Posted on 02/08/2017 1:36:18 PM PST by Kaslin
RUSH: I got an email during the break. “Rush, you confused me on this Rule 19 versus 60 votes. Could you go through this again?” Let me do it very quickly and then I’m gonna go at it the office direction. In the Senate, you need 60 votes for anything. The way it happens, it’s called a filibuster, but it really isn’t a filibuster. It’s just a Senate rule. It’s been around for a long time. Don’t ask why, what’s the logic. It just is. The Senate is supposed to slow down things. Passing laws was supposed to be hard to do.
The Founding Fathers didn’t want a growing government. They didn’t want a lot of laws. The Senate was designed to bottle everything up. Sixty votes, not a simple majority. In 2013, Harry Reid came along and said, “It’s not fair,” and he wanted to pack the courts with Obama-appointed judges. So he implemented what’s called “the nuclear option” and got rid of the rule requiring 60 votes for legislation and for district court judges. Not Supreme Court judges, but district court, appellate judges, everything else. It was called the nuclear option because it blew up decades of Senate tradition.
Sixty votes are still needed, not to pass legislation, but to end debate on any item. And that’s the key to understanding Rule 19’s application. You need 60 votes in the Senate to stop debate on anything, and then after you get that, that’s called cloture, and then you vote on the actual legislation. You can get cloture with 60 votes and have the thing pass by only 55-45, but you have to have 60 to stop debate and go to the actual vote. The way Rule 19 works, it eliminates the 60 votes to stop debate and replaces it with a rule that says senators can only speak twice about a single subject during a legislative day.
Whoever runs the Senate can define what a legislative day is. So McConnell will define the legislative day as the Senate not going into recess and the subject would be Gorsuch’s confirmation. He’ll invoke Rule 19, and the part of it that says senators can only speak twice about it. When every senator who wants to has spoken twice about Gorsuch, that is the same as getting 60 votes to stop debate. Rule 19 says that debate is over if a single Senate legislative day has taken place with no interruptions, and McConnell could be in charge of that.
Once every senator has spoken twice about Gorsuch, it’s over. Debate is over, and you move to the vote. You don’t need 60 votes in this case because Rule 19 replaces the need for 60 votes with a limit on senators’ debate to two speaking terms. They can go as long as they want. This could take 48 to 50 hours to do. But after every Democrat senator has spoken twice, it’s over, and you go to the vote. So the reason this is being discussed as relevant is because Rule 19’s invoked really quickly last night, and it’s very seldom invoked.
So Senate watchers are thinking, “Hey, you know McConnell and the boys are looking Rule 19 here, and the reason they’re looking at it is because they so quickly invoked it against Fauxcahontas!” By the way, this is just a theory. These are people speculating that this is what McConnell might do. Nobody said this is gonna happen. What is known is that McConnell, who’s a great traditionalist, does not want to have to use the nuclear option on Supreme Court nominees. He cares more about the traditions of the Senate than Harry Reid did.
But I think if push came to shove, he would. But they’re trying every which way they can to get Gorsuch confirmed without going nuclear, so to speak. So I hope that… Mr. Snerdley, was that a little bit more…? (interruption) Okay. Good. Good, good, good. Nobody knows whether that’s gonna happen, but it’s a possibility. I know what you’re saying, “Well, wait a minute. What if Elizabeth wants to talk for a week?” Well, she can’t. I mean, she cannot leave the floor. Senator cannot leave the floor. It becomes a filibuster in the sense that senators can only speak twice.
But they can’t pass it off to somebody else and then come back. It would take a while. Not every Republican would speak twice. The debate’s gonna be irrelevant any. Gorsuch is gonna get the votes. All of this is just, “How do you get there? How do you get to the vote? Do you invoke Rule 19?” I’ll tell you the way they really want it to happen is to get enough Democrats to vote for the guy to get to 60 without having to play any games. And they might, because more and more Democrats are coming out for Gorsuch and signaling that there’s no reason to oppose the guy.
So it’s all gonna work out, how.
As I posted last week, Dems don’t have the guts to force the nuclear option this time around.
They’ll hope they can recover the Senate prior to the next SCOTUS vacancy.
They want to delay the use of the nuke option as long as possible and this nominee only maintains the “balance” they’ve survived under for some time now.
It’s not guts to oppose Republicans...they have no shortage of that. It’s what happens next. The filibuster gone, the Reps roll in the new justices to completely reshape the Court, for generations. Let this one go through...then use the filibuster later, when people on the left start fading out - that is their only card, in a very weak hand (since the Republicans can just as easily nuke the filibuster next time).
In any case, we were both right - they’re letting Gorsuch through - which is still GREAT for us:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/444718/nine-senate-democrats-say-gorsuch-deserves-vote
I like this approach.
As it was explained, Rule 19 can be invoked when one Senator speaks ill of a colleague, or another Senator. Since Gorsuch is not a Senator, it doesn't seem that this would apply.
There are still 10 appointments for the cabinet that need to be approved.
Senate “Rule 19” is a lot larger than just the part about speaking ill of another senator. It’s the entire Debate rule. One part of the rule is how many times a senator can speak on the same subject during each “day”... :
“no Senator shall speak more than twice upon any one question in debate on the same legislative day without leave of the Senate, which shall be determined without debate.”
This is part of the concept of a real speaking filibuster, which is that any senator is allowed to speak, but only 2 times in the day.
I think the flaw in this might be another rule, where while a senator is speaking, that senator can entertain questions from other senators, and I don’t think there are rules on how many questions. So one senator can keep the floor, and yet take a “break” by yielding for a long question from another senator.
Given the fact that....
31 states are controlled completely by Republicans
5 states are controlled completely by Democrats
14 states are a combination of the two, in some form or fashion
...if my math is correct.
Getting rid of the 17th Amendment, which shouldn’t be in there anyway, gives at least 62 Republicans in the Senate. Possibly 69, if the political parties in those 14 states split the difference.
Allows the state level politicians, the ones we have “access” to, to pick folks that are more concerned about Main St, than K St or Wall St and donors.
That’s not to say that all the state legislator’s walk on water, either. There are plenty here in Georgia that I’d like to see take a long walk, off a short pier. But, it’s definitely better than what we’re doing now.
here is my suggestion.
please discuss
if there were 50 willing Republicans
(maybe in 2019.)
with a quorum, and a 2/3’s vote, to suspend the rules.
50 Republicans could ‘flash mob’ the floor,
at 4 in the morning.
the Dems would need 25 senators
always available, to stop it.
which they would eventually get tired of doing.
I would think that at some point, the opposition would realize what was going on then each opposing senator would speak all day and all night (it would become a real filibuster).
Can the meeting begin like that? So far as I know in Robert’s Rules, it can’t...but Senate is different.
That is, when the body adjourns for the day, they announce that they will reconvene at such and such hour on such and such date.
At the end of the term, they adjourn “sine die.” (Latin for “without a day.”)
Reid already invoked the nuclear option for judicial nominees.
“It’s what happens next.”
Which is exactly why I said they don’t have the guts.
It wasn’t about opposing GOP.
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