Get your propaganda out early

Mitch McConnell: The Filibuster Plays a Crucial Role in Our Constitutional Order

Start with this: it is not part of the constitutional order.

It is, broadly speaking just any device used to delay or prevent an anticipated decision in a legislature.

In the US senate, it is entirely an artifact of senate rules, and on the whole an inadvertent one.

And over its history it has mostly been used to defend "states rights" and associated causes.

I have argued it is in fact unconstitutional, and still think so and think we would be better off without it.

Individual politicians, parties, and voters will just need to take more responsibility for what they say and what they choose.

This is McConnell preparing for losing the senate to the Dems in 2020 and facing the very real possibility - not nearly real enough, in my view - that the Dems will junk the filibuster and steamroll the Republican minority who have so often in recent years flouted established and more amicable Washington ways in order to screw over Democrats.

The Times is so predictably stupid

Sure, Let’s Make the Senate Even Less Deliberative

A curmudgeonly editorial against ending the filibuster.

That's the spirit!

In a major policy speech, Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling to end the Senate filibuster. 

She is the first major presidential candidate to endorse ending the Senate’s historic [in my view unconstitutional- PV] rule which requires 60 votes to pass legislation.

Warren made her announcement at the National Action Network today. 

It came just two days after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used the  “nuclear option” to reduce debate time of presidential nominees. 

This allowed Republicans to railroad through huge numbers of conservative judicial picks made by Donald Trump.

Now, according to Senator Warren, it’s time for Democrats to “fight back.”

“I’m not running for President just to talk about making real, structural change. I’m serious about getting it done. And part of getting it done means waking up to the reality of the United States Senate,” Warren said, before adding:

“So let me be as clear as I can. When Democrats next have power, we should be bold and clear: we’re done with two sets of rules — one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats.”

“That means when Democrats have the White House again, if Mitch McConnell tries to do what he did to President Obama, and puts small-minded partisanship ahead of solving the massive problems facing this country, then we should get rid of the filibuster.”

Warren said before that eliminating the Senate filibuster should be a topic of discussion. She wants to have a debate in the 2020 presidential campaign about whether to keep it or not.

But with Democrats like Warren talking about big ideas like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and new tax plans, it’s become more and more clear that a minority of GOP senators could stop them, even if Democrats sweep the 2020 election, taking the House, the Senate and the presidency.

Republicans have this power because there’s no way for Democrats to put together 60 seats in next year’s elections.

. . . .

"For generations, the filibuster was used as a tool to block progress on racial justice. And in recent years, it’s been used by the far right as a tool to block progress on everything,” Warren said. 

“I’ve only served one term in the Senate — but I’ve seen what’s happening. We all saw what they did to President Obama. I’ve watched Republicans abuse the rules when they’re out of power, then turn around and blow off the rules when they’re in power.”

Other presidential candidates have not supported Warren’s position. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) don’t want to change the filibuster.

But Warren’s endorsement today of ending the filibuster in the Senate will be sure to add it to the debate in the 2020 presidential campaign.

So Sanders wants his agenda to fail?

Because if the senate keeps the filibuster the AOC/Bernie agenda will be DOA.

On the other hand, arguably it will fail anyway.

A goodly piece of the Democratic majorities in house and senate that we hope for will be made up of people who will not support Medicare for All or Bernie's tuition plan.

People who ran in districts in which even Nancy Pelosi seems too far left, and she is not on board for the AOC/Bernie agenda, either.

Nancy Pelosi says Obamacare is best path to ‘quality, affordable’ health care

But even to get through helpful legislation those Democrats would support will be impossible against a filibuster.

And then what do they do, what does anybody do, if the courts give Bozo what he's asked for and declare every bit of the ACA unconstitutional?

Time for court packing?

Not every Dem pundit is all in for the AOC/Bernie agenda

Or for Bernie.

Or for Bernie-supporting women, at least one with a role in the 2016 campaign, running to the media to breathlessly complain Joe Biden touched their hair, shoulders, or arms.

Dana Milbank: Bernie Sanders has emerged as the Donald Trump of the left

I suppose that should be "reemerged", since he was that in 2016, as well.

How to blow the next presidential election and hand it over to Trump — 3 surefire techniques for Democrats who want to lose

1. Keep on calling it Socialism.

2. Kill the candidacy of any male Democrat who gets accused of anything by a woman.

3. Play stupid manipulative games with your own voters.

As for me, I really don't want it to be Bernie, though I prefer him to Trump or indeed any Republican.

This is why.

Bernie hates capitalism. He really is a socialist. He really is not a liberal or a progressive.

Though, being penniless, I am not personally a capitalist, I am a pro-capitalist, anti-socialist progressive.

Bernie hates the Democratic Party.

I am a Democrat, and I do not hate the party.

Bernie thinks any politician who takes money from corporations or rich contributors has been bought by the plutocracy and Wall Street.

I do not, and I am only too glad not every such well-heeled contributor is of a kind with the Kochs.

That is because Bernie hates Wall Street, Corporations, and billionaires.

I do not.

