Tweet
I’m of two minds about President Obama’s shout out for Senate rules reform in his State of the Union speech. I’m glad he brought attention to the need for reform, but mostly I’m very disappointed with what he chose to call for. From the State of the Union:
Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything -– even routine business –- passed through the Senate. Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a simple rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days.
This change would make the only thing exempt from the filibuster in the Senate the particular business of a president in making appointments.
The real problem with the current Senate rules governing debate that allow for filibusters and 60 votes requirements for closure is that they hurt good governance. Allowing that is illogical and frankly idiotic.
The current senate rules make a mockery of the clear Constitutional intent that the Senate be a majority vote chamber except where the Constitution explicitly requires more. They make our government even more biased in favor of the status quo. They destroy accountability by allowing parties to make partisan promises that they know they will not have to keep. The rules also shift the balance away from the far more representative House to the already undemocratic Senate. Finally, super majority requirements have repeatedly been shown to be a very bad way to run a legislative chamber.
The fact that the senate rules also allow a minority to make it slightly harder for a president to fill executive and judicial positions without the president using recess appointments is just one relatively minor issue in comparison.
Yet instead of calling for a meaningful fix to the root cause of the problem, President Obama just called for the creation of a new special privilege that would help only the president. Calling only for this one change but leaving the rest of the problem in place makes this look more like a power grab than a call to honest and fair reform. There is no good reason to say a minority in the Senate shouldn’t be allowed to filibuster the business of the executive branch but should be allowed to filibuster the business of the House or even a majority of the Senate.
President Obama, if you believe the 60 votes for closure rule is unfair or bad for the government, you should call for it to be eliminated, not call for just a special exemption for presidential appointments.
9 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL Action
As I said on another thread, 0′s sotu speech was lies, obfuscations, and misdirections. He is trying to co-opt the OWS and get them to stop by using phrases that he thinks will assuage their rejection of the status quo. Most of us here have long ago written off his words and look only at his actions. If the first four years were a charade of progressive talk and right wing action, imagine what the next four years will be like. he will have no reelection to worry about and no congress that has any inkling of what the 99% are facing. He is really going to get after the bad guy corpses, you betcha.
Disagree — not about the need for the Senate to pave over its quicksand — but about what Obama said and didn’t say about it. It’s not ever cool for a POTUS to tell the Senate or the House how to write its rules. Last night he fired a warning shot into the air that might land on himself (impact velocity equals muzzle velocity). Had he gone further, as you would hope, he would have alienated Senate Democrats’ support forever.
Looking at the longer term, I do not agree that eliminating the filibuster is such a great idea. It is true that the minority has used it to clog the system, but there have been days – and there will be again – when we will want to use the same tool to frustrate the goals of the right. If the right wins only a few Senate seats this year, we could be facing a couple of years when the EPA will be under attack, entitlements will be hamstrung, the Bush tax cuts will be extended and every progressive idea will be up for revocation. We will cheer our team’s ability to effectively block those attempts.
I’m a little ambivalent about the filibuster. There are times when it is a very useful tool to slow or stop truly harmful legislation or dangerous nominees. To simply do away with it would be a move that will eventually come back to haunt us. Remember Bush?
The answer is to remove those senators from office who abuse the rule. That is a harder thing to do but ultimately better.
I take it the president’s phrase, “For starters….” doesn’t carry any weight with the author of this post. Twice after the quote, the author states that the president “just” called for the senate to have a vote on his nominees within 90 days. But in fact he called on the senate to live with majority rule, starting with a change in the way his nominations are handled.
The constitution gives each house of congress the right to make its own rules. Of course the president can ask the senate to institute a rule (or abandon one) that would accrue to his benefit, but the senate is not obliged to grant his request.
As far as I’m concerned, the more stupid and obstructionist rules the congress operates under, the more aggravated the public will become. Voters, aggravated to the end of their patience, can overturn senate rules by overturning senators. Hopefully that’s how a change in senate rules will come about.
A quaint notion with about as much chance of happening as a flying submarine. Cenk/Robert Reich/et al have the correct idea: let’s set aside all these parochial battles and put our energies into a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Until the corrosive influence of untrammeled amounts of money is gotten rid of, everything else will be for naught.
Overturning Citizens United would, at best, end the role of corporate money in politics (which could be achieved via other means) but it would not eliminate unlimited spending from politics – which has been legal since 1976. The pre-Citizens United campaign finance system was already broken.
For those who think the filibuster can serve progressive ends (leaving aside its undemocratic nature), I wonder – when has the filibuster actually blocked significant conservative legislation? When Dems used it to block conservative nominees, Republicans were ready to use the nuclear option to end it, and the Gang of 14 essentially agreed not use the filibuster. This is exactly what would happen in the future – Republicans will not allow Dems to use it to serve progressive ends.
100% right. The filibuster is non-Constitutional. Constitution clearly says majority rule and while the Senate and House can create their own rules of order, overturning majority rule in an already representative vs. direct democracy is making the US government unworkable. Elections mean nothing, or least when Democrats get elected, as GOP is able and Democrats unwilling to block what the people voted for. Democrats lost 2010 elections due to failure to pass real health care reform. People wanted their votes to count and Obama and Democrats saying that a majority was not enough was wrong answer.
In fact, Democrats in majority in the Senate right now can kill the filibuster by the “nuclear option” of declaring in void via simple majority vote. GOP threatened to do this and Democrats should have done in 2009 to pass health care, energy/oil/climate, Wall St reform, green jobs initiative, etc.
GOP will likely do it for them in 2012 though the ineffectiveness of Democrats to wield the un-Constitutional filibuster makes it a moot point.
“I take it the president’s phrase, “For starters….” doesn’t carry any weight with the author of this post.”
As well it shouldn’t. Obama “starts” weak, ends weaker has been the history of his failed presidency from failed health care reform, failed Wall St reform, failed civil rights, failed appointees (why Warren is running for Senator vs. running financial consumer protection agency).
First order of business if you are proposing reform, then propose the actual reform and reasons. Filibuster should be eliminated because it is un-Constitutional and is destroying US representative democracy.
Second propose a real solution and fight for it. Don’t come out with your last resort position as your starting point.