Filibuster

As Republican leadership refuses to rule out filibustering Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination, it’s important to keep in mind the ideological company her opponents keep. One new critic is none other than failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who plans to elaborate on his complaints against Kagan at a Wednesday news conference hosted by the anti-choice group Americans United for Life.

As we pointed out recently, Bork agrees with Republican Senate nominee and Tea Party darling Rand Paul that certain key parts of the Civil Rights Act should never have been passed. And lest his opposition to Kagan surprise anyone, he also opposed President Obama’s last nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. For more on Bork’s judicial philosophy, see the ad we made in 1987 to oppose Bork’s nomination:

It’s good to know that today Robert Bork is just another ultra-conservative lawyer and not a US Supreme Court Justice.

The House has just passed a Defense authorization bill that includes a path to repealing the discriminatory and way too long-lived Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. The vote was 229 – 186.

Earlier today, People For President Michael Keegan said of the policy that prevents gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the military:

This discriminatory policy has for 17 years prevented patriotic citizens from serving our country in the armed forces. Because of this policy, thousands of qualified men and women have been forced out of the military simply because they are gay, and countless others have been deterred from serving in the first place. The policy does a disservice to men and women who have served this country with honor and stands in contradiction to our values as Americans.

The Senate must now clear its version of the bill. Republicans have threatened a filibuster.

The vast majority of Americans are on the side of equality and common sense on this issue. Let’s hope our Senators get the message.

Yesterday’s confirmation of Chris Schroeder to head the Office of Legal Policy was a welcome break in the gridlock that GOP senators have created over President Obama’s Executive Branch nominees. (Though, as has become the pattern, they made sure Schroeder’s confirmation was held up for nearly a year before allowing it to easily pass in a 72-24 vote).

The GOP’s recent unprecedented abuse of procedural stalling tactics has Senators and observers scrambling for ways to amend filibuster rules to get the Senate working again.

In the Washington Post this morning, Ruth Marcus details her ideas on reforming the filibuster while maintaining the power of the minority to have a strong voice in the Senate, and Ezra Klein outlines the enormous time-wasting potential of the current rules.

And Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, has launched a (sure to be smash hit) series of hearings on filibuster reform. At this morning’s hearing, there was some especially interesting testimony from the Brookings Institution’s Sarah Binder, who debunked the widely held idea that the Founding Fathers meant the Senate to be deliberative to the point of inaction.

The filibuster clearly has worthy uses (as anyone who’s seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington knows), but it’s clearly wrong to imply that the Senate’s inventors intended the sort of obstruction that we see today.

Stanley Bach, a former legislative specialist at the Congressional Research Service who testified at this morning’s hearing, put it this way: “A useful starting point [to discussions of reform] is to ask whether the usual purpose of filibusters is more balanced legislation or no legislation at all.”

These days, the answer to that seems pretty clear.
 

John Perr wrote what I consider a must-read post over at Crooks and Liars about how Republicans, when in power, fail miserably at governing and seem to do their best art destroying our country. The results of their policies -- economic or otherwise -- inevitably force them out of office, but last long enough that they are able to pin the woes on their democratic successors and make "Government" the scapegoat for all the nation's problems, with particular anger being directed at the then-incumbents: Democrats.

That Americans' trust in government has plummeted to near-record lows isn't a surprise. After all, as the Pew Research Center documented, distrust of Washington is an American tradition, one which tends to rise and fall inversely with the economy. But the spike in anger towards the federal government, a fury which doubled to 21% since 2000, points to a potential midterm bonanza for the GOP. All of which suggests that the Republican Party whose anti-government rhetoric and incompetence in office helped kill trust in government may now be rewarded for it.

By now, the Republican recipe for badmouthing government into power should be all too familiar. First is to endlessly insist that, as Ronald Reagan famously said, "Government is the problem." Second is the self-fulfilling prophecy of bad government under Republican leadership, as the Bush recessions of 1991 and 2007, the Hurricane Katrina response, the Iraq catastrophe and the transfer of federal oversight powers to the industries being regulated all showed. Third, when the backlash from the American people inevitably comes as it did in 1992 and 2008, attack the very legitimacy of the new Democratic president they elected. Fourth, turn to the filibuster and other obstructionist tactics to block the Democratic agenda, inaction for which the incumbent majoirty will be blamed. Last, target the institutions and programs (Social Security, Medicare, the IRS) which form the underpinnings of progressive government.

