onegoodmove

I always thought GOP stood for Grumpy 'Ol Pricks.

Short of increasing the Democrats' senator tally to 60, or bundling all of your legislation with your financing bill, the Republicans are always going to have veto power over whether anything gets done. While I would say that minority parties should have a say, it's problematic when a single voice can essentially shut down Congress. More parties and voices seems to be the answer, but that's essentially going to require constitutional amendments, and the grassroot effort to accomplish such a campaign is pretty daunting.

"More parties and voices seems to be the answer"

Why? If a single voice can shut down the Senate, how does it solve this problem to add more voice?

The problem right now is getting 51 votes or 60 votes. This problem seems to become more difficult, not less, if you have more voice, more differences to overcome.

The most straightfoward way to solve the problem is in fact to get rid of the filibuster. This would not require a constitutional amendment; in fact it wouldn't even require a new law. It would just require a change in the senate rules. Of course, that would probably have to overcome the filibuster (though the GOP didn't think so a while back).

You could also reduce cloture to 55.

The filibuster problem is worse to the degree that the minority party is heavily concentrated in small-population states. The Mountain West states combined have 10 Senators--10% of the Senate--and yet their combined population is less than any of the four largest states. A very small fraction of the population--far smaller than 40%--can elect legislators who obstruct what the other 70-80 percent of the country wants.

One reason that it is harder to notice the massive obstructionism in Congress is that the filibuster is now being written into the unanimous consent agreements. So they don't even have to go through the cloture vote, let alone actually sit there and debate at length. The 60-vote threshold is written into the agreement on the bill. We're going back to the pre-cloture days where one senator could block anything.

"Why? If a single voice can shut down the Senate, how does it solve this problem to add more voice?"

If you have more than two parties, you can probably expect each party to have no more than 40 senators, and that would make it possible to overcome a single belligerent party. Of course, there's the risk that you could end up facing more than one problematic party that could in turn combine to fillibuster, but at least there are more targets for breaking the gridlock.

"If you have more than two parties, you can probably expect each party to have no more than 40 senators, and that would make it possible to overcome a single belligerent party."

How would the leadership work? Would a two-party coalition elect a "majority" leader and leave the third party the odd man out? That would probably leave the 3d, opposition party smaller. But then it would create a new veto player within the leadership coalition. Instead of getting 60 votes together with one party plus a few from the other party, you have to get two parties to agree on the proposal from the get-go or it doesn't even have 50. The latter does not seem to me to be obviously easier. In fact it seems that the former is easier because party discipline in not that strong in the U.S. senate.

There are plenty of empirical examples of legislatures with more than two parties. They're not especially good at producing 60% supermajorities.

The liberal assumption behind this third party response to everything seems to be that the third party will be more to the left than the Democrats, but the Democrats will remain just as left as they are now. There is no reason at all for this assumption. We should look at the senators who are supporting these filibusters, and then look at what states they're from and what the bills are about. Then ask who (or which state's senators) would be voting differently if there were a third party. Tell me who would be bailing on the GOP in the cloture vote. The third party idea seems to be an easy way to imagine that we might easily have a very different political society, political culture, and different political institutions than we now have.

Dende touched on this: why is the filibuster an insurmountable obstacle to Democrats following the Congress in which the Republicans repeatedly threatened the "nuclear option"? Seems that Republicans are more effective as a minority than the Democrats are as a majority. As a minority, the Dems may as well just not go to work, they're so ineffectual.

All Durbin is doing is whining. He is simply proving that the Dems are submissive: the Republicans are the alphas. If the Dems get a majority of 59 in the '08 elections, expect them to continue whining and stalling, with the "message" that they'd do So Much More if only they had 60 seats in the Senate. And by 2010 the song will have grown tinny and the American electorate will whittle away that majority in favor of a slightly different Republican Party that promises that they can actually lead. In the wrong direction, perhaps, but they can lead.

The Republican Party is callous and incompetent, the Democrats pathetic and ineffectual. And so it goes.

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."

• Thomas Jefferson

60+ filibusters in one year is a tad extreme. Even so, how else do we protect the representation of political minorities?

Remember friends, only a few short years ago, this shoe was on the other foot.

60+ filibusters in one year is a tad extreme. Even so, how else do we protect the representation of political minorities?

Remember friends, only a few short years ago, this shoe was on the other foot.

I agree with you Zaphod. The Supreme Court insures that the majority does not oppress the minority and it is my understanding that filibusters are also there to help out the minority.

Although the filibuster may at this point in time hurt the Democrats, there have been times in the past when the filibuster helped the Democrats.

The Supreme Court insures

Correct myself here... It doesn't "insure", but it gives the minority a bit more of a voice.

In truth, the successful use of the filibuster to block extremist judicial appointees is one of the healthiest developments since our founding fathers required presidents to get the Senate's "advice and consent" to fill judicial seats. Federal judges are given lifetime appointments; thus their influence extends long past the term of the president who selects them. To require a super-majority discourages either party from engaging in politicalization of the judiciary

"60+ filibusters in one year is a tad extreme. Even so, how else do we protect the representation of political minorities?"

There are actually a lot of ways, most of which work better than the Senate filibuster. But what kind of minorities are we talking about? For every majority there is a minority. So if it is literally true that the minority has an equal right to the majority, then democracy is completely destroyed, because you have no rule at all. It's like saying that all losers must also win.

The Senate doesn't represent real minorities very well. African-Americans have representation there that's 1/12 of their share of the population. People in small-population states, for no good reason at all, get almost triple their share of representation. Their clout in the Senate is largely manufactured. If you live in rural Texas, you are part of the big bad majority which needs to be checked by minority rights. If you then move to urban Boise (or any place in very urbanized Utah), you're part of the embattled minority which needs triple the representation. That's perverse. But don't tell a Wyoming senator that (racial) minorities should get a boost in college admissions!

The traditions of the Senate promote consensus and compromise, and sometimes they lead to actual deliberation and debate. But I don't think that necessarily protects true minority rights.

I disagree with the idea that Durbin is whining. He's doing exactly what the Dems should be doing: explaining to the public that the biggest reason these bills are not getting through the Dem-controlled Senate is because of GOP obstruction. You can't just try harder and make 55 votes turn into 60, and you'll never overcome obstruction unless you let people know that it's happening. The voters might like to know that their legislator voted against cloture on 62 filibusters.