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Quinnipiac is out with a new poll that shows a very slight plurality of the nation thinks that entirely eliminating the filibuster is a bad idea rather than a good one. This is still surprisingly strong support for ending the filibuster among the public, given that the position lacks a single prominent champion advocating for it. From their poll:
Some people have suggested eliminating the filibuster procedure in the U.S. Senate so that all that would be needed to pass legislation would be a simple majority of votes, 51 out of 100. Do you think that is a good idea or a bad idea?
Good idea 42%
Bad idea 45%
DK/NA 13%
While overall the poll found the country slightly opposed to the idea, the split is very even, with the difference just outside the poll’s 2.4% margin of error.
Although Quinnipiac didn’t even find majority support for the belief that keeping the filibuster is a good idea, this is still most supportive poll I have seen yet for the filibuster. Polls last year from the New York Times, Mark Penn and PPP all found majority support for ending the filibuster.
Strong public support despite no prominent champions for ending the filibuster
Even using just Quinnipiac’s numbers, I still find it impressive that there are almost as many people in the general public who support completely eliminating the filibuster and returning the Senate to majority rule as there are individuals who support the status quo. Totally ending the filibuster effectively lacks any even semi-prominent champion, outside a few bloggers.
On the other hand, neither president Barack Obama or Vice President Joe Biden has publicly called for ending the filibuster. Both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid say they support keeping a filibuster in some form. Although the New York Times and the Washington Post editorial boards each support modest change, both speak against the “radical” idea of restoring majority rule. Despite it being the death of many of the House Democrats’ achievements, I haven’t see a single prominent House member publicly push to totally end the filibuster. The closest you can find to a prominent supporter of allowing a simple majority to pass bills is Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), but that is only because he still supports his old proposal to weaken the filibuster by slowly reducing the requirement for cloture to end a filibuster over many days of debate.
Almost the entire mainstream political and news structure as declared it off limits or too radical. Basically every senators and most major newspapers for some reason at least claim to support the filibuster at least in principle. Yet still in the most friendly poll so less than a majority actual think eliminating the filibuster and allow the Senate to pass bills with a simple majority as the founder intended is a bad idea.. It is a reminder of often how disconnect what is declared too radical or completely out of bounds in Washington is from the regular public.
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Thanks Jon
It is amazing how little are “representatives” actually represent the views of the public
We (the public) are not their constituents
The key issue here is “the regular public.” The only thing these guys care about is half the people who actually vote, plus one. “The regular public” has nothing to do with government.
It’s all pretty much academic for this Congress anyway. The Blue Dog DINO’s in the Senate (pretty much the entire Dem Senate caucus) is going to side with the GOP anyway, so topping a 60 vote threshold to ratfuck Soc Sec, gut Medicare, and shaft us on any number of other bills will be a cinch.
58% don’t support it. Are you now writing for Fox NEWS?
Or is this just another exercise of a Democrat Party talking point to clear the table of obstacles before the GOP takes the Senate in 2012 making it easier to screw us all?
These polls are so ridiculous when, for most of the people polled, this is the first they’ve ever heard of the filibuster. Rewrite the question more precisely:
Ask it that way and I bet you get a different result.
I suspect phrasing has a huge impact on polling. I think if you said, do you support allowing only a minority of senators to stop a majority from voting on an issue? you would see like a 10 point jump.
Don’t look now but here comes the Veal Pen:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0111/Abortionrights_groups_concerned_on_filibuster_reform.html#
“Democrat Party” ? Best way of alerting people to your concern troll status, thanks.
42% is the biggest majority I have seen for ending it. Same thing with legalizing pot. It used to be you had to be completely outside the mainstream. An just like that, politicians won’t touch it, but people seem to understand.
yeah ending the filibuster has more support than the HCR bill did.
I’m a Green, it is the Democrat Party, nothing democratic about it.
One more time. The Senate is not electorally a Democratic institution. States get seats in the Senate, there is no one person, one vote in the Senate involved.
As such it is possible for 41 votes to comprise anything from 38% of Americans, allocating 1/2 of population of a state per Senator to in the mid 60% range. Similarly, 51% of the votes in the Senate can represent in the 40s to the 70s percentages.