Then lather, rinse and repeat.

Read Perr's entire post (w/links) here >

And check out two recent PFAW reports which evidence quite clearly that the Right has no real interest in actually governing or doing what's best for the country:

• Rise of the New McCarthyism: How Right Wing Extremists Try to Paralyze Government Through Ideological Smears and Baseless Attacks >
   
• The Numbers Don't Lie -- GOP Obstruction Efforts Unprecedented in Senate >
   

The threat of filibuster is holding up Senate business more than ever before, and Senators are at odds over whether to do away with or amend the rule that’s causing so much trouble.

People for Executive Vice President Marge Baker joined a panel yesterday at American University’s Washington College of Law to discuss what can be done to loosen up the gridlock in the deliberative body.

Baker, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus and Cato Institute scholar John Samples discussed several proposals that have been put forward to fix the filibuster problem, from limiting lawmakers to a “one bite” rule that would not permit filibusters of both motions to proceed to a bill as well as on the merits of the bill itself to reducing the number of votes needed to invoke cloture to scuttling the rule altogether. But they kept coming back to one point: what’s causing the gridlock isn’t the filibuster rule itself but its increasing use as an obstructionist tactic.

“The problem is not its existence; the problem is its overuse,” Marcus said.

People For the American Way has found that Republicans in the 111th Congress are holding up executive branch nominations at an unprecedented rate, and that they are more than ever invoking the cloture process to delay votes whose outcome they know they can’t change.

“It really is a problem. It really is causing government to break down,” Baker said, “The cloture vote is being used to an unprecedented degree, and the degree to which it’s being used primarily for obstruction, is really a serious problem.”

Here’s a look at the rate of cloture filings in the past 90 years:

And a look at filibuster threats to executive nominees from 1949 through March of 2010:

Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Tom Harkin have introduced a measure to phase out the filibuster in a series of steps, eventually ending in a Senate where votes can pass with a simple majority. Senator Tom Udall has proposed letting the Senate adopt new rules--and make a choice about the filibuster--at the start of every new Congress. But the solution may lie not in taking away the power of the minority to have some leverage in matters that are truly important (nobody likes that idea when they’re in the minority), but in limiting the situations where the filibuster can be used. Marcus suggested taking the option off the table for executive nominations, limiting its use in judicial nominations, and limiting the minority to one filibuster per law. Baker suggested changing the rule that provides for 30 hours of post-cloture debate before a matter can be voted on, which would save enormous time, particularly where the result is a foregone conclusion.

Though, whatever the form that filibuster rules take, I’m pretty sure we can count on the GOP to come up with creative ways to keep on stalling business.

Baker, Samples, Marcus, and moderator William Yeomans at American University's Washington College of Law

The first day back from spring recess and Republican senators were at it right off the bat, continuing their unprecedented obstruction and trying to filibuster the extension of unemployment benefits for over a quarter of a million out of work Americans. To his credit, Senator Reid almost immediately called for a cloture vote and a united Democratic caucus along with a handful of Northeastern Republicans provided the needed 60 votes to proceed with debate on the bill (which will allow for the bill's passage).

DownWithTyranny! has more >

You can take action against the GOP's unprecedented filibuster abuse here >

The good news is that the Senate Judiciary Committee voted this morning to approve - again - Dawn Johnsen's nomination to head the Office of Legal Counsel. The bad news is that this was yet another party-line vote where the Republicans opposed an unquestionably qualified candidate solely because she was nominated by President Obama.

People For the American Way has carefully documented the unprecedented behavior of Congressional Republicans, as they have done everything in their power to stymie President Obama's nominations and administration-supported initiatives even if they have overwhelming support within their own caucus. Just this week, for instance, Republicans filibustered the nomination of Judge Barbara Keenan to the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, after every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee had voted in support of her nomination. When the filibuster was broken, she was confirmed 99-0. 99-0!

How do you explain a party whose position on more and more issues is determined simply on whether they can hurt President Obama, even when they agree with him?

If you consider today's GOP as a traditional political party in the mold of other political parties throughout American history, their behavior is surprising. But this is the party that impeached President Clinton, shut down the 2000 Florida recount, and launched vast voter disenfranchisement campaigns around the country.

