Obstruction

Some more evidence of the Senate GOP’s extraordinary efforts on behalf of getting nothing done: trying to put off a vote on Wall Street reform, Senate Republicans are filibustering the motion to proceed to the legislation, adding yet another layer of delay to stall the bill.

The motion to proceed has traditionally been a quick formality, dispatched by unanimous consent in order to start debate on a bill. But recently, Republicans have been embracing it as yet another opportunity to slow down Senate proceedings. NPR reports:

It used to be relatively rare that so-called "motions to proceed," or to bring up a bill, were filibustered.

Before Democrats became the majority in 2007, such filibusters occurred only about eight times a year. Since then, the Republican minority has nearly quadrupled the frequency of such filibusters.

This dilatory tactic is just one of many ways that the GOP has found to impose unprecedented delays on Senate business both controversial and mundane. At least they haven’t yet skipped out of work altogether. Oh, wait.
 

The Senate Rules Committee is holding a hearing tomorrow to discuss the history of the filibuster, as Democrats consider their options for limiting GOP abuse of stalling tactics.

People For’s Marge Baker just released a memo on some of the GOP’s most egregious abuses of filibuster threats in the current Congress. She writes:

Although the bulk of the news coverage on nominations has focused on a few nominees singled out for very public attacks by the GOP and right-wing activists, it’s the lower profile nominations that most clearly illustrate the Republicans’ “Party of ‘No’” strategy. In dealing with those nominees, the GOP has undertaken a relentless and irresponsible campaign of obstruction that has frustrated the timely confirmation of the President’s nominees and diverted critical time, energy, and focus from other, equally critical business of the Senate.

The cases that Baker outlines—like that of Circuit Court Judge Barbara Keenan, who waited 124 days for a Senate floor vote on her nomination, only to find that no Republican Senator actually objected to her taking a place on the court—are frustrating examples of purely political obstruction. There’s not a consensus on what to do about the filibuster, but it’s clear that the extent to which the GOP has been using it just to stall the business of government is stunning.
 

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 >

Justice John Paul Stevens’ announcement that he will retire this summer marks the end of an era for the Supreme Court and a crucial opportunity for President Obama and the Senate to shape the Court’s direction.

Stevens—the last survivor of the era before Supreme Court nominations became televised partisan battlegrounds—has been a bulwark against a Court that has been moving aggressively to the right. His adamant dissent to this year’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, like his dissent in Bush v. Gore, were strong defenses of democracy and indictments of an increasingly politicized Court.

President Obama now has the chance to nominate another Justice who will prioritize the rights of ordinary Americans. People for the American Way President Michael B. Keegan said today:

“His retirement will give President Obama his second opportunity to nominate a jurist for our nation’s Highest Court. I hope he will select someone who will continue Justice Stevens’s tradition of working to ensure that individuals receive the fair treatment that our Constitution guarantees. In recent years, the Court has given extraordinary preference to powerful interests at the expense of ordinary Americans. Justice Stevens was a bulwark against that trend. Our country’s next Justice must play a similar role.”

Let’s hope that Republicans in the U.S. Senate will put aside their habits of obstructionism and support the nomination of a Justice who will continue Stevens’ strong, even-handed legacy.
 

In case you missed it, the GOP is not pleased about the passage of health care reform, and after careful consideration they’ve decided that the best strategy going forward is to stomp their feet harder and scream louder.

In legislative terms, that means that they’ve chosen to invoke an arcane Senate rule that requires unanimous consent for any committee meetings after 2 p.m. That’s right. GOP Senators are so angry that they won’t work after lunch.

In a statement, Senator Leahy explains what that means for the Judiciary Committee.

I have previously accommodated requests from Judiciary Committee Republicans to delay the Committee’s hearing to consider Professor [Goodwin] Liu’s nomination. I had intended to hold this hearing two weeks ago but, at the request of Republicans, delayed it until today. We had agreed, instead, to proceed to a hearing for Judge Robert Chatigny, a nominee to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, on March 10. Republicans then reversed themselves and asked for additional delay in connection with that March 10 hearing. I, again, accommodated them. Earlier this week I sought to move this afternoon’s hearing to the morning, into the two-hour window of time after the Senate convened, that would not be subject to this arcane objection. Republicans asked that we keep it scheduled for this afternoon because it worked better for the schedules of the Republican members of the Committee, and they had planned to participate this afternoon. Now, having objected to holding the hearing this morning, they object to it not being held this afternoon. They pulled the plug on our hearing and put up roadblocks to the Committee’s process for working to fill judicial vacancies.

And, like most Republican obstruction tactics, it quickly moves from being “annoying” to being “harmful for our nation.”

Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. Claire McCaskill both complained that Republicans kept them from holding their hearings on budget requests for the military's Pacific and strategic and police training contracts in Afghanistan.

That, in a nutshell, is the political strategy of the GOP: prevent any effort to assist our armed forces or allow for a functioning judicial branch out of sheer petulance.

You stay classy, guys.
 

A few minutes ago, the House of Representatives passed landmark health reform, perhaps the most important piece of domestic policy legislation in a generation.

The feat is all the more impressive given the scorched earth tactics the Right Wing has used to try to derail it.  Even yesterday, Democratic Congressmen faced racist and homophobic slurs for supporting the legislation, and this evening Congressman Bart Stupak (no friend to a woman's constitutional right to reproductive choice) was called a "baby killer" by a Republican Representative for supporting the bill.

But in the end, health care reform passed: a major accomplishment for Congress and an important plank of President Obama's platform realized.

The moral: standing up for your agenda pays off.  The GOP made clear that there was virtually nothing they wouldn't do to stop reform, but by powering through Republican obstruction, Democrats were able to score a major win for themselves and for the American people.

Now that this victory is under Congress's belt, we look forward to pushing past other instances of GOP obstruction.

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.

If anyone had any doubt that the courts matter, check out this article in today’s Hill about Republicans and allied groups vowing to spend millions on legal challenges to healthcare reform and other parts of the Obama agenda.

Health care, global warming, financial reform, workers rights--you name it.  The courts make a huge difference in the lives of all Americans. Who sits on those courts--and how fully they embrace our core constitutional values--is critical.

That’s why there’s so much urgency about breaking the current nominations impasse created by Republicans’ unprecedented obstruction. And that’s why we need a bold choice to fill any new vacancy on the Court--someone who understands the constitution mandates attention to the interests of all, not just a privileged few.