than ‘Fuck Obama’” and they say “I disagree” I’m basically left with nothing further to say.
What do you mean? Just say “even ElvisL1ves agrees with me”. That usually works.
The problem is that there is no objective criterion to define of where center is. Everyone will always be convinced that the center lies where they currently exist such that any large deviation from their current view point is deemed to be radical and extreme, an obstructing extreme legislation is good governance, and so it is all to some extent in the eyes of the beholder.
That said I think attempting to argue against the notion that that the current set of Republicans aren’t obstructionist is a bit of an uphill battle (akin to arguing that the second Highlander movie was better than the first.) But there is no accounting for taste.
We can get a rough idea from the Pew Political Typology – not of the location or content of a conceptual ideological “center,” but of the actual demographic center-of-gravity of American public opinion on politics.
I see what you’re saying, but I think you’re focusing only on one particular conflict… that is, if everyone agreed that the current Republicans are opposing and filibustering bills at a markedly high level, and the dems claimed it was pure obstructionism, and the reps claimed it was due to honest opposition to the content of the bills, then we’d have to attempt to determine the truth among the 3 most obvious possible explanations for why this was happening:
(a) pure obstructionism on the Republicans part (presumably the narrative that dems believe)
(b) Dems got way more radical, Republicans are sticking to their values (presumably the narrative that reps believe)
(c) Reps got way more conservative all of a sudden, and now object to far more bills than they ever did before
So you’re right that it’s hard to distinguish between (a) and (b), but of course not everyone agrees with the framework in general. Bricker, for instance, doesn’t seem to think that the current level of obstructionism IS out of the ordinary.
That said, I do think that there are ways to at least somewhat objectively measure how “extreme” a party’s proposals are… for instance, you can compare them to similar proposals made in past years, particularly when the proposal is something like establishing a minimum wage where there are numbers involved (that can be correct for inflation, etc.) You could say “on average over the past 30 years, the Democrats have proposed budgets in which the ratio of social spending to military spending was X… this year, it was Y…”, etc.
(Note that in all of this, I’m kind of assuming that the “you” doing this research is an experienced and knowledgeable political scientist or researcher, not just random guys on the internet.)
Here’s what I’ve noticed in the repeated attempts to hijack the thread: The idea of obstructionism isn’t a new, nor is it necessarily political on one side. Democrats can be obstructionist just as Republicans can, though history shows that only one side really engages in obstructionism that’s extreme and over the top. But regardless of who one believes is obstructionist, there are plenty of Democrats and liberals trying in this thread trying to determine how this can be measured and not a single conservative Republican trying to objectively do the same. Conservative responses fall in the range of “Democrats did it too/worse” or “That’s not obstruction”. You’d think that presented with such a great opportunity to stick it to Dems, at least one of them would have the balls to say “This is an objective measure of obstructionism and it proves Democrats do it too/are worse”. But all of them have been avoiding the purpose of the thread like the plague, as if they know any unbiased measure of obstructionism would prove Republicans are far and away worse
So how about it conservatives? You think we’re doing the same thing? Come up with a definition of obstructionism and how to measure it and we’ll see who is worse
My thesis is that there cannot be a meaningful and mutually-agreeable definition of “obstructionism,” because any such attempt would lead in short order to a disagreement about underlying definitions and values.
I say, for example, that it was clearly obstructionism for the Democrats to shut down the government over the issue of abortion funding.
Was it?
Doesn’t the answer depend, in some key way, on how important you regard government funding for abortion to be?
See the problem? Is my proposal to increase the Pentagon budget by 30% crazy? Is your proposal for a $19/hour national minimum wage crazy?
Yes, yours is – but mine is sound policy. 
See?
So when we discuss my tactics to stop your crazy bill, that’s not obstructionism – that’s sound government. But your tactics to stop my wise bill are simply obstructionist.
If there are metrics that can be assembled, I’m open to hearing them. But I don’t agree there are. My failure to offer them is based on my belief they don’t exist, not on any fear of what they may reveal.