Posted on 12/21/2018 8:49:44 PM PST by conservative98
Here’s how it works.
Senators don’t need unanimous consent to bring up a bill. The lack of unanimous consent or 60 votes doesn’t table a bill. It’s just that opposing senators in the minority can request to be recognized and continuously hold the floor. In recent years, majority parties have never made the minority do that. Sometimes it makes sense to pre-emptively achieve an agreement because the majority just can’t afford to chew up endless days on debate of a single issue. But sometimes there are issues worth fighting for. Either way, this is the end of the line for the 115th Congress.
How do you get Democrats to stop talking? This is where Senate Rule XIX, “the two-speech rule,” comes into play. The rule explicitly prohibits individual senators from speaking “more than twice upon any one question in debate on the same legislative day.” Given that Republicans preside over the chair and control the floor, they can refuse to officially adjourn, opting only to recess temporarily, and keep the Senate in the same legislative day indefinitely. This will ensure that even the Democrats who are willing and able to speak for a long time will eventually be forced to relent.
(Excerpt) Read more at conservativereview.com ...
This never happens and is never enforced, because Republicans never force Democrats to hold the floor in the first place and McConnell simply won’t bring up legislation without a unanimous consent agreement or without 60 votes to ultimately shut off debate. But if he forced the minority to hold the floor and enforced Rule XIX, Democrats would exhaust themselves very quickly. This is a strategy laid out by James Wallner, an expert on Senate procedure who is currently completing a manuscript on the history of the Senate.
Wallner points out that Democrats do have the ability to challenge rulings of the chair and bring up points of order or call for quorum calls as means of prolonging their floor time, but Republicans can dispense with their motions with 51 votes. Eventually, Democrats would run out of steam and exhaust their two speeches per member. This would theoretically take several days or weeks, but it all depends on the determination of each side. If Republicans keep them in session day and night and over the weekends and make them hold the floor, Democrats would eventually run out of options to block a majority vote to proceed with the border wall funding continuing resolution.
This strategy is even stronger in optics than in the raw technicalities. Actually forcing Democrats to publicly hold the floor in such a dramatic and unusual way, particularly on a government funding bill, will make the Democrat speech-givers look like utter fools and obstructionists during Christmas.
For that to happen Mitch would have to actually want a wall.
“How do you get Democrats to stop talking? “
Helicopter rides...
This is the article from Daniel Horrowitz that Mark Levin talked about on the show tonight.
There is more and you can read the rest for yourself if you want.
Mitch, Get to work!
To the dummy who wrote clickbait. There is a word limit on posts here! I don’t care if you click it or not.
McConnell has to pretend he needs 60 votes to hide the fact that he doesn’t even have 50.
How many did he get? Last I checked it was upper 40s.
Long drawn out version of nuclear option.
The numbers are meaningless until they have a vote. Some senators who don’t want to support a bill may pretend they are going to vote for it if they know it isn’t going to pass anyway.
Making sausage just do it.
Unfortunately this all assumes that there are some testicles in the Senate...
Read this article. VP Pence could replace Mitch & get bill on the floor. Time to pass 5.7 billion border wall funding. Don’t let Chuck win.
You are correct....I think there’s at least three GOP Senators who won’t vote along this line. I suspect by late January, after a whole month of shutdown, things will shift.
The final vote was 47-47 and Pence broke the tie.
Thats right, just like the votes to end Obamacare when they knew Obama was going to veto it anyhow. Just as soon as they got a president who would not veto it, boom the votes weren’t their anymore.
Therein lies the problem. I don't think they have 51 votes.
Pence is Deep State
Nope. They don’t.
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