Well as a minority I like protection from the tyranny of the majority. That being said, the Senate is broken and needs to be fixed somehow.

Like the Missile Gap during the Cold War, there appears to be a Testosterone Gap in the Senate. . .

In addition, having a requirement of 60 votes to proceed makes the Senators on the margins the most important people in the world, as we saw with the weakening of the stimulus bill by Snowe and Nelson (and others, I think), the extraction of the public option by Lieberman, and other shenanigans by Nelson and others at the margin. Those people don't want to give up their hostage-taking abilities.

Ezra recently noted: "Over the past two decades, the minority has learned that they profit in the next election when the majority is judged a failure."

Not precisely true. When the government was shut down in 1995, the public blamed Newt Gingrich, not Bill Clinton.

It's likely that there won't be a budget passed on time in 2010, so the federal government would shut down if a series of continuing resolutions aren't passed after Oct. 1. If the Democratic leadership is smart -- I know, that's a big assumption -- they could maneuver the Republicans into forcing another government shutdown just before the midterm elections.

That's also assuming that Democrats have the inclination and the spine to play hardball with the Republicans and go for the jugular.

"reining in" the filibuster is stupid. the dems are not reacting to a filibuster, but to the threat of one, and then calling that a filibuster. if they were making the rethugs ACTUALLY filibuster EVERY TIME THEY THREATENED IT, locking the doors etc, then I think might see a lot less "filibustering" simply because the threat is not the same as the actual act, and the act takes a log of coordination and work.

Your U.S. 'Supreme' Court in on the brink of eliminating all financial restrictions by your Corporations for your elections. Fifty years of precedent removed by the Republican Supreme Court. This combined with a utterly corrupt Corporate Media combined with an utterly corrupt U.S. Senate and an economic system of EVIL capitalism that has lead to your economy being nothing more that a giant Ponzi Scheme, a casino economy for the rich to indulge even further their evil greed, turning 90 percent of your citizens into nothing more than AN INDENTURED SOCIETY that serves the rich, has created A DEATH SPIRAL for your country.

A greater than simple majority is needed in a lot of states for a lot of reasons. It's a grotesque corruption that extends far beyond the filibuster.

It's the source of all California's legislative problems.

So I would push for a Constitutional Amendment disallowing the super-majority requirement in every situation everywhere except excessive problems like impeachment or declaring war.

A Constitutional Amendment is a simple and straightforward solution.

And related to this issue, why should any ONE senator be able to place an indefinite hold on presidential nominees? This is another rule that is in dire need of fixing.

Eliminating the Filibuster will help but not solve the problem. The only way to save the United States is to eliminate the legalized greed of corporate campaign contributions. The other prong of the ruling elite is their ownership of the media. Using GIGO on the public is what produces things like the tea party movement, and is probably what keeps the republican party vital (such as it is).

How to actually go about correcting these problems is a mystery to me, but I know that until they are addressed we are just spinning our wheels as a nation.

The first problem is that the Senate was designed to shift federal power to the elites of rural states. This has become more and more of a problem as the U.S. becomes a majority urbanized industrial nation rather than a rural agricultural/mining nation.

The second problem is the filibuster itself. It hands additional power to the minority in the Senate. The minority of the population is in rural areas, so this piles government power even more onto the minority special interests.

The third problem is the practice of the Senate hold. A single Senator can keep an individual appointee from getting a Senate vote for reasons that have nothing to do with that appointee. DeMint has not let Obama's nominees to head the Transportation Security Office go for vote until somehow DeMint gets assurance that the Department will never by unionized. That is too much power for any single Senator to have. It is certainly too much power to be allowed to be used anonymously!

My question is why do we have a Senate at all? It is modeled on the British House of Lords of two and a half centuries ago. The British have removed almost all power the House of Lords have had and function much better without it. We should do the same with the Senate. Any legislation that passes the House should go directly to the President for signature. The Senate, if it has any power at all, should not do anything other than be able to delay and discuss legislation for 90 days.

This is not a tough one. We (the democrats) don't want to change the current rules because most of us have been around long enough to know that we will eventually be the minority party again.

Conservatism is inherently anti-democratic. The political philosophy that underlies modern conservatism (which is that of Edmund Burke) derives from a time and place, 18th century Britain, where the political struggle often was directly and openly waged as one between a Parliamentary Oligarchy instinctively supportive of the King and Church Establishment vs a large majority of English rural and urban workers demanding expansion of the electoral franchise.

The American Revolution marked the beginning of this period as Americans successfully revolted against the abuses of the King in Parliament. For the Founders the Bill of Rights were not theoretical, they were directed against then current practices in Britain. In England at the time there was no freedom of press or freedom of speech, there were no effective limits against coerced confessions, the typical punishments while not unusual were certainly cruel and so on.

