The filibuster rule allows a minority of 41 senators out of total to prevent a vote on most species of legislation. Whether you see that capability as an important safeguard against the tyranny of the majority, or a guarantee of institutional paralysis, likely corresponds with your party identity and who controls the Senate at the time.
Also, some Democrats fear that if there is no filibuster, Republicans will, next time they hold the Senate majority, pass horrifying laws, for example to restrict voting access, encourage environmental despoilment, reward Wall Street, curtail reproductive rights — who knows. Democrats say Republicans have abused it serially, forcing their minority vision on the entire country with narrow-minded parliamentary tactics and blocking policies the people support, such as gun control.
Abolishing the filibuster rule would theoretically allow Democrats to finally get some things done while they hold power: immigration reform, climate legislation, voter protections, racial justice legislation, and so on. Ending the filibuster in may not net Democrats the legislative victories they dream of. Because they hold only very slight majorities in both houses, Democrats would need to maintain a unified caucus to take advantage of a Senate sans filibuster.
And that would mean only passing legislation that the most centrist senators agree with. There are risks, definitely, but many top Democrats have concluded that the time is nigh, because Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell have grown so relentlessly obstructionist that Democrats are powerless to enact policy even after they win elections.
A study by the Center for American Progress found that Republicans have used the filibuster roughly twice as often as Democrats to prevent the other side from passing legislation. It would also change the incentives for senators who want to puff up their reputations as lone wolves, as it would no longer be possible for a single senator to unilaterally delay progress. The vote threshold is not written in stone. And the threshold was reduced from 67 votes to 60 in the fairly recent past.
The simplest filibuster reform would be to reduce the cloture threshold from 60 to a lower number — just as the Senate reduced the threshold for nominees to 51 votes in and in The Senate could reduce the threshold for all legislation. Or it could reduce it for bills touching on subject matters such as voting rights or statehood, for the reasons explained above. Alternatively, the filibuster threshold could be reduced over time. As far back as , for example, then-Sen.
Tom Harkin D-IA introduced a proposal that would have gradually reduced the number of votes required to break a filibuster. Thus, senators who strenuously objected to a bill could hold up that bill for up to eight days — potentially delaying other matters on a crowded Senate calendar in the process. The filibuster is often misrepresented in popular culture.
The film Mr. The show Parks and Recreation more recently recreated this scene, albeit on a much smaller scale. In reality, however, senators do not need to hold the Senate floor in order to maintain a filibuster. They simply have to withhold unanimous consent, and then they can do whatever they want with their time. In , Sen. Merkley proposed actually requiring senators to speak continuously on the Senate floor in order to maintain a filibuster.
The Majority Leader would then schedule a simple majority cloture vote on the bill. In order to invoke cloture on most legislation, senators who support that legislation must find at least 60 votes out of a total of senators to end the filibuster.
Among other things, placing this burden on the majority can put the entire Senate at the mercy of random events. The majority may have 60 votes to break a filibuster, but it may be unable to do so because a single member of that vote supermajority is stuck at home in a snowstorm. In , Democrats briefly held 60 seats in the Senate, but their ability to legislate was curtailed because Sen.
Ted Kennedy D-MA spent his final months at home in Massachusetts while he was dying of a brain tumor. This presumption in favor of a filibuster could be flipped. Instead of requiring 60 affirmative votes to break a filibuster, the Senate could require the minority to produce 41 votes in order to maintain a filibuster.
Thus, the burden would fall on obstructionists to ensure that they had enough senators present to block legislation.
Nothing useful was accomplished, for example, by forcing 30 hours of post-cloture debate on the Mayorkas nomination after it was already clear that Mayorkas had enough votes to be confirmed.
The nomination cannot be amended, and senators who already voted in favor of cloture are unlikely to change their minds because a few of their colleagues give floor speeches opposing the nominee. A simple reform, in other words, would be to eliminate post-cloture debate on all confirmation votes or, alternatively, to eliminate the cloture process altogether for nominations and allow the majority leader to call up any nomination for an immediate confirmation vote.
Such a reform would prevent the minority from delaying confirmation votes simply to eat up floor time that could be spent on other matters.
The Senate could also reduce or eliminate the time between when a cloture petition is filed and when the Senate can actually hold a vote to invoke cloture. But with the Senate split , and with Vice President Kamala Harris holding the key tiebreaking vote, Democrats need every single one of their members to support a measure eliminating the filibuster. And at least two of those members, Manchin and Sinema, appear determined to keep the filibuster in place. After all, the Senate voted to weaken the filibuster in , in , in , in , and in Filibuster reforms are not rarities.
If a majority truly values getting something done in the face of the filibuster, it has other avenues to do so short of abolishing the tactic. Sign up for The Weeds newsletter. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
Nowhere in his remarks did Biden utter what may go down as the political word of the year. He has to be willing to shift his idea of what it takes to get things done. If anything, the speech underscored why the intensely partisan, highly racialized battle over voting rights is a difficult issue for Biden politically. Biden has limited his personal engagement with cultural issues such as immigration reform and LGBTQ rights and has focused instead on kitchen-table economic concerns—checks in the pocket, shots in the arm, and more recently, shovels in the ground.
As has been the case with the earlier stages of his career, he has stressed his determination to work with Republicans.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill represents the sweet spot for those two priorities: a tangible lunch-bucket initiative that allowed him to slap Republican senators on the back when they emerged from the White House together.
Voting rights is almost at the opposite end of that spectrum; it starkly divides the parties and has become a symbol for the larger struggle for power between a racially diverse and urbanized Democratic coalition and a GOP coalition centered on noncollege and non-urban white voters.
The concern among voting-rights groups is that Biden has devoted far more time, energy, and political capital to lobbying members of Congress and selling the public on his economic plans, particularly the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That relative emphasis on infrastructure over voting rights may reflect several calculations in the White House. One is the belief, as officials have described to me , that the best way for Biden to prevent Republicans from stealing future elections is for Democrats to maintain control of the House and Senate in —and the best way to ensure that is for him to pass the bread-and-butter agenda he ran on which includes, in their view, working with Republicans.
A third possible factor in the White House ranking may be the most confounding to voting-rights groups.
0コメント