Do you want proof that the Senate is broken? They have 290 House-passed bills in their queue, along with several dozen nominees. For all intents and purposes, the members of the House of Representatives can just go home and campaign for the rest of the year because they’ve already passed their versions of energy and financial reform, and they’re not going to discuss immigration until the Senate passes it (which, they won’t).
By the time the Senate finishes debating the financial reforms, they’ll have at most two full weeks before the Memorial Day recess. They plan on using that time on a “package of tax extenders, a yearlong unemployment insurance extension and Medicaid assistance.” When they come back on June 7th, they’ll have four weeks to try to pass climate change legislation (they probably won’t succeed). Then they’ll have another four-week session between the July 4th and August recesses. They can try to pass immigration reform then, but that’s all the time they have because the Senate doesn’t plan on working very far into September before recessing until the elections. There is very little opportunity to deal with the 290 House-passed bills on their docket, let alone the myriad nominees that are languishing in the queue. And all the appropriations bills (except, perhaps, an Iraq/Afghanistan supplemental) will have to wait for mid-November and December.
This is no way to govern a country, and we need to break the back of the filibuster rule just so we can have a functioning government. In the meantime, as you’re ruminating on why some top priority of yours hasn’t been addressed by the Obama administration or the Democrats, remember this calendar. The whole point of the Republicans’ stalling tactics is to make the Democrats ineffective and to sow dissension among our ranks.
Thanks for cutting through all the BS, Boo. This is indeed the issue. The only question is, how many Democratic senators actually prefer things this way?
The media and the netroots are consumed with the particularities of each piece of legislation that they miss the forest for the trees. 2009-2011 is the best chance we have in a generation for progressive reform and the GOP decided early on taht they would do everything possible to make that period as difficult and short as possible. We’ll get Health Care and Financial Reform and maybe some form of climate change bill in unless Harry Reid does something. Also, don’t forget about the new supreme court justice. That’s at least 2 weeks there as well.
Its important to remember that the dems and Harry Reid control the senate calendar. To clear up time for debate on climate change/immigration/ EFCA he can just bundle all the nominations at once for an up or down vote and threaten to recess appoint anyone who is unreasonably held up. Threatening to keep Senators there over the weekend or over holidays can be a very effective strategy so Reid should consider as well.
how long did the actual debate over Sotomayor last? I don’t remember. They probably should start threatening to cancel the August recess, or portions of it.
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(SCOTUS blog) – Souter’s retirement plans leaked to the public on April 30, 2009. Twenty-six days later, on May 26, 2009, President Obama nominated then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill Souter’s seat on the bench.
Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings began on July 13, 2009, forty-eight days later. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved her nomination fifteen days after that, on July 28, 2009. Nine days later [August 6, 2009], she was confirmed by the full Senate by a vote of 68-31.
The Senate is currently scheduled to leave town after the Fourth of July weekend for a “state work period” (Senate-speak for “we’re not going to be in our offices in Washington, but don’t get any ideas that we’re on vacation”) …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Obviously from my commenting here you know I’m a big proponent of Senate reform, but part of me also wonders whether the problem is really our political institutions or just the modern day manifestation of the GOP? The answer is obvious: both; but the weighting of blame probably isn’t.
Consider our electoral institutions. Clearly flawed, no one would deny that. But were the state election laws in Florida circa 1999-2000 really the problem or were Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris’s pursuit of party/personal ambition what got in the way of general notions of fairness and legitimacy. Same question for Ohio in 2004 and Ken Blackwell. Obviously tough issues to untangle and our job as engaged citizens is to keep the eye on the institutional reform ball and keep beating that drum, but part of me wonders whether another institutional crisis is just going to pop up, just like the electoral college in 2000 and the Senate in 2009-2010, as long as the GOP exists in its current incarnation. Throughout the 20th century the electoral college did a decent job of electing the guy who actually won and the Senate, while always a stick in the mud, never really grinded government to a hault until 2009-2010.
For anyone with a shreck of power or concern about these sorts of things, it should be a given at this point that any area where the GOP has a modicum of discretion, such as where to allocate new polling machines or how often to use legislative holds or filibusters, will be used to forward strictly partisan ends.
Seems it me it’s kind of like the oil blowout: setting yourself up for damage assures that, sooner or later, damage will be done. We have idiotic systems, so they will be used to win power and wealth for the worst among us. It’s kind of silly to blame the worst for doing what they, by definition, do. If murder laws were as useful as our political system Caterpillar would be making a fortune selling mass corpse moving machines. There’s always somebody to fill a vacuum.
They are destiny. David Simon used about 3500 minutes of film stubbornly proving that in The Wire.
But I still come back to the idea that there is something very unique about the times we’re living in. You can’t look at the chart of senate uses of the filibister for the past 100 years and not get that impression. I agree, generally, with your idea that “if x didn’t exist, the sytem would just invent x” but why is that in almost every instance of the system beating back any attempt to make life a shred more livable for working class American, “x” ends up being the GOP?
What’s unique, at least in this century or so, is that the US is a declining superpower/supereconomy. It’s pretty clear that there won’t be as much to go around anymore, so wealth no longer quite papers over the structural cracks the way it used to. Internal demographics, international economic shifts, resource/environment limits make the inherent unresolvable conflicts in our basic beliefs and institutions more and more unsustainable in the real world. Which threatens the ruling oligarchies as never before, since the system sustains them. Those among them who cling to fighting for the dying ways become desperate Republicans. Those who prefer to co-op the emerging realities become “centrist” Dems.
Good point. They are all about gaming the system, whatever the system happens to be. The motto of the present-day GOP: “It’s not whether you win or lose; it’s whether you win.”
But it wouldn’t have worked if Obama hadn’t kissed their asses since February 2009.
Oh really?
And how would things have been different if Obama had gone after them from the get-go?
A more progressive stimulus (which was possible as the measure got nearly 0 republican support anyway) instead of one that vainly looked for “bipartisanship” would have resulted in a better economy at this point and better electoral terms for the Dems.
TPMDC