The biggest Congressional news story yesterday was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoking the rarely used procedure of appealing the ruling of the chair to the full Senate. When this is done, a simple majority of the Senate decides how the Senate rules should be interpreted. A majority of current senators are the people in [...]

Live on CSPAN2 now Liveblog: 10:13 – Reid: Senate will resume at 12 noon tomorrow.  If cloture is not invoked, debate will continue on the Reid amendment. 10:07: Reid – There are negotiations going on right now at the White House. We want to give everyone as much space as possible to reach an agreement, [...]

Video: McConnell and Reid spar over vote on Reid amendment today

Now, ten years after 9/11, with Osama bin Laden dead, in a broad bipartisan vote, the United States Senate moved forward with another extension of the “temporary” Patriot Act. The vote was 74-8. Both the support and the very limited opposition to this extension were near-even slits along party lines; true bipartisan efforts. As a [...]

Even though judicial nominee Goodwin Liu received the support of a majority of senators today, he will not yet be confirmed to the bench because over 40 Republicans joined in a filibuster to stop his confirmation. This is a good time to remember that a mere six years ago, most Senate Republicans thought it unacceptable [...]

Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid didn’t just fail to deal with filibuster reform, he totally committed himself to the defense of this disgraceful practice. From his floor speech about his deal with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: Senator McConnell and I both believe our reverance for this institution must always be more important than our [...]

Senate Democrats had an opportunity to get together and make the Senate a working, majority-rule-based chamber. They could have recently used the “Constitutional Option” at the start of this new Congress to rewrite the Senate rules to either eliminate the filibuster outright or at least make staging a filibuster more difficult. Yet, due to a [...]

With their total capitulation on Senate rules reform, Sen. Tom Udall (D-MN), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Tom Harkin (D-IA) again remind us why no one in Washington takes liberals seriously. . . and frankly why they shouldn’t. For months, Udall has been promoting the “Constitutional Option,” which would allow the senators to declare the first [...]

It is interesting to think that the creation of the Senate wasn’t just a political compromise between the small and large states, but also a de facto technical compromise between republican ideals and what the existing limits of technology allowed. At the time the Constitution was written, sending a message and getting a response from [...]

While there seems to be some growing intellectual consensus in support of slightly reforming Senate rules to modestly reduce obstructionism, the idea of returning the Senate to its original intent of a majority rule chamber is still labeled too radical. In reality there is nothing radical about merely bringing back the original Senate rule that [...]