The Articles of Confederation had required a 2/3 majority to pass anything. It didn't work. The Founders knew better, which is why the Constitution says everything the Senate does only requires a 51 vote majority except for treaties, impeachment, veto overrides, Constitutional amendments, & expulsion of members.
The current filibuster rules enable the minority power to control the Senate--and even one Senator to hold up bills and appointments as long as they please.
Instead of being a rare event, the Republican Party now uses filibustering darn near everything not as a tool to exercise minority rights but as a tool to make the majority government a failure, in hopes of the minority party regaining power.
This is a betrayal of the people--putting Party before Country. The GOPs actions have crippled a crucial part of government and turned America's government from a Constitutional Republic back into a Confederacy.
The majority party needs to do what it's talking about and rein in the abuse of Senate rules that centers on the filibuster.
The current rules violate the spirit of the Constitution and the intentions of the Founders. Anyone who opposes filibuster reform should be able to demonstrate why their opposition doesn't show a willingness to harm the Republic for partisan ends.
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[Requiring more than a majority is] a poison [that] destroy[s] the energy of the government, and substitute[s] the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which …the weakness or strength of its government is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. If…the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority… the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater…. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers Number 22
For more details, you can read a nonpartisan analysis of the Senate filibuster here.
2 comments:
Funny, filibuster was perfectly okay when the Democrats were the minority.
Equally funny, filibusters were just awful when Republicans were the majority, and they talked about the "nuclear option."
Now that we've traded quips, how about thinking about governance a little more seriously? We should all want government to work--work in a way that balances majority and minority rights but prioritizing the right of the people to have a government that isn't just spinning its wheels while the two warring parties duke it out.
The present system gives the Senate minority the whip hand. That overturns the fundamental notion of democracy--after all, dictatorship is the ultimate in minority rule.
Until the 1990s, Senate majority-minority rights generally worked out to everyone's satisfaction. Filibusters were few and far between, reserved for only the most serious disagreements.
Then the Republicans decided to use existing rules to block virtually everything the majority did unless the majority could get 60 reliable votes--something that has almost never been possible.
I'm proposing rules changes that would restore the filibuster to its original purpose.
Blocking everything the majority does is the minority's way of not accepting the results of a democratic election. We can respect the rights of the minority party without letting it act as if it won the last election.
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