One more thing
October 29, 2010
Late news is that Obama has voiced his support for filibuster reform. Never mind the fact that he did so on the Daily Show of all places rather than, say, a statement in the White House press room, and never mind that frankly I don’t think his word alone is worth anything much anymore.
The filibuster, as you know, is the bizarre Senate rule that gives a minority of 41 senators the power to kill any legislation, no matter how popoular it is. It’s not in the constitution: it was born in a sort of gentleman’s honor system situation, a rule that could only survive (or allow the Senate to survive) as long as people didn’t abuse it, which they could always do freely. Well, the Republicans have been abusing it non-stop for the past four years to the point where the Senate has begun to actually live up to (or exceed) the cartoonishly exaggerated stereotype of Congress as the place where good ideas go to die. But since it’s not in the constitution, the Senate is free to rewrite the rule, and at the beginning of each two-year term, that term’s ‘rules’ for how Congress works are adopted by simple majority vote, which cannot itself be filibustered.
In short, this is something the Democrats can do all on their own, and should have done at the beginning of this term. If they had, the world would be a much better place right now. And chances are they’ll still be able to do that after the election: the most likely outcome seems to be that the Dems will keep a 52-53 seat majority in the Senate. Of course, the Dems have a sizeable Idiot contingent, who do not believe the rules need to change, and I very much doubt that Obama can be bothered to try to persuade them, or even sees that as something he should do. Most likely he simply doesn’t give a damn, just like he doesn’t give a damn about anything else his party’s biggest and most engaged constituency cares about. So I wouldn’t expect it to happen anyway.
But really what I was going to say is that, at this point, very little good could come out of getting rid of the filibuster in any case. Hypocritical though it sounds, it would be a useful tool to stop Republican insanity, if the Democrats were willing to use it.
At this point you should be laughing. Because of course they aren’t.
Like I said, the Democrats have a sizeable Idiot contingent. Even though they very likely will keep a majority-in-name in the Senate, if the Republicans win the House (which has a better than even chance of happening) what we will quickly find is that there is a functional conservative majority in the Senate, consisting of every Republican plus Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and a few other Democrats-in-name-only. It would be the height of facepalming dumbassery to get rid of the filibuster just in time for the Republicans to not have to worry about it.
Like I said, these guys are going to destroy the US. And if they don’t do it now, they’ll do it in two years.
