Did you ever read what was agreed to, before you posted your thought.. What are you, a mind numb robot.
So after reading the link you post you thing that speeding things thru the Senate, limiting debate and eventually the Congress is a good thing? This is antithetical to what the founders believed and intended.
I read it and I don’t like it.
I have been a registered Republican since Ronald Reagan ran in his first primary.
What I am currently witnessing exceeds even the gutless and traitorous display of non-support for Barry Goldwater by the “Rockefeller Republicans” back in 1964.
Boehner and McConnell are caving in on EVERYTHING and ANYTHING they can and getting NOTHING in return. Obama has drained them of the little testosterone they possess. This allows Boehner to control the Tea Party COnservatives in the House and Reid to control any Republicans who get out of hand in the Senate.
The GOP IS the GUTLESS OLD PARTY. Unless these people can be flushed out of office somehow, a new political party is needed and people like Boehner and McConnel can slither over to the Democrats where they belong.
We’ll have to see the actual agreement, not just an anonymous leak.
But what is described isn’t caving in on the filibuster.
The Republicans have been filibustering things they would never have done before, simply because Reid has taken up all the amendment slots.
According to the news article, the agreement involves leaving 2 slots for the minority party to propose amendments (note that once you have a slot for an amendment, you can put as many of your individual changes as you want into the amendment). In those instances, apparently some part of the filibuster will be waived, although you will still need 60 votes to get the legislation to the floor, so you can still block things.
My guess is some things we don’t like will pass, that wouldn’t have passed before; on the other hand, the filibuster was never designed to create a 60-vote requirement for all legislation, it was an outgrowth of the infinite debate concept in the senate — that you didn’t vote until everybody had a chance to say something, and that meant a single senator could talk “forever”.
The senators got lazy, so instead of having to talk forever, they made rules to simulate the ‘talk forever’, which actually weakened the ability of an individual senator to stop things, but gave more power to the party apparatus (which is the true shame of the senate, that everything is geared to the two-party system, rather than every senator representing their own state’s interests).