Here’s an interesting factoid about Harry Reid’s decision to hold cloture votes for the Wall Street reforms on four successive days:
Steven Smith, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who is working on a book about party leadership in the Senate, said Reid’s tactics are highly unusual.
Smith said the last time he knew of a Senate leader holding multiple cloture votes in succession was more than 20 years ago when then-Majority Leader Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) held seven votes to advance a campaign finance reform measure.
So, from an historical perspective, what Reid is doing is highly confrontational and unusual. But, why might the Majority Leader be acting in an anomalous way? Could it be related somehow to following chart? The chart details how many times ‘cloture needed to be invoked’ in each Congress going back to the first of John F. Kennedy’s administration. Now, what do we mean when we say that cloture ‘needed to be invoked’?
The Senate operates by unanimous consent, which means that any member can prevent the whole body from moving to a new piece of business by withholding their support for a motion to proceed to that business. If any member withholds their support, the only way to proceed is to file for cloture, wait a couple of days, and then get three-fifths of the duly-sworn senators to vote to override the objection. The ostensible purpose of this rule is to allow a senator time to consider a piece of legislation or a potential nominee, not to give effective veto power to every member of the Senate. Honestly, the unanimous consent rule was not intended to protect the minority, but to protect individual senators, many of whom had to travel long distances to Washington without the benefit of air travel. However, since the 1960’s, and particularly since the Roe v. Wade decision, the filibuster has been used by both parties as a way of wringing concessions out of the majority, or of outright blocking their ability to confirm nominees or bring up legislation for debate.
Both parties have been guilty of abusing the filibuster rule, especially where it concerns the courts. This has been driven, in the main, by the Republicans’ determination to fill the courts with judges who do not honor stare decisis with respect to the Roe v. Wade decision (and the Democrats’ determination to protect that ruling).
However, as you can see from the chart, the Republicans have broken all precedent in this Congress, nearly doubling the annual record for filibusters last year and projecting to outdo themselves this year. There are dozens of nominees awaiting a confirmation vote, and virtually nothing is allowed to come to floor without first passing a cloture vote. Even bills and nominees that have overwhelming support are denied unanimous consent just to slow down the overall legislative process. This isn’t how any previous minority has behaved and it is destroying the Senate’s (and, therefore, the government’s) ability to function.
So, it’s only within this context that we can understand Majority Leader Reid’s newfound pugnaciousness and lack of civility. It’s fine for The Hill to attribute this to Reid’s woeful polling numbers, because those numbers certainly inform his thinking. But part of the reason Reid is unpopular back home is because Republican obstruction makes him look weak and ineffective. And he is ineffective so long as he allows this obstruction to succeed and go unpunished. He has to find some way to make the Republicans pay a price and he has to fight for the president’s agenda. He really has no choice and the people will probably reward him if they see him (and understand why he is) fighting back. However, the effectiveness element of this is more important than any potential political benefit.
In the longer term, the Senate can change the filibuster/cloture rules in January, at the beginning of the next Congress. Considering how dysfunctional the Senate has become due to this unprecedented abuse of the filibuster, the Democrats ought to change the rule so that it serves its intended function, which is to protect individual senators, not serve as a weapon of the minority.
One would hope that this will preserve Reed’s legacy to fight another day. Regardless, it at the top of my list of fighting Dem historical moments and juxtiposing Levin’s grilling of GS boys it makes CSPAN the best watch in town. ‘Course seeing a Republican empty Senate after they make their ‘no’ stand, MSM noting that they didn’t even make any amendments and the daily headlines that are getting larger and larger fonts is damn impressive.
I like journalistic pieces that look at what’s going on and try to make some sense of it by looking at hisotry, talking to experts, etc. Sometimes I feel like the entire exercise is really a fools errand to avoid acknowledging the obvious: almost everything that seems “weird” or disfunctional about our political institutions comes down to the strange evolution of the GOP into a parliamentary style party. Our political institutions (best exemplified by the Senate) were designed for consensus and compromises. If one party (important to note that parties were not envisioned or on the mind of the framers when they wrote the Constitution) is unwilling or unable to join the consensus or compromise, the effect will ripple throughout our political institutions, and you’ll get all sorts of “weird” things happening, like Harry Reid filing an absurd amout of cloture motions. But that’s the journalistic equivalent of describing a building that was destroyed by an earthquake and completely ignoring the fact that there was an earthquake. Until DC accepts the inconvenient truth that its the mutation of the present day GOP that’s causing things, we’re going to be seeing more of articles like this.
