The filibuster is the key to the Democrats’ far-left agenda
Whatever the recent proposals of the Democrats might be – DC as a state, court-packing, national voting “reform” that would enable voting fraud in the entire country – the key to passing or not passing such bills in the current Congress is the closeness of the Senate and its still-current filibuster/cloture rule that allows a minority party to block a bill if it doesn’t have 60 votes for cloture (ending a debate and taking a vote on the bill).
I believe that even the RINOs are unlikely to vote for cloture on most of the bills on the Democrats’ far left agenda in numbers high enough to reach that 60-vote threshold. So the Democrats are strongly tempted to nuke the filibuster, which they can do by a simple majority vote.
Now we have Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona saying they are against the nixing of the filibuster and will not be voting for it. Like all such promises, it must be looked at with a wary and cynical eye. They both are from states where supporting the end of the filibuster would probably be political suicide for them, but there are other reasons this might be a good temporary move for the Democrats. It gets the Senate rolling. And it’s a useful threat to keep at the ready.
After all, Manchin and Sinema can always change their minds if the Republicans fail to show the proper “unity” – that is, if they keep using the filibuster/cloture method to block the Democrat far-left agenda. The Democrats can say the Republicans drove them to it by their wicked obstructionist ways. I don’t know if the American public will buy it, but if the filibuster goes, it won’t matter what the American public wants because one of the first things that will be done is voting “reform” that throws away many of our voting security guarantees (I plan a longer post on that issue).
Of course, there’s also the handy-dandy tool known as the executive order, and Biden has shown himself to be not the least bit shy about using it to accomplish things unilaterally and bypass Congress altogether. So perhaps Congress has become irrelevant.
In the past – and the not-too-distant past at that – support for the Senate filibuster was bipartisan. Despite periodic griping about it by the party in the majority, Democrats and Republicans understood that because they wouldn’t be in the majority forever, preserving the filibuster protected their future minority rights. No one wanted to be the victim of what Madison referred to as “the tyranny of the majority.” Now the Democrats are probably willing to chance it because they believe that they can pass laws that will guarantee they will never be out of power for the foreseeable future.
To be fair, both Democrats and Republicans have been horribly abusing the filibuster for years and years. For example, it has become common when one party controls both the Senate and the Presidency to nevertheless filibuster legislation rather than letting it pass and then be vetoed. Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump issued fewer vetoes in 28 years than Reagan did in 8. That’s just an abuse of the process.
Mike
Its a feature not a bug.
MBunge:
Why do you consider that such a dreadful abuse? If it’s a foregone conclusion that it will be vetoed and that there aren’t enough votes to override, why bother to waste everyone’s time going through the whole long process?
Neo – exactly. A lack of vetoes isn’t evidence of abuse of the filibuster.
Mr Bunge:
The filibuster is designed to impede the tyranny of the majority. Basic to the republican (democratic republic) concept of governance. It does slow things down and that isn’t always a bad thing, kind of the antithesis of letting a crisis deciding policy and law (executive actions and executive orders). Inconceivable.
I know, I’m just not too bright.
It’s an abuse of the process because it destroys the very purpose meant to serve by the filibuster. Let me arrogantly give everyone a civics lesson.
The filibuster is supposed to be a way of preventing a bill from coming to a vote by a senator taking the floor to speak and never giving it up, prevent the Senate from moving on and doing anything. Theoretically, one senator can surrender the floor to another senator and so on to continue the filibuster indefinitely.
The filibuster is supposed to work on the principle of mutual pressure. There’s the physical and political pressure brought to bear on those conducting the filibuster and the political pressure on everyone else because the Senate can’t get ANYTHING done. The idea is either one side or the other or both relents under that pressure and some sort of deal is struck on whatever the particular issue may be. The purpose of the filibuster is that if there is an issue of intense concern to a minority, that minority can’t simply be tossed aside by the majority.
What’s happened is that no one actually filibusters anything any more. They just have votes on limiting debate. No one has to hold to floor and keep speaking. They just have the debate-limiting vote and then the Senate moves on to another matter. There’s no pressure brought to bear on anyone and no compromise or resolution.