In the decades after the American Revolution England was convulsed by demands for expansion of the franchise, demands which often met a violent response. There were large flare-ups in the 1790s (sparked in part by the French Revolution and Jacobism), more in the late 1810s (Peterloo Massacre), others in the agitation around the Great Reform Act of 1832 (which was from the standpoint of Democratic Radicals not much of a reform at all), and again in the events surrounded the Chartist movement of the 1840s, which itself cannot be separated from similar movements for democracy which led up to the revolutionary events on the Continent in 1848. The events of this half century can be fairly summed up as Reaction vs Revolution where Revolution was in large part synonymous with Popular Democracy, (something that England didn't realize until 1920, prior to that around 60% of even men didn't have the right to vote.)

Conservatives pay lip service to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence but really don't mean it, their political philosophy would have placed them squarely on the Tory or Church and King side of the American Revolution. They believe and often openly support such things as an Established Church (America as Christian nation), the belief that the electoral franchise should be restricted to property owners (who properly value property rights as against the rabble who would redistribute it), and they are more than tolerant of a state civil and military structure openly devoted to protect those property rights.

For Conservatives the Republican Senate is simply doing its job by protecting capital and property, if pressed they would agree that the 16th Amendment (Income Tax), 17th Amendment (Popular Election of Senators), and 19th Amendment (Women's' Suffrage) were wrongfully decided and foreign to Original Intent of the Founders.

Conservatives are not just on the tracks of history yelling "Stop", they want to back the train up to 1898, the event they might most want to have prevented being McKinley's assassination in 1901 that put the first of two Roosevelts in charge. The nineteenth century was for Conservatives a time of triumph as the Jefferson-Jackson style of popular democracy (hmm, for white men admittedly) gradually gave way to near total control by industrial capitalists, in their lights the period from 1901 to 1980 was one of disastrous expansion of the rights of the people against the rights of property owners, it is no wonder they called it the Reagan Revolution.

The election of George Bush and then the events of 9/11 opened the door for Conservatives in much the same way as the French Revolution in 1789 and subsequent Napoleonic Wars opened the door for Pitt the Younger. The convulsions on the Continent and the entry of England into near perma-war status allowed Pitt to get middle class support to inaugurate more than a half century of explicitly anti-democratic political suppression.

Now that Buckley is dead I don't know if there are actually Conservatives who understand that their goal is to restore the state of political and economic affairs to America 1898 or Britain either 1790 or perhaps 1880, (most of them show no clear understanding of what happened in 2004-2006 which is the last time they even approached a state of Conservative dominance). But for them the events of 2006-2008 are a disastrous setback in their drive to defend liberty against democracy. And one that can and should be fought with all means available.

"Nevertheless, it seems institutional resistance to majority-rule remains frustratingly strong."

It is not institutional, it is instead ideological. You can't be a traitor to a principle you never believed in. And these people really believe the slogan they roared to in 1964:

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

In light of that Republican use of any tool they have is not something to scratch your head over, it is something baked into their 250 year plus old political philosophy. They see no virtue in moderation, and less in straight majority rule.

I recently discussed this with KagroX (David Waldman of Congress Matters and Dkos) and Olivier Knox, congressional correspondent to the Hill for AFP.

KagroX and Olivier KnoX

Time to scrap the rule altogether. 50 votes. Ideas which pass and end up doing violence to the well being of the people are put in front of the supreme court when they become law. That's how the damn thing was written. The filibuster is a crock of shit which does more damage than it avoids.

What do you want to bet that when the Dems become a minority party, if they try anything like the obstructive tactics using filibuster, the Thugs will immediately change the rules eliminating the procedure. They know how to play hard ball. The Dems are wimps. Thanks (soon to be ex) Senator Reid.

Go go Grayson! Cojones are rare in the D party.

"The GOP's current misuse has no precedent in American history"

Well, as much as I'd love to blame the GOP, this is actually something to lay at the foot of Harry Reid. The Senate is being governed by Unanimous Consent agreements that require 60 votes, creating "virtual" filibusters. If the Majority threw that out the window and made the GOP actually filibuster, the dynamic would be very, very different.

Unless the filibuster in he Senate can be broken, very little reform of anything is going to happen. The filibuster is a parliamentary maneuver requiring at present 60 votes for cloture to be able to vote on a bill, nominee, whatever. However, it is no big secret that the filibuster can be broken (probably for good) by 50 votes plus the VP. The nuclear option is perhaps the best known filibuster-breaking parliamentary maneuver. Google it, if you don't know how it works. It's not Rocket Science.

