Constant filibuster threat is tying Senate in knots

By Margaret Talev
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans this year are threatening filibusters to block more legislation than ever, a pattern that's rooted in — and could increase — the pettiness and dysfunction in Congress.

The trend has been evolving for 30 years. The reasons behind it are too complex to pin on one party. But it has been especially pronounced since the Democrats' razor-thin win in last year's election, giving them effectively a 51-49 Senate majority, and the Republicans' exile to the minority.

Seven months into the current two-year term, the Senate has held 42 "cloture" votes aimed at shutting off extended debate — filibusters, or sometimes only the threat of one — and moving to up-or-down votes on contested legislation. Under Senate rules that protect a minority's right to debate, these votes require a 60-vote supermajority in the 100-member Senate.

Democrats have trouble mustering 60 votes; they have fallen short 22 times this year. That's largely why they haven't been able to deliver on campaign promises. ~snip~

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003800474_filibuster22.html

I would set things up to encourage filibuster as often as possible. The nation has been sheltered from the nastiness that typifies modern repubs. Filibusters would expose this and keep them too occupied to cause other problems.

It's as simple as that. They are undemocratic anyway.

Republicans also say Democrats are forgetting how routinely they threatened filibusters when they were the minority, especially to block many of President Bush's judicial nominees. Republicans were so mad that they considered trying to change Senate rules to eliminate filibusters — but didn't.


Well, actually, that's not quite the way it went down. Basically, the dems promised not to filibuster, and didn't, so the rethugs just drove everything through. It wasn't, as this paragraph intends to misstate, that the GOP "considered" it but "didn't". The only reason they didn't is because the dems promised not to filibuster anything. And (tragically) they kept that promise.

On a short aside: why is it they keep promises to each other but not to We, the People? Honor among thieves, I guess...but I digress.

I would say in response to this paragraph that rethugs are trying to rewrite history, and that they are forgetting their demeanor for those years in the senate, now that the shoe is on the other foot, as it were.

The headlines says that the filibuster is tying the senate in knots, and then goes on to blame the source for this knot tying on dems "unwillingness" to work with the GOP, not the GOP, who are the ones doing the actual filibustering.

But many Republicans say the Senate's very design as a more deliberative body than the House is meant to encourage supermajority deal-making. If Democrats worked harder to seek bipartisan deals, Republicans say, there wouldn't be so many cloture votes.

See, it's all the dems fault because they won't seek "bipartisan deals" (which the GOP never sought). They did, however, coin the phrase "nuclear option" (a topic directly related and yet strangely absent from this article) to describe what they were going to do if dems did try and filibuster.

Really more of a propaganda piece than actual news, IMO.

I largely agree with your comments about what the Republicans say.

And if the reporter had simply stated the Republican spin as fact, as the Washington Post did this morning, then I would also agree with your assessment of this as propaganda.

But since the reporter accurately attributes the Republican spin to the Republicans, I think I will not consider this propaganda but rather political reporting.

we used the filibuster lots of times and we were mad as hell when republipukes wanted to stop it. i look at it like this. at least we dont have a group of backstabbers in the democrat senate that will join with reps to stab our base in the back. lets take comfort in that!!

is a hypocrite on this issue

Every decade, states gerrymander districts to make them "safe," to support whichever party is in power in that state. Thus, there are fewer districts each year where the Congresscritter has to work to make voters happy. Instead, they have only to make their own party happy, and to Hell with the minority of voters in their district. Thus, politicians are rewarded for extremism, not for concensus-building. So Congress is made up increasingly of politicians who toe one line or the other, and who find it against their self-interests to compromise in any way. You can see that on DU, obviously, where even the most beloved politician is castigated for compromise, and rewarded for obstinate votes that accomplish nothing.

Whereas all politics used to be local, now it is all ideological. People vote for parties, not candidates. While there is good reason to do this, it adds to the problem created by safe-district gerrymandering. So candidates vote for their party line, rather than the needs of their districts. Democracy's greatest strength is its ability to respond to the needs of the people. When people start to get hungry, they switch their vote, so government responds to empty wallets and empty bellies. But with an increasing number of "safe" seats, where ideologues vote for abstracts instead of for what they are feeling or experiencing, this strength of Democracy is weakened, and government becomes less responsive.

Add to this a corporate structure and a media that favors one party, and the problem is compounded.

The good news is that when things get bad enough, they will still change. Even in safe districts people can tell when they are unemployed, when things just aren't working anymore. Katrina helped a lot of people understand that, and I think Katrina may be an historical turning point in national politics. Certainly that's when Bush's numbers began to plummet, and that's when people began to turn on the Republican Congress.

The bad news is that they may to get really, really bad before things change enough.

This is no reason for us to give up our ideology or to try to vote for moderates. It just means that redistricting laws need to be changed, and they need to be challenged in court--as they have been here in Texas, with DeLay. We need a return to national balance, but that doesn't mean we need to aim for a moderate Congress. It just means that districts should have more balance, so that either party's candidate has a chance to convince the voters the are the best. I think we'd wind up with more liberals, more moderates, and fewer conservatives if the redistricting was more neutral.