The result is that both Republicans and Democrats now routinely use the mere threat of a filibuster to require a 60 vote majority on an enormous number of issues, far beyond anything ever seen before or ever intended by the Founders. It also serves to prevent the public from noticing what they’re doing because a filibuster or a Presidential veto is a much bigger news item than a cloture vote in the Senate.
To put it in practical terms, the primary reason the immigration system on our southern border has been broken for 30+ years is this abuse of the filibuster. Any reform proposal from either Democrats or Republicans has needed to get over that 60 vote hurdle and none of them have. So the problem has festered for decades.
Does that strike you as any way to run a railroad?
Mike
Well, sorry to say that I don’t think that restraints on Congress will have any effect. According to reports, Biden issued 30 EOs in five days, some trivial some far reaching. (the average for the three previous Presidents in their first week was 3–five by Obama.). Schumer has urged him to take Executive Actions on the climate to achieve that which he cannot get through Congress.
It remains to be seen what Biden–or whoever is pulling his strings–will do when courts start over turning some of his EOs.
I have drafted an email for my contact list with the subject line, “how do you know when you are entering a dictatorship?”; and I annotated some recent events. I don’t know whether I will send it.
MBunge, if the Congress were a railroad the train would have been off the tracks some time ago. My Grandfather, a retired steam locomotive engineer, took me to see a few train wrecks (not too uncommon back in the day). They were a scary sight, what with massive equipment scattered around. Not as scary as our massive government in action, however.
The self appointed expert and authority has spoken (Mr Bunge). LOL
He knows the intent of the founders too; who could have guessed Mike’s astounding powers! Any other grand opinions? LOL
“A mans got to know his limitations.” Mike certainly doesn’t.
If not for the filibuster the trains would run on time, eh Mike? That’s how you run a railroad! Tell that to the Acela Corridor folks?
I consider the filibuster to be “a dead man walking”.
“the primary reason the immigration system on our southern border has been broken for 30+ years is this abuse of the filibuster. Any reform proposal from either Democrats or Republicans has needed to get over that 60 vote hurdle and none of them have. So the problem has festered for decades.” Mike
You have the cart before the horse. The primary reason that our broken immigration system has festered for 50 years is because the democrats want limitless immigration that will result in their electoral dominance and the GOP wants selective mass immigration that favors the interests of their business donors.
The methodology you describe in the Senate is simply a convenience for both sides. It serves neither of them to have a tedious but obtuse exposure before the public of each sides motivations.
Finally, the issue of illegal immigration is easily addressed. Go after the employers and end the benefits. Rigorously enforced and mandatory prison sentences for employers of illegals will deter the employment of illegals.
No jobs + no benefits = self-deportation.
Economist Milton Friedman nailed it; “you get more of whatever you reward”
Though for different reasons, neither the democrats nor the GOP wishes to fix the immigration system, which is why the ‘problem’ continues to fester. Changing the filibuster back to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” wouldn’t change a thing.
Survey after survey show that voters on both side prefer that the Federal Government enjoys a very low approval rating, and that the voter’s preference is for the government to do as little as possible. It has been thus for a very long time. The filibuster is a feature, not a bug. The absence of the filibuster, in an environment such as this one, with radically polarized and destructive leaders in two of the three branches, well-advanced into their paranoid vicious senility, would be disaster.
It’s rather incredible, watching the Biden Administration and both houses of Congress, just one week into their new term, going full-throttle to put all the policies into place that were responsible for getting Trump elected in the first place.
Hello. That’s an interesting comment from MBunge about the filibuster; it is rather striking how weird some of the parliamentary mechanisms in Congress are, how far they depart from what we used to be taught in civics class. Food for thought. Of course, if everything is just going to be done by executive ukaz now, the point seems a bit moot….
Speaking of which, I really wanted to ask if anybody is aware of some fundraisers that would be worth contributing to to help the Keystone workers, at least those of them who might not have been making the big bucks, who are in maybe a worse way than some of their other union brothers are and who might really need some help at this point. I’d be interested in ponying up to such a cause.