So just what is today's GOP? Just six weeks after President Obama's inauguration, our affiliate People For the American Way Foundation foresaw the next step in the party's devolution in a powerful and prescient Right Wing Watch In Focus report: Dragged along by its most extreme base, today's Republican Party does not see itself as the minority party in a democracy. Instead, they increasingly see themselves as a resistance movement, a mindset appropriate for fighting a dictatorship, but not for working with a democracy's freely elected government.

No one who read that report has been at all surprised by the GOP efforts to sabotage the workings of the federal government. They made it clear over a year ago how they envision themselves in a nation that rejected them at the ballot box. Their behavior since has been consistent.

It's sad that the party of Abraham Lincoln has sunk so low.

And it's outrageous that qualified nominees are being blocked by the GOP's obstructionist tactics. Help put a stop to it here.

Last night, Patricia Smith, President Obama’s choice to be Solicitor of the Department of Labor, passed an important procedural hurdle: the Senate decided to vote on her nomination.

What’s remarkable is that, unlike past attempts to block votes on executive branch nominees, the vote was entirely along party lines.  Even the so-called moderates in the Republican party, like Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, voted against allowing an up or down vote on a second-tier executive branch nomination.

For a party that railed against the use of the filibuster even in the case of judicial nominees, the hypocrisy is remarkable.

Perhaps, you think, Patricia Smith is far outside the mainstream, and the GOP was using it’s last tactic to stop an extreme nominee. 

Nope.  

But filibustering a nominee like Smith for a position most people have never heard of in a department that is rarely in the news still requires some justification. After all, most of the GOP senators have been around long enough that they served during a time when such a filibuster would be unimaginable.

So they called Smith a liar.

Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wy.), the ranking Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, led the pack, decrying her "lack of candor" and cited "discrepancies in her testimony." The issue -- which was really not, of course, the issue -- centered on a small pilot program in New York called Wage Watch, which aims to educate workers about the minimum wage is and when they are entitled to overtime. Republicans, during committee hearings, insisted that it was a Big Labor plot, but Smith said the idea had been generated within her office. It was later shown that apparently a labor representative had suggested it to an employee, who then suggested it to Smith.

The GOP also lambasted Smith for categorizing the pilot program as "educational" rather than "enforcement." Democrats pointed out that the distinction was an irrelevant one: The purpose of the education was to improve enforcement efforts.

The pilot program cost $6,000. Smith manages some 4,000 employees and oversees an $11 billion annual budget.

The conclusion is obvious.  The GOP, including so-called moderates, are obstructing nominations for the sake of obstruction, throwing sand into the gears of government and attempting to hobble the Obama administration by any means necessary.  That tactic is irresponsible and unacceptable.  Americans deserve better.

You might have read the recent news about Joe Lieberman’s efforts to block meaningful health care reform. It’s no longer surprising that Senator Lieberman is doing everything he can to slow down or stop reform, but it might be surprising to know that his efforts have been opposed by . . . Joe Lieberman.

Yes, just a few years ago, Senator Joe Lieberman testified in support of legislation offered by Senator Joe Lieberman to stop the kind of maneuvering that Senator Joe Lieberman is doing right now.

In late 1994, I joined Senator Harkin in launching an effort to encourage Senate discussion of reforming the Senate's cloture rule. Like Senator Harkin, I had become increasingly frustrated at the way the Senate's cloture rule repeatedly allowed a minority of Members to prevent the Senate's majority from enacting legislation. I felt--and continue to feel--that the Senate rules should be changed to prevent a small minority of Senators from bringing legislation to a halt simply by saying that they will never end debate. Senator Harkin and I therefore offered a proposal under which an initial cloture vote would require 60 votes, but the requisite number to reach cloture would decline by three with each of the next three cloture attempts on the same matter. As of the fourth cloture vote, 51 votes--a simple majority--would suffice to invoke cloture.

Yes, Senator Lieberman was deeply concerned by abuse of the filibuster. But apparently times have changed. Since Democratic activists booted him from the party, Senator Lieberman has reversed himself on any number of major issues for no discernable reason beyond political expediency. (NB: This is what Senator John McCain calls “principle.”)