There are times when senators representing 60% of people SHOULD be able to block legislation INDEFINITELY. Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we blue states on the coasts are subsidizing the entire libertarian capitalist experiment in the red states as we pay in more to DC than we get back, we’re hurting out here in CA and we’ve not quite yet lost total faith in government although they’re trying for that.
The Senate system is what allows that, what gives San Francisco 1.25 house seats and 8/37 of a Senate seat while Wyoming with 1/2 of the population of SF gets 1 house seat and two Senate seats. The GNP of SF dwarfs that of WY.
So lowering the barriers to the red states dominating the coasts so that Obama can pass whatever new corporate giveaway he wants reeks of the same kind of suicidal crap that the Democrats always throw our way.
Fortunately for we coastal liberals, the Democrats are to damn chickenshit to pull the trigger on much of anything other than us and brown skinned people living in the global south. Once one of their own gets hit, a completely different standard applies.
-marc
Then how about saying “Democratic Party” because it is the grammatically correct usage of the word instead of acting like you’re Sarah Palin?
Because it is not democratic and it pisses off Democrat apologists to no end.
I like democracy, think it is a good idea. That is why I am not a Democratic.
There, do you like that?
-marc
Well, it’s your choice to act like an uneducated yahoo I guess.
Oops, should be 16/370 of a senate seat. My bad math.
The yahoos around here are the ones that expect for the Democrat Party to stop treating them like effin-retards and insist upon demonstrating allegiance to the decrepit institution by promoting their milquetoast agenda verbatim and without question and defending their linguistic choice of moniker instead of addressing the substance of the critique.
Why do you expect to prevail when 58% of poll respondents are not on your side?
I guess my perspective comes from having a mother who was an English Teacher and librarian.
It is possible to make the points you make while still speaking and typing correctly
And you might even find folks more wiling to engage you on the merits of the arguments when you’re aren’t acting trollish
This reminds me of a battered spouse defending her abuser.
And in this instance, the post asserts that 42% support is “strong” because the abuser expects to be given a cudgel by the abused spouse in order to perpetrate more abuse.
Didn’t they call this “dysfunctional” back in the 1990s?
But, please, don’t let this take away attention from our semantic distraction.
actually not caring one way or the other is not the same as being against
Yeah, they could do a “limbo dance” lowering of the percentage required to pass progressive legislation in the Senate and if it required 50% the DemoRats couldn’t get 50%, if it was 40% the DemoRats couldn’t get 40%, …, if it was 0% they couldn’t get 0%! They are some lying Kabuki bastards.
They need to do a real poll, that explains the current Filibuster practice (what is the percentage that really understand the Filibuster), because no one could be for it except those who do not want things to change in the United States (craphole).
“Do you think the opposition party should be able to just say “Filibuster” and table any legislation without 60/100 votes to override”.
“If the rules were changed to require the opposition party to hold the Senate floor during a Filibuster to postpone a vote with nothing else be done in the Senate. Would it be reasonable to hold the Senate from taking a vote for 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, 2 years, 6 years, 1000 years, until the Sun goes dark or the end of time.”
maybe so. but it would be just more bullshit propaganda — or a damn lie if the person saying it actually knows better.
idiots and/or liars? i don’t know and it really doesn’t matter. in the end effect is anti-democratic because self government takes an informed citizenry and both misinform the citizenry.
The reform being proposed doesn’t seek to completely eliminate debate, but it limits it on procedural points and requires that it actually be done by standing up and talking instead of signing a piece of paper. So, the filibuster will be retained, but the process of legislating will be streamlined a bit. Both sides in the public poll should be pretty well satisfied with that.
Well, you have to consider that it’s mostly Republicans that (threaten to) filibuster, so of course the so-called “liberal” press loves it because they get to pretend they want what the D-Party (professes it) wants, while also enabling them to blame D-Party failure on the Repugnant “Party of No” and their repugnant-by-definition red state supporters. (This is also great for their political commentators because most of them are culture warriors anyway, and that’s much easier than actually delving into policy issues to get the real story).
If the D-Party under Bush had ever threatened to filibuster in order to revise R-Party Bills into something more people-friendly (as the D-Party claimed to want) then you’d see more progressives supporting the filibuster because they could see it’s usefulness as a legislative tool.