You think the Republicans would not have used the nuclear option in 2005 if what they wanted wasn't handed to them by a "Gang of 14?? [They wanted a set of right-wing judges approved for Federal bench positions -- and they got most of what they wanted by threatening the nuclear option.] You think they wouldn't use it again to pass whatever once they again become a majority? You think “Senate Tradition” is going to stop them -- like it now paralyzes Democratic Senators and many pundits from seriously advocating breaking the filibuster?? Get Real.

If there are not 50 votes to end a filibuster, then passing bills or amendments to really reform or improve health care, climate change, judicial nominations, whatever, are going to be dysfunctional exercises in "pass inadequate bills and pronounce those bills as ground-breaking". And hope the American voters don’t notice. Voters on average may be generally uninformed, but they are not THAT dumb.

In health care and other issues, Obama and Senate Democrats , most Pundits, and many Broderesque -bloggers constantly reinforce a meme that liberal or progressive Democrats are easily rolled by those making intransigent demands. This reinforces a long-standing meme that Progressives/Liberals are wimps, wusses, chumps-- pick your term. McCain, Coker, DeMint and most Republicans may be batshit bonkers pushing insane ideologically-based solutions, but they appear very willing to take a lot of flack to push their agenda.

To coin a phrase, politics ain't beanbags. Voters consistently reject candidates they view as weak wimps, no matter what their ideology or personal heroism (Google: Wilkie, Dewey, Stevenson, Stassen, McGovern, Rockefeller, Carter, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, etc).

To modify another quote:"The fault, dear Senate Democrats, is not in the Republicans,
But in yourselves.

The Senate is already anti-majoritarian in its very conception; putting a supermajority requirement just makes it that much worse. Abolish the Senate and enlarge the House as a unicameral body.

I'm glad to see three anti-senate comments here, and I'd like to see them on the front page in any discussion of the filibuster. The senate is a grossly unrepresentative body and it is grossly unresponsive. That people can be senators past the point of senility should be a sign that something is wrong.

What if there's a limit: each side gets to demand 40 cloture votes per year. The precise number doesn't matter, as long as it's lower than what the Republicans have done since 2007. I'd suggest using the number of filibusters done by the Democrats in 2005-2006 as a reasonable start.

Minority rights are protected in the future. But current abuses are prevented.

Grayson, who cited a number of major bills that were passed by the Senate with less than 60 votes while President George W. Bush was in office.

Anybody got a handy list of such bills?

"...if they were making the rethugs ACTUALLY filibuster EVERY TIME THEY THREATENED IT, locking the doors etc, then I think might see a lot less "filibustering" simply because the threat is not the same as the actual act, and the act takes a log of coordination and work.
Posted by: rageahol on January 10, 2010 at 12:16 PM | PERMALINK

But the actual filibuster ONLY REQUIRES ONE MEMBER OF THE MINORITY TO SAY "DO YOU HAVE A QUORUM? THEN I OBJECT." to continue the filibuster. The minority is not required to say a thing afterward.

The rule has been abused to the extent that is is contrary to the spirit in which it was created...to draw maximum attention to the issue at hand and get a full deliberative debate.

Using it to prevent the majority from legislating is only how the repubs have used it...there is no reasoning behind their obstructionism beside obstructionism.

The same goes with the holds placed on nominations. The senate has become dysfunctional by the abuse of its own rules. Holds and filibusters must have an end...let them have double the debate and attention paid but eventually they must end if we are to ever have a functioning government again. Filibusters 10 days...holds 45days...but then let them come up for a simple up or down vote with 51 votes used to pass or approve.

"...They see no virtue in moderation, and less in straight majority rule.
Posted by: Bruce Webb on January 10, 2010 at 2:56 PM | PERMALINK

Unless of course THEY are in the majority (remember the "nuclear option"?...something they would not hesitate to do if their roles in the senate were reversed).

The argument that Democrats don't really want to change the 60 vote rule because they may need it when they are next in the minority is flawed. The reason was plain for all to see during the Cheney/Bush regime. At no time did the Democrats use their filibuster power to block programs and policies that would be detrimental to our country even though the results were obvious. There is no reason to suspect that they will block anything in the future. So the Democrats have no intention of ever using a real filibuster, but they don't want to take away the filibuster from the GOP either. I wonder why.

"Abolish the Senate and enlarge the House as a unicameral body."

While we're at it, bring back the Articles of Confederation!

Seriously. unicameral leg? No way. Having 2 bodies, including one that is not entirely beholden to the passions of the mob, is still a useful check, as frustrating as it might be at times (see CA for examples of how dangerous direct democracy and mob rule can be).

The Senate still reflects the various checks and balances in our system that certainly ain't perfect, but rein in power more than if we had one popular chamber. The States still have sway in our Republic that is not a single nation, but a Federal design that distributes power away from the central government. Abolish the Senate and the States have even less ability to check national power.

Anyway, best of luck getting the Constitutional Convention ball rolling!