Huey Long performed a notable filibuster in 1931 or ’32 in which he at one point recited and commented on Louisiana recipes he knew by heart, which was to many quite an entertaining feat. Huey was well-known to have the gift of gab and to utter many gems of memorable if rather low wit. He had the knack of appending derogatory nicknames to his opponents which tended to stick, such as how he referred to the mayor of New Orleans as “Old Whistlebritches” after said mayor (who was in the pay of Standard Oil) suffered an unfortunate attack of audible onstage flatulence during a bout of some intestinal complaint.
Huey is maybe best-known now by the image of him created by Robert Penn Warren’s novel and the film which followed thereafter, but such a picture ought to be contrasted with the testimony of highly-respected former basketball player Bill Russell, who said that nobody did more for blacks and the poor in the state of Louisiana than Huey Long. He made schoolbooks free, is one instance. Another is the matter of the toll bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, which was the only way to get into New Orleans from the countryside back then. The bridge was owned, ultimately, by Standard Oil. Huey when governor had the state build a competing bridge right next to the toll bridge, and passage over the new bridge was free. No one was using the toll bridge after that, such that it ended up being torn down.
Interesting that the Communist Party hated Huey; their official line of propaganda was that he was going to be “the American Mussolini.” It’s true that Huey sometimes strong-armed or paid off politicians, but he just made use of the system he found. This was how (is how) democracy works. It has an underside that’s often not very pretty, operating on a level a great distance from idealism and elevated rhetoric. I had an argument with the writer Paul Bowles, who had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, when this was quite fashionable, as he recited the party line. I contrasted Robert LaFollette, a prominent politician back then who I compared to Senator Eugene McCarthy (the presidential candidate of 1968), as both of them made beautiful idealistic speeches but were unwilling to get their hands dirty or really fight, and in the end got very little if anything ever done. But they looked good.
Huey no doubt got his hands dirty. It’s possible he might have gone in a very bad direction in the end. We’ll never know. He had announced he was going to oppose Franklin Roosevelt for the nomination of the Democrats in 1936, and many thought he had a very good chance to win, as FDR was not doing well in the polls and Huey had a huge following buttressed by the popular nationwide broadcast of his radio program and his announced intentions, there in the Depression, to do such things as limit inheritances and provide each head of a household with a “grubstake” to get a fresh start. When he spoke of “Wall Street money devils” he included FDR. I think it’s worth noting that this was homegrown American populism, not another European import like Anarchism, Communism and Socialism. (This was partly why the Communist Party rightly saw it as such direct threat.) When the German ambassador called on Huey in New Orleans (this after Hitler had taken power and the Ambassador was a Nazi) Huey received him while wearing brightly-colored pajamas and smoking a cigar, greatly offending the Germans and creating a diplomatic scandal. It’s also worth noting that during a time when Southern politicians routinely played the “race card” and blamed blacks for crime and whatever else they could imagine, Huey never went that direction nor showed any inclination to do so. The elite intelligentsia unrelentingly hated and despised him — just as, incidentally, they would hate and despise and oppose Harry Trueman in 1948, vastly preferring Henry Wallace instead (who was, if not openly a communist, certainly in bed with them),
Huey Long was assassinated in late 1935.
@Phillip Sells:
Re Civics Classes of Yore, I’m sure that neither mine nor yours included Bismarck’s quip that the making of laws is similar to sausage manufacture: best not studied too closely if Happy Thoughts are your thing.
Politics is a Filthy Business because by nature we humans are horrible beasts to each other given half a chance. In the scheme of things, Filibusters of old weren’t so bad. In a modern panopticon state where there is blackmail material galore on members and far more Democratic Party enforced unity of action it’s bad news.
Zaphod:
You might want to explain how the filibuster is a bad thing in the current political environment. You made sausage of your argument.
Huey is maybe best-known now by the image of him created by Robert Penn Warren’s novel and the film which followed thereafter, but such a picture ought to be contrasted with the testimony of highly-respected former basketball player Bill Russell, who said that nobody did more for blacks and the poor in the state of Louisiana than Huey Long.
