Do you really think term limits would make it better? Get real.
That wasn’t my point, actually. It happens NOW. I don’t think implementing term limits will make it any worse, really, except to push people into the lobby mill earlier than most of them go now. It’s really only the Senators who either take public service seriously or who already have enough money that their senatorial perks are more of a draw than additional money is, that spend decades in the Senate. Same for the House, although the continuing electoral success of a Rep is generally less than that of a Senator, which influences the decision to “retire” to K Street.
How about reducing the 3/5 (60%) rule to 11/20 (55%) or 14/25 (56%)? Would that help?
There was a proposal by a Dem senator (I’m thinking it was one of the moderates, but the name escapes me at the moment) to set up a “cascading” filibuster rule: It starts at the current 60 votes, then on the second cloture vote it drops to 58 vote, then 55, then 53, then a simple majority. So there couldn’t be more than 5 cloture votes before an up-or-down vote was mandated. This would allow for plenty of debate if actual substantive debate is what’s really desired.
If complete obstruction of any and everything proposed by either the Democratic majority or the Democratic president is what’s desired, on the other hand, this obviously would not be a favored proposal.
I agree with this. I see why the filibusterer is there, and I think it does serve a purpose, but to just say you filibuster, without actually filibustering makes it too easy. It would be used a lot less if someone actually had to stay there and talk the whole time.
The party that wins the election is supposed to be able to implement the policies they ran on. The filibuster was a rarely used device in the past. It was not suppose to thwart the ability of those in power to govern. It is being abused badly. I would suggest changing it. There must be someway to limit its use. It was not suppose to be a blanket over ride of policy.
I wouldn’t mind, for the same reason I would be very happy with abolishing the Senate and moving to a unicameral system: Whatever makes it easier/harder to pass legislation also makes it easier/harder to repeal legislation. Let the system be supple and quickly responsive!
:rolleyes: The idea of “citizen legislators” is astonishingly overrated. Government is a very complicated business, and like any such is, for the most part, best left to career specialists. We could choose members of Congress by lot, like jury duty, but then we wouldn’t have a Congress, we would have a focus group. It would be unqualified to do anything but vote up-or-down on Executive-Branch proposals. And the Executive Branch pretty much has to be a set of career specialists. It is best we have a set of elected career politicians to check it; they are at least more regularly accountable than bureaucrats with civil service job protection.
We have a basic philosophical difference. I want it to be very difficult to pass any damn thing into law. Let the system be slow and deliberate.
:rolleyes: back at ya. This is elitist liberal drivel. “Oh, the American people are too stupid to run things. We know better than they do”. Bullshit. It ain’t that damn hard. An elementary school student can describe the basics of the legislative process in a song…or we could in my day. I dunno if “School House Rock” still runs on Saturday morning TV anymore.
“I’m just a Bill…sitting here on Capitol Hill…”
That was before people realized that Big Bird was a Trotskyist. That’s a true fact, you could look it up!
I don’t support ending the filibuster for good and all, it is an appropriate piece of political theater, in the hands of reasonable persons of good faith. Therein lies the rub.
The Bunning filibuster is just plain silly, holding up funds that are going to be spent regardless, but his shenanigans may cause good working folk to miss a paycheck for no good reason, and that’s wrong. But it serves a purpose, if ony to vent bile and spleen.
And then every once in a while there is an issue that the majority favors but weakly and the minority despises with every fiber of their being, perhaps a compromise can be worked out, or at least a face-saving gesture.
It is an extreme gesture, and so long as it is used only in extremis, a worthy thing. But one does not break a butterfly on the wheel, one does not go to the mattresses because there is no baba ganoush. Whatsamatta you?
There is a time and place to filibuster, as several have noted. Threatening to filibuster every controversial proposal is an abuse. Limiting the right to filibuster to, e.g., once per session per senator, plus two or three additional occasions per session at the discretion of the majority and minority leaders, would preserve the legitimate use of the filibuster while eradicating its use as a continuous partisan obstructionist tactic.
The only way to fix the filibuster is to fix democracy. The only way to fix democracy is to fix the people. Its taking a lot longer than we thought…
:dubious: Of course anybody can describe the basics of the process. But drafting and hammering out legislation is a lot more complicated than that. It involves reviewing reports of bureaucrats and policy analysts and technical experts and so on, and hearing testimony from witnesses, and that only scratches the surface. One-term-limited citizen-legislators, not having a re-election campaign to fund, might not easily be bribed by lobbyists and special interests, but could very easily be deceived by them.
What does requiring a supermajority have to do with preventing haste? If anything, it’d have the opposite effect: The moment a party did manage to get 60 votes (or whatever the magic number is), they’d ram all their legislation through at breakneck speed, while they still had the chance. The only reason the health care bill has gone through so slowly (and it has indeed been slow) is that the Democrats, when they took office, thought the old, sane rules were still in effect, and that they’d still have the chance to do their jobs if a few of them died or retired before 2012.
No, the reason the HCR bill has gone through so slowly is that enough of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate were enough in the insurance companies’ pockets to make sure they DIDN’T have 60 votes.
Err…what have members of congress done to give you the impression they are experienced and thus should have the job?
Certainly some have been there a long time and are experienced now but many get there without the first clue of doing the job (unless you buy having a law degree makes you expert enough but while many do it is not required).
Then explain the likes of Michele Bachmann.
Frankly, I seriously doubt if a random lottery could do much worse (maybe limit it to people with at least a 4-year bachelor’s degree).
That’s true. But the Bush tax cuts were indeed passed by circumventing the filibuster rules using the same reconciliation process that Democrats are now considering for HCR. It was passed with an exact 50/50 tie in the Senate (with Cheney passing the tie-breaking vote).
Using the filibuster to slow down every single piece of legislation (often filibustering a bill multiple times) is a relatively new invention, and has been taken to new heights in this Congress.
This. Better to let the legislature make mistakes & fix them than to hamstring it in the name of caution but make it so that it can’t fix its past mistakes.
Just because he said it doesn’t mean it’s wrong…