For the record, I’m not trying to say that by evolving into a disciplined, parliamentary style party, the GOP is evil. Just that its mucking everything up- and unless the formal rules in the senate change to adjust to this reality, gridlock is going to continue to be a feature, not a bug.
The problem is not GOP discipline. The problem is that the GOP has devolved into being the party representing the ruling oligarchy at one end and the intellectual dregs at the other. The former doesn’t dare speak openly of its goals and the latter can’t understand anything. Thus the party’s only recourse is mindless unanimity.
But your view, while accurate, is difficult for most of the nation to accept. My point is, we need the establishment to at least recognize what’s going on here and then people can decide on their own whether its a good or bad thing. Parliamentary style parties are not necessarily bad for democracy, and the GOP’s evolution into a parliamentary style party is not necessarily bad for democracy either. The evolution was tactical and was necessary in order for the GOP to maintain any shred of governing power. Like Booman, I’d just like the establishment to get the story straight before they start assigning blame.
“In the longer term, the Senate can change the filibuster/cloture rules in January, at the beginning of the next Congress. Considering how dysfunctional the Senate has become due to this unprecedented abuse of the filibuster, the Democrats ought to change the rule so that it serves its intended function, which is to protect individual senators, not serve as a weapon of the minority.”
Until Democrats are in the minority and a far-right Republican majority rams through really bad laws. Then it won’t look like such a great idea, but will be fully justified by Democrats having done it first.
Can’t be helped. System is broken.
I would be much more in agreement with that sentiment if I saw any indication that Democrats in national office understood how close the nation is to becoming a hollowed-out democracy – where elections are stolen and nobody does anything about it; to becoming a two-tier legal system – where powerful malefactors break the law with impunity because they are powerful; and Democrats showed that they intended to do something to reverse it, not just in specific cases, but in law. At present I don’t see either one.
To me what is awful about torture under the Bush regime, for example, is not that it happened – I assume it has always happened under the exigencies of war – but that, for the first time, a lot of people in authority said it was OK and made it a part of recognized policy. Bad action has moved from ugly secret to being tacitly accepted on many fronts. Once it becomes codified into law, we are well and truly fucked as a nation. A simple majority in the Senate could do that, and very well might.
Maybe it means I am a conservative at heart, but to me, inaction is better than codified bad action. Yes, the system is broken. But are we ready to deal with what comes next?
There is nothing in the Constitution or in law that enables the filibuster. It is based on an internal rule made long after the beginning of the Senate and never used for its intended purpose since. The Senate changes it rules all the time. No majesty of the law involved.
Now the real fix, abolishing the Senate entirely, you might have cause to worry about.
Sorry, DaveW, I wasn’t being clear. It’s not the legality of abolishing various Senate rules – which are, as you say, rules, not laws – that has me sweating about doing away with the filibuster. What has me sweating is the likelihood that once the filibuster is gone, really bad laws such as legalizing torture could easily be enacted in a blind rush by the inevitable Republican President and Congress. Unlike another commenter, I think Republicans have been restrained by law, tradition and public opinion compared to their wish for “democratic centralism” (as the Stalinists used to call it) – the appearance of democracy and the rule of law without any of their substance. If the Dems are the ones to do away with this constraint on rushing bad law through, tradition and public opinion will say, “Dems did it first for their own reasons.”
I waffle mightily on that every time it comes up. I well remember the howls of outrage from progressives when Frist and McConnell were threatening the “nuclear option” when they were in the majority. I was as outraged as anyone else.
But in the end I think it comes down to a matter of principle. The Senate is an inherently undemocratic body to begin with, when a few Senators from sparsely populated rural states can thwart the expressed will of overwhelming majorities of citizens from all parts of the nation. Add on top of that the notion that a minority in the Senate, less than fifty egos, representing perhaps only a small portion of the nation as a whole, can thwart the will of literally everybody else, and the very meaning of representative democracy becomes a sad joke. Whatever the original purpose of the fillibuster may have been, it has become not a feature but a very serious bug. And when one intransigent Senator can hold hostage a vital national issue, to wangle extra gimmes for his state or just out of sheer spite, the bug has become potentially fatal.
When did you last observe the GOP needing to justify anything? Seriously you imagine they’ll restrain themselves just because the Democrats did?
Was stare decisis honered wrt Plessey v. Ferguson? Should it have been honored?
Who cares if it’s unusual? Traditions emerge because they serve some purpose. When new purposes need to be served, new traditions need to emerge. If it’s legal, do it.
Dare one hope that the Dems finally started to realize that nobody respects you when you’re too timid and calculating to stand up and get something done? That history is on their side if they just quit dithering like they’re at some faculty tea instead of running a country? Or even that Harry is sick of getting called out as a chickenshit?