Mitch McConnell: The Filibuster Plays a Crucial Role in Our Constitutional Order. For info

[elleng]

'Democrats who want to change Senate rules for temporary political gain will rue the day, as they have before.

You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.”

That was my warning to Senate Democrats in November 2013. Their leader, Harry Reid, had just persuaded them to trample longstanding Senate rules and precedents. Now that some Democrats are proposing further radical changes to the Senate’s functioning, it is instructive to recall what happened next.

To confirm more of President Barack Obama’s controversial nominees, Democrats took two radical steps. First, since the nominees had proved unable to earn the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster, Democrats sought to change Senate rules so that ending debate on most nominations would require only a simple majority. Second, lacking the two-thirds supermajority needed to change the rules normally, Democrats decided to short-circuit standard procedure and muscle through the new rule with a simple majority as well — the first use of the infamous “nuclear option.”

Republicans opposed both moves on principle. Strong minority rights have always been the Senate’s distinguishing feature. But when appeals to principle fell on deaf ears, I tried a practical argument. The political winds shift often, I reminded my Democratic friends. And I doubted they’d like their new rules when the shoe was on the other foot.

Unfortunately, Senate Democrats bought what Senator Reid was selling — but buyer’s remorse arrived with lightning speed. Just one year later, Republicans retook the majority. Two years after that, Americans elected President Trump. In 2017, we took the Reid precedent to its logical conclusion, covering all nominations up to and including the Supreme Court.

So this is the legacy of the procedural avalanche Democrats set off: Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and 43 new lifetime circuit judges — the most ever at this point in a presidency. The consequences of taking Senator Reid’s advice will haunt liberals for decades.

A number of Democrats publicly regret their 2013 vote. One calls it “probably the biggest mistake I ever made.” Nevertheless, the far left now wants Democrats to touch the hot stove yet again. This time, they want to erase the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to end debate on legislation.

A Democratic assault on the legislative filibuster would make the nomination fights look like child’s play. That’s because systematically filibustering nominees was not an old tradition but a modern phenomenon, pioneered in 2003 by Democrats who opposed President George W. Bush. When Republicans followed suit and held up a handful of Obama nominees the same way, Democrats could not stomach their own medicine and began a “nuclear” exchange that Republicans had to end.

The back-and-forth was regrettable, but the silver lining is that the failed experiment Democrats started in 2003 is now over. The Senate has taken a step back toward its centuries-old norms on nominations: limited debate and a simple majority threshold.

On legislation, however, the Senate’s treasured tradition is not efficiency but deliberation. One of the body’s central purposes is making new laws earn broader support than what is required for a bare majority in the House. The legislative filibuster does not appear in the Constitution’s text, but it is central to the order the Constitution sets forth. It echoes James Madison’s explanation in Federalist 62 that the Senate is designed not to rubber-stamp House bills but to act as an “additional impediment” and “complicated check” on “improper acts of legislation.” It embodies Thomas Jefferson’s principle that “great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/opinion/mitch-mcconnell-senate-filibuster.html?

[Fullduplexxx]

1. People need to vote and quit relying on the filibuster to save your intrests

[no_hypocrisy]

2. So has the reliability of The Senate voting on bills and Supreme Court nominees.

Stop the hypocrisy and devotion to The Constitution.

Resign!

[Kaiserguy]

3. So does honesty Mitch

and that is something that no longer exist in the GOP

[dalton99a]

4. The Constitution Says Nothing About the Filibuster.

[Igel]

6. No, it doesn't.

By and large, I've never been in an organization where its bylaws or charter/constitution set up the filibuster.

But Robert's Rules (or Sturgis, if anybody still uses it) sets it up as a way of securing and preserving minority rights.

A democracy is just rule by the population. It can be representative. It can be majoritarian. These aren't at odds. It can be liberal, which I rather think isn't majoritarian. Basic safeguards can be put in place to block the majority, to coerce or corral the majority, and I rather like these even as I hate them. Life's complicated.

