This week I wrote a piece about U.S. Sen. Harry Reid‘s support for reforming filibuster rules that have ground the U.S. Senate to a halt. Reid particularly wants to eliminate the so-called motion to proceed, which requires 60 votes and, if successful, moves a bill to the Senate floor for debate and final passage.
But this Washington Post blog shows there’s more to filibuster reform than just the motion to proceed, and alternative ideas that might work even if that rule is left unchanged. For example, a slowly decreasing threshold of votes necessary to proceed, or fast-tracking certain bills (such as critical nominations) that wouldn’t be subject to the filibuster.
Although some people might think of this as simply arcane Senate procedure that has nothing to do with the real world, the fact is, these rules are a big reason there’s gridlock in Washington, D.C. Although they were originally intended to ensure the rights of the minority party were respected and to fulfill the Senate’s role as a cooling saucer for the hot tea of public passions, they’ve become a barrier to running the government. Reform is necessary, but how it’s done could have profound impacts going forward.
Calling it Filibuster reform is probably in error. We really have no way of knowing how many bills have been filibustered. There is no record of those. We only have records of Cloture votes. These skyrocketed in 2008 when the Senate, House and White House were all in Democrat hands. The Senate had a 60 vote majority when the Democrats could hold everyone together and keep those 2 independents in line.
This is the reason Cloture took such a front seat.
Cloture was originally designed to give the minority a voice, like everything in life it has become overblown and should be changed. It was changed in the mid seventies, lowering the from 75 to 60 the number of votes required to break a filibuster. Now Harry Reid does not have that 60 vote majority, he wants to reform “filibuster” rules.
Same goes for the Republicans, they didn’t like cloture votes when they had less than a 60 vote majority and they wanted to reform cloture, now they are using it to hold legislation back.
But this leads to the question why the Democrats didn’t hold votes on all these jobs bills back when they held that 60 vote majority. They could have had all of this their way and they didn’t take advantage of it then.
Topping that off, when asked on video why he did not push these bills back then Harry simply ignored the question and said “next question”.
Its not Cloture that needs reforming its the attitudes of the politicians inside the beltway. Lots o’luck on that.
it’s well known that the US Senate is where good ideas come to die …
One need only look at the motive for filibustering to understand the problem.