Bernie shares Trump's protectionist delusions, at heart.

I do not.

Bernie shares Trump's neo-isolationism, at heart.

I do not.

Bernie shares Trump's opposition to globalism.

I do not.

Bernie shares Trump's angry hatred for "the rigged system".

I hate that hatred.

Bernie thinks the major parties need to make their nomination processes more democratic because he thinks that will give demagogues like himself a better shot at taking over a party most of whose voters and nearly all of whose elected officials do not share his radicalism.

I oppose making the process more democratic because I think he is right.

(And then there is Trump, he whom no smoke filled room would ever have nominated.)

(On the other hand, Bernie won mostly in caucus states where his young socialist activists could gain control of the process. He lost big to Hillary in primary states where Democratic voters, overwhelmingly not socialists, got to make the choice. So maybe we're both wrong.)

Bernie wants Medicare for All in part to force down salaries for Medical professionals and remuneration for other providers, and partly to enable political control of medical, technical, and pharmaceutical research.

I oppose Medicare for All for those reasons, preferring expansion of Ocare and its subsidies to achieve universal coverage among those not otherwise covered.

Bernie wants to spend lots of federal money to make publicly owned secondary schools tuition free. This for him is a step toward a public monopoly on higher education and research.

I oppose his plan in part for that very reason, and prefer a system of tuition vouchers usable at any secondary school, private or public, secular or religious-affiliated. Heck, even training to be a cleric.

On the other hand, I do support court packing and abolition of the filibuster and the Electoral College.

I support representation of states in the senate proportionate to population.

And some other progressive reforms.

The Dem agenda will be dead on arrival, says Boo.

The Boo is pessimistic.

Paul Waldman ably describes the two most common fallacies pundits and politicians use to explain how Democratic presidents can get stuff done in Washington. 

One can be called “the Bernie Sanders fallacy.” 

It involves leading “a grass-roots movement so powerful that it would force Republicans in Congress to vote for things they despise such as single-payer health care and free college.” 

It’s a manifestly absurd campaign promise and it really shouldn’t even qualify as an aspiration–because it’s delusional. 

The Republicans will not vote for a progressive vision for America, let alone a Democratic Socialist one. 

No amount of citizen pressure could ever convince them otherwise.

The second fallacy can be called “the John Hickenlooper fallacy,” after the former Denver mayor and Colorado governor who just announced his candidacy for president. 

In this scenario, you can convince a sufficient number of Republicans to vote for your agenda by having a respectful dialogue with them.

. . . .

As Waldman correctly points out, this is every bit as ridiculous as the Bernie Sanders fallacy. 

. . . .

The only way to pass progressive legislation in Congress is to do it without any Republican votes. 

But that is not how Congress works. 

Congress includes the Senate, and the Senate requires sixty members to overcome a legislative filibuster.

There are two things that will not happen between now and Inauguration Day, 2021: The Senate Republicans won’t become responsive to citizen pressure or presidential cajoling, and the Democrats will not get enough votes in the Senate to end a filibuster on their own.

Any presidential candidate who promises to accomplish anything legislatively needs to explain how they’ll go about overcoming this problem. 

They’ll need a better answer than the ones Sanders and Hickenlooper have provided thus far.

If this is right, any moderate Democrat who disses the AOC/Bernie agenda saying "That's not going to happen; that's just too radical" needs to explain how his plans to expand Medicare and firm up Obamacare are the least bit more realizable.

But maybe it's not right, in which event the Dems could as well pass the AOC/Bernie agenda as the moderate one of, say, Ed Rendell, if they can unite for it.

According to the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Ballin (1892), Senate rules can be changed by a simple majority vote. 

Nevertheless, under current Senate rules, a rule change could itself be filibustered, requiring two-thirds of senators who are present and voting to end debate. (This differs from the usual requirement for three-fifths of sworn senators.)

However, despite this two-thirds requirement being written into the Senate rules, any Senator may attempt to nullify a Senate rule by making a point of order that the rule is unconstitutional or just that the meaning of the rule should not be followed. 

The presiding officer is generally expected to rule in favor of the rules of the Senate, but any ruling from the chair may be appealed and overturned by a simple majority of Senators. 

This happened in 2013, when Harry Reid of the Democratic Party made a point of order that "the vote on cloture under rule XXII for all nominations other than for the Supreme Court of the United States is by majority vote."

Although there is no simple majority vote provision in the text of rule XXII, Reid's point of order was sustained by a 52-48 vote, and that ruling established a Senate precedent that cloture on nominations other than those for the Supreme Court requires only a simple majority.

On April 6, 2017, that precedent was further changed by Mitch McConnell and the Republican majority to include Supreme Court nominations.

More briefly,

The nuclear option is a parliamentary procedure that allows the United States Senate to override a rule – specifically the 60-vote rule to close debate – by a simple majority of 51 votes, rather than the two-thirds supermajority normally required to amend the rules. 

The option is invoked when the majority leader raises a point of order that only a simple majority is needed to close debate on certain matters. 

