Yet, instead of forcing a vote on the issue, Udall, Merkley and Harkin merely talked about it a few hours on the floor yesterday, and then gave up. Because they didn’t have 51 supporters, they decide to bend to the will of leadership. There will be no vote on the Constitutional Option; in its place, there will possibly be some incredibly weak and effectively meaningless bipartisan reform.

I’m not real familiar with this. What other options could they have pursued in this situation?

Thanks,

- Tom

How do they force a vote, for instance? How does that work?

You demand a ruling by the chair. If they rule with you that is fine and than the issue most be voted on. If they rule against you, you than demand an appeal to the Senate which forces a vote on the issue.

We need our own party. The democrats are hopeless. I view the democrats and republicans sitting together as ganging up on the progressive majority. I do not care about the things Washingtonites care about. I do not want them working together on the conservative agenda. I do not want budget cuts or austerity. I do not want mandates or no health insurance. I do not want the democrats and republicans both representing wallstreet. I do not agree that American workers are suffering because they are uncompetitive and refuse to be innovative. There is just nothing in either party narrative I agree with.

Watch and learn, liberals: Mitch McConnell will get a vote in the Senate on health care repeal, the House bill that passed that body last week. He says he has a parliamentary maneuver ready to enable him to do that. And you know what? I believe him: he’s run circles around Harry Reid this entire time.

If you think the tyranny of the minority has been bad in the US Senate, wait until Mitch in Majority Leader in 2013.

Its the old Bait & Switch Routine.

The Democrats have been using this since 2006 –
after many liberals, progressives, libertarians, socialists, unionists, syndicalists and anarchists
worked to elect democrats to stop the Republican agenda.

They bait us to get our votes, then switch to screw our agenda.

The motto of those in power at the Democratic Party is –we are the lessor of the two evils–
and –where are you going to go, the Republicans?–

Get used to it, if you want to be a Democratic politician, you have to play ball with those in power.

So perhaps we need to re-read our Declaration of Independence:

–We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all (people) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among (people), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government. . .–

Jon,
Powwow has a diary up here explaining why a rule change isn’t even needed to force a real filibuster. I still think something needs to be done with the “secret hold” though.

Why conflate them with the left? They are Democrats.

It is more than obvious that we need our own party. The democrats have sold us out for a very long time and will continue to do so. It will take years before we could hope to field candidates and win elections. During the time between now and then, our strongest hand is to trade our votes as a block. Make the democrats agree to give us what we want on certain issues in return for our block of votes. They can’t win elections without us so they’re in no position to refuse to bargain. The TeaParty Fascists are a perfect example of such a block. They have enough votes and they have leaders to bargain those votes in return for action on their issues. What we lack at the moment is a leader or spokesperson to hold us together and bargain with democrats in exchange for our votes. We need badly to have some way to band together that will first off show our numbers. If enough of us who claim to care about our issues are lumped together we become the number that means the difference between winning and losing elections. That gives us enormous power to demand commitments and to punish whoever betrays those commitments. If we don’t do this, we continue to help elect people who will ignore us from day one and then make stirring speeches as the next election cycle approaches. We need people who aren’t afraid to fight and don’t shrink from the need to confront right wing tactics with a dose of their own medicine.

the fact that there is, in reality, nothing actually stopping the Senate from changing its rules with a simple majority vote.

just as there is nothing actually stopping the Senate from passing important legislation with a simple majority vote — if the majority is willing to hear out the minority first. but that would mean legislating out in the open instead of by secret back room deals.

i agree with powwow and also your statement:

I still think something needs to be done with the “secret hold” though.

however, the “secret hold” is not in the senate rules so it wouldn’t take a change in the senate rules to end them — it would take the majority leader deciding to stop honoring them.

This is part of an obvious pattern on the left

What left?