But, because the D-Party (and the “liberal” press) IS ITSELF THE PROBLEM, D-Party supporters would definitely prefer you believe that the legislative tool is the problem. Without even looking it up, I can bet Matty and Ezra think the problem is the filibuster and not the DLC D-Party they shill for.
It is true that it is a tool of the minority party, that the D-Party doesn’t use, so I can see how it’s possible to blame the legislative tool. I just think there are other ways of looking at it.
The general public meanwhile, made up of people who largely take their marching orders on command from above on threat of being fired, tend to mostly view Congress as a place filled with archaic procedural rules that by definition mean nothing can get done, ie., “government is inefficient.”
Such people are well prepped to say they want to abolish the filibuster without examining the issue or being urged by political advocacy.
I think the bigger problem is the D-Party. It’s elite DLC, Third Way, Blue Dog contingent are really Republicans. The real “minority party” is the progressive and black caucases.
The progressive and black caucuses need to start FILIBUSTERING. When the elite press kicks up a fuss, they need to get out front and present a CLEAR and concise explanation to the public without attacking any part of the public in the course of offering their explanation. This would be a lot better than what you have now.
I know. They won’t do it under Obama.
Well, you have to consider that it’s mostly Republicans that (threaten to) filibuster, so of course the so-called “liberal” press loves it because they get to pretend they want what the D-Party (professes it) wants, while also enabling them to blame D-Party failure on the Repugnant “Party of No” and their repugnant-by-definition red state supporters. (This is also great for their political commentators because most of them are culture warriors anyway, and that’s much easier than actually delving into policy issues to get the real story).
If the D-Party under Bush had ever threatened to filibuster in order to revise R-Party Bills into something more people-friendly (as the D-Party claimed to want) then you’d see more progressives supporting the filibuster because they could see it’s usefulness as a legislative tool.
But, because the D-Party (and the “liberal” press) IS ITSELF THE PROBLEM, D-Party supporters would definitely prefer you believe that the legislative tool is the problem. Without even looking it up, I can bet Matty and Ezra think the problem is the filibuster and not the DLC D-Party they shill for.
It is true that it is a tool of the minority party, that the D-Party doesn’t use, so I can see how it’s possible to blame the legislative tool. I just think there are other ways of looking at it.
The general public meanwhile, made up of people who largely take their marching orders on command from above on threat of being fired, tend to mostly view Congress as a place filled with archaic procedural rules that by definition mean nothing can get done, ie., “government is inefficient.”
Such people are well prepped to say they want to abolish the filibuster without examining the issue or being urged by political advocacy.
I think the bigger problem is the D-Party. It’s elite DLC, Third Way, Blue Dog contingent are really Republicans. The real “minority party” is the progressive and black caucases.
The progressive and black caucuses need to start FILIBUSTERING. When the elite press kicks up a fuss, they need to get out front and present a CLEAR and concise explanation to the public without attacking any part of the public in the course of offering their explanation. This would be a lot better than what you have now.
I know. They won’t do it under Obama.
Perhaps I do not understand what marcos is saying, but he seems to be saying that he is a democrat (small d), and that the 60 vote cloture rule improves the situation given that the Senate is much less representative of the franchised citizens than is the U.S.House.
I don’t follow his reasoning. The cloture rule weakens party accountability because it makes backroom deals between individual Senators more common. It doesn’t change the unrepresentative nature of the U.S. Senate. I guess it slows political change down somewhat, but our divided government does that very well anyway, compared to most other democratic nations.
Strategically I don’t think high poll numbers are really needed. What is need is wide public understanding that only a simple majority vote on procedural rules at the beginning of the session would be sufficient to remove the cloture rule. The incumbent Senators power stems from both selling the idea of party to the public, and controlling a significant amount of funding through the hill committees. If they are seen as limiting the political significance of party they will lose influence.
If the public sees incumbent controlled parties as a joke, that is good because it is true. If the 60 vote cloture rule is revoked that is good because it will strengthen the effectiveness of party.
Educate the public, pass this on.
The Filibuster: Your Senators Excuse
http://i-voter.tripod.com/SenateFillibuster.html
Full permission for non-profit distribution
See also:
Our Glorious National Committees
http://i-voter.tripod.com/NationalCommittees.html