Zaphod:
Are you ex-NOLA? I once jogged on the levee from where I lived uptown to the Huey P. Long Bridge and back. Long was a complicated fella, known as the Kingfish. Let Randy Newman tell part of the story.
_____________________________________________
There’s a hundred thousand Frenchmen in New Orleans
In New Orleans there are Frenchmen everywhere
But your house could fall down
Your baby could drown
Wouldn’t none of those Frenchmen care
Everybody gather ’round
Loosen up your suspenders
Hunker down on the ground
I’m a cracker
And you are too
But don’t I take good care of you
Who built the highway to Baton Rouge?
Who put up the hospital and built you schools?
Who looks after shit-kickers like you?
The Kingfish do
Who gave a party at the Roosevelt Hotel?
And invited the whole north half of the state down there for free
The people in the city
Had their eyes bugging out
Cause everyone of you
Looked just like me
–Randy Newman, “Kingfish” from the album, “Good Old Boys”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riOxEDVfkt8
_____________________________________________
My bet is that Long’s bodyguards shot him, but that’s complicated too.
I keep wondering when the cancel culture comes for Randy Newman because of his “Good Old Boys” album.
MORE Biden folly to augment the Capitol Hill March to the Future!
Biden has set a new record of 30 Executive Orders over just five days time. The average is three, by Obama did five.
Yet only months ago, here was Biden on TV:p, warning against trying to legislate things you cannot do through an EO: “ Things you can’t do by executive order unless you’re a dictator. We’re a democracy. We need consensus.”
HOW MANY EOs can you do before you become the Dictator, China Joe?
Original quote:
“ STEPHANOPOULOS: “So, there’s not going to be any delay on the tax increases?”
Biden: “Well, I got to get the votes. I got to get the votes. That’s why, you know, the one thing that I — I have this strange notion, we are a democracy. Some of my Republican friends and some of my Democratic friends even occasionally say, ‘Well, if you can’t get the votes, by executive order you’re going to do something.’ Things you can’t do by executive order unless you’re a dictator. We’re a democracy. We need consensus.”
https://menrec.com/watch-biden-in-october-2020-you-cant-legislate-through-executive-orders-unless-youre-a-dictator/
Zaphod: Actually my 1960’s civic class (taught by my high school’s German teacher, who was related to Paul von Hindenburg) did indeed include Bismarck’s quip, but a little internet research suggests it’s apocryphal.
CatoRenasci:
Add that to the list of apocryphal statements which ought to have been made then.
That’s cool re Hindenburg. As a penurious student back in the 80s, I washed dishes in a restaurant where another part-time student employee was a Papen in the direct line. She and her sister were solid 9s out of 10. Breeding will Out.
Good-looking enough that I kept in check my natural propensity (no, not that one) to put my foot in it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfl6Lu3xQW0
‘It’s rather incredible, watching the Biden Administration and both houses of Congress, just one week into their new term, going full-throttle to put all the policies into place that were responsible for getting Trump elected in the first place.” – Aggie
They have learned not to delay, but to get things done as quickly as possible before opposition gets in gear.
All of those EOs and legislation were ready to go, probably even before the election.
Republicans aren’t smart enough to agree on what they want to do on Day One, or at least agree which faction of the party gets to do something first.
– Miklos
The Democrats must have expected Long to win.
Trump surprised them.
Always enjoy your comments – so much to learn.
Consider this contrarian view of the filibuster. The 60 votes required to move legislation gives some moderate (i.e. slightly less than guano-crazy) Democrats the ability to vote for something they really don’t want to pass because they know there are less than 60 votes for passage. Without the filibuster those Congress Critters who vote for something will be on record as having helped pass it and will be accountable to their voters. No more filibuster to hide behind.
Justice for Ashli Babbitt!
Re: Randy Newman and Good Old Boys.
His song Rednecks will probably keep him clear. It is so descriptive of us good old boys. Quoting from memory
“We rednecks , rednecks , we don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.
We rednecks , rednecks , and we keep in da niggas down.”
That is a direct quote , I would never use such language. Randy frequently used the vernacular.
Keith:
“Short People” may be little Randy’s undoing. 🙂