I was deeply frustrated by such safeguards when I chaired meetings of low-level representatives of a large organization, or of high-level representatives that functioned as that low-level body's surrogate--we had a budget, we had employees, we had appointees. And a filibuster could seriously mess things up for a lot of people. I charged a distinct, autonomous representative body composed of fiduciaries legally responsible for hundreds of employees, scores of contracts, and a budget well over $50 million, and this was 25 years ago when $50 mill meant something. If there was something I wanted done, dammit, I know I was on the side of history, of right, of good, of the American way, of Jesus and Adonai and the Buddha and my spirit ancestors. Because me.

Even as I felt like throwing the gavel out the window, with one or more of the representatives in involuntary hot aerial pursuit, however, I knew that the filibuster was a good thing. If you rule by 50% + 1, you're telling anybody that's not a majority that they're shit. Explicitly so. That might have a racial skew, a religious skew. A political skew. It's convenient to be all self-righteously pious, but sometimes the benefits that the majority want to reserve for themselves and theirs are outweighed by the damage done not only directly to the minority, but to the future willingness of any of those to not cut of their nose to spite their faces and deep-6 something that's truly important to a large majority. If you like human dignity and minority rights of those you tolerate--where "tolerate" doesn't mean "love and appreciate"--you're stuck with it. If you're mature enough to say, "I disagree and think you're a dick, but let's try to figure out why we disagree and come to some kind of workable conclusion for the good of the whole," you're left with it. Otherwise you really are saying that minorities that aren't somehow specially privileged are, well, shit. (Then you're left with "your group enjoys some non-white, non-male privilege, I welcome our new overlords of rectitude and superiority" or "your group is sewer sludge, FOAD." I see nothing reasonable or acceptable in either result. Each dehumanizes some set of humans, and takes "cancel" from being a bad thing to a true godly virtue.)

Even when I had the votes to squash a filibuster, I knew I'd have to work with those representatives and would work long and hard to find ways to avoid having to call any cloture vote that wasn't not only a slam dunk, but would pass by consent. Very often the final result wasn't what I wanted. Sometimes it wasn't as good as the majority had wanted, as it turned out; very often the differences didn't much matter in the long run; sometimes the results were better. Humility isn't the same thing as low-self esteem or humiliation. The alternative is to say, however, "L'etat, c'est moi." It was hubris-filled when a king said it, it's hubris-filled when modern-day wannabe kings say it.

However, a pro forma filibuster lets trivial, picayune details become sticking points. If you just file a piece of paper and say, "I filibuster this" and it's filibustered until you say otherwise or the session ends, it's a meaningless roadblock. It's too powerful a tool and let's a minority of one wag a very, very large dog. Blue-slips are this kind of "convenient" filibuster that many on the left seem to be obsessed with these days, even as they debate whether to dispose of more onerous kinds of filibusters. The demand for cloture votes has truly skyrocketed in the last few years, and the filibuster should really be used to shut down all business if it's meaningful. But filibusters of convenience are the name of the game and allows dickiness of great magnitude to swell and take over the enter chamber. It's loathsome, in my opinion, in principle.

I like actual filibusters (well, like I like having a root canal--necessary evil). Not where you're time-limited and take up your 30 minutes and have to sit down. That's just running out the clock in a trivial but annoying way. If you declare a filibuster you basically should have to do what the people in Hong Kong are doing--you take the floor and don't yield it (during session time) until either you tire of defending your rights or the majority loses votes because it can't get anything done, so then it isn't the majority any more and you win. Very often, the side supporting the filibuster eventually melts away as they see things they support are also sidelined. Sometimes the majority finally says, "You know what, you really have strong feelings about this, so let's talk and find a compromise"--and sometimes it's because the minority says, "You know, we think the filibuster sucks, and instead of these 5 problems let's just finesse these 2." This can make a compromise even easier.

Of course, "compromise" these days is a kind of mortal sin.

[elleng]

5. Discussion of this coming up on Lawrence show, @ 10:30 p.m.

[Lucky Luciano]

7. Easy for him to say. The senate over represents rural states.

It effectively acts as a filibuster to get a simple majority for the democrats.