Posted on 07/23/2007 7:05:18 AM PDT by CharlesWayneCT
That would require every single Democrat Senator to care more about the Democrat platform than about maintaining his own power and perogatives. That is not, and never will be, the case.
The cloture rules give individual Senators a tremendous amount of power. The Senators like it that way. Not even the Democrat Senators want to be pushed around by Harry Reid.
With all this delaying going on, may-be, just may-be they could find some time to actually READ some of the stuff they pass. But that’s just me...
A Virginia liberal blog picked up this article, and used it to argue that the democrats should target the remaining moderate republicans, since they voted to put the current republican leadership in place.
Tonight I’m going to point out that, if the democrats succeeded, they would simply ensure that the republican leadership was even MORE “extreme” by their reckoning, since there would be no moderates to fight for a more “moderate” leadership.
You may be right. Check out Dick Morris’ very good book called “Outrage” in which he deals with The Congress and Senate as they really are—losers all.
The will start talking about it about 30 seconds after they read your post!
But to extend my previous comment, they ain't gonna do it. The Senate rules have been carefully constructed over time to work to the maximum benefit of all Senators, but particularly those in the majority. 51 Democrat Senators are not going to vote to kill the Golden Goose out of a sense of loyalty to Harry Reid.
Absolutely - most people have already forgotten how unprecedented this was.
Prior to the 'Rat judicial obstruction, there had never been a filibuster of a judicial candidate who had the votes to be confirmed. (Abe Fortas, the Nixon SC nominee who was filibustered, did not have enough votes to be confirmed due to GOP defections).
The article also misses the point that prior to the Gang of 14 betrayal, the nuclear/constitutional option was going to be used to eliminate judicial nomination filibusters only, since it was basically a de facto constitutional amendment changing the requirement for confirmation from 51 to 60. The traditional filibuster would have remained in place - another fact conveniently left out of this slop piece.
The filibuster is not a bad thing in theory. The original idea in the Senate was that they wouldn’t vote until everybody had said what they wanted to about the legislation. It’s a good rule if people are civil — otherwise if 51 senators supported something, they could bring it up, move to end debate, and have a vote without the opposition ever having a chance to try to convince people to vote no.
But this was also used when a person wanted to kill legislation, they could simply talk forever. Of course you can’t talk forever, but you can talk long enough to make people upset. Remember that in Mr. Smith goes to Washington, he filibustered but would have failed if it wasn’t for his friends showing up at the last minute and convincing the other senators to vote with him.
Nowadays you don’t have to talk forever, but 60 senators can decide enough is enough.
That’s a good compromise, because if 60 senators don’t think there’s been enough debate, there probably hasn’t been.
Except when it’s used instead for the minority to simply stop the vote because they won’t win, NOT because they want to convince people to add something to the bill.
The filibuster this year has been used both ways by the minority. There’s been a LOT of filibusters because the majority wouldn’t let the minority talk at all, or introduce amendments becuase the majority feared those amendments. That is one new thing.
It was very rare in the past for cloture to be called simply to limit a reasonable amount of discussion.
The Democrat judicial filibusters were mostly about stopping the vote, because they never offered any NEW discussion or suggested there would ever be a time when they had said everything they wanted to say. Plus there are no amendments to offer, so there’s really no reason to block the vote in order to “compromise” on the measure.
Unless the side that wants to limit debate knows it has 60 votes, why bother voting on cloture at all?
People also forget that the Fortis filibuster was not intended to work in place of a vote to defeat him.
Instead, the purpose was to delay the vote, to prevent embarrassment to the administration by giving them time to withdraw the nomination.
If Fortis hadn’t been pulled, the filibuster would have been ended, and he would have been voted down.
When the Democrats did their first judicial filibuster, they claimed they simply had more questions and needed more time. But eventually Frist offered them access to the candidate and another hearing, and they STILL wouldn’t agree to a time certain for a vote.
Since then they dropped the pretense and simply argued that Judicial nominees were too important for a simple majority vote.
Don’t let it go to your head. ;)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.