The presiding officer denies the point of order based on Senate rules, but the ruling of the chair is then appealed and overturned by majority vote, establishing new precedent.

This procedure effectively allows the Senate to decide any issue by simple majority vote, regardless of existing procedural rules such as Rule XXII which requires the consent of 60 senators (out of 100) to end a filibuster for legislation, and 67 for amending a Senate rule.

But would enough Democrats agree to end the filibuster?

As many as needed to constitute a majority of 51?

Perhaps it is this that Boo is pessimistic about (I took him to be thinking the Democrats would not alone be able to contribute the 67 votes allegedly needed to change a rule in the senate).

Anyway, Boo himself in the past has opposed scrapping the filibuster and opposed elimination of the Electoral College.

Don't recall off-hand whether he has opposed proportional representation in the senate, but I would expect him to.

Embracing the baloney

For a reality appetizer video, go here.

After which, read on.

'This primary is going to be a choice between socialism and a more just form of capitalism'

Chris Cillizza surrenders to the rhetorical strategy that emerged during the campaign of 2016, draining "socialism" of its actual meaning and using it as a label not only for the more progressive candidates for the Democratic nomination - actual and self-professed democratic socialists - but also for their more progressive agenda.

Some talking heads on MSNBC back then decided that owning the word and insisting it refer to any public ownership of any organization providing any good or service, at all, rather than public ownership of all the means of production, was the best way to deal not only with resurgent and false right wing denunciations of Democrats, their current agenda, and all the achievements of more than a century of progressive politics, as socialists and socialism but with Bernie's open profession of socialism.

They repeatedly cited public ownership of schools, hospitals, fire departments, police forces, bridges, and roads, calling each of these instances of socialism.

In this way they explained politics could be thought of as in part a matter of quarreling over what means of production ought to be in public hands rather than private, "all" and "none" being at the communist and libertarian opposite ends of a spectrum representing differing ratios or mixtures of the two - differing dosages of socialism and capitalism.

This move was dishonest then and is so now in that both Bernie and AOC have a well-known history with the DSA and routinely claim to be democratic socialists, meaning by that the real thing, and definitely not meaning the watered down Marxism and even post-Marxism of European Social Democracy, nowadays just a more advanced progressivism than our own, that both have urged America needs a greater dosage of.

And most actual socialists historically have referred to any economy featuring anything much less than public ownership of all the means of production as capitalist and sometimes to those in which some of the means were publicly owned as "mixed economies".

Democrats in general, whether or not they embrace all or part of the Bernie/AOC agenda and however appalled they might be at Republican projects of privatization of schools, roads, and prisons, overwhelming are not socialists and reject both socialism and "socialism".

The increasing acceptance of "socialism" among the young, including young Democrats, is doubtless due in some part, perhaps entirely, to the increasingly widespread use of "socialism" as those MSNBC talking heads used it.

And while those talking heads consistently endorsed the spreading tendency they had themselves helped to create to understand "socialism" in that way, they also agreed with Bernie's and AOC's assertions that America needs a significant dose of European Social Democracy.

Though apparently accepting their usage of "socialism", Chris Cillizza does not seem quite on board for Social Democracy or the Bernie/AOC agenda.

Actually, the environmentalist parts aside, the Bernie/AOC agenda itself is not much different from what TR ran on in 1912.

TR was not the Socialist Party candidate, nor was his the socialist agenda, of that year.

That distinction belonged to Bernie's professed political mentor and personal idol, Gene Debs, who advocated actual socialism, public ownership of all the means of production, or at the very least what was then called "the commanding heights" of the economy, including but not at all limited to the entire financial, transportation and steel industries.

But neither Bernie nor AOC is running on that agenda, nor have they said a word about it, though last time out Bernie did often give angry vent to his evident and sincere loathing of capitalism, in that way at least revealing his continued adherence to the real socialism of his mentor, usually at the same time denouncing the Democratic Party and the American political "system" with equal fervor.

TR flat out rejected socialism, and did so by its name, and was probably the most progressive of the other three candidates that year, and Taft the least.

In any case, since nobody is actually running on an agenda of flat out socialism, the primaries will not be a choice for Democrats between socialism and "a more just form of capitalism".

It will be, so far as the agendas go, a choice among different visions of the latter, with differing doses of concession to feasibility in a divided country and a divided congress.

But so far as candidates go, yes, it will be a choice between supporters, at least in their hearts, of out and out socialism on the one side and supporters of capitalism - "a more just form of capitalism" - on the other.

No, it's not President Donald Trump. 

(You probably figured that out from the "more just form of capitalism" part of it.)

It's actually from former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, who has been running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination since, approximately, 1991. 

And while Delaney is a long shot to be a long shot in this race, he's not the only one who is thinking about the two lanes of the Democratic primary fight that way.

"I will tell you I am not a democratic socialist," California Sen. Kamala Harris said during a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday. 

And in a CNN town hall on Monday night, another Democrat, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, was careful to make her skepticism of things like "Medicare for All" and the "Green New Deal" very clear.

What you see in all of that is a clear line being drawn between Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who announced his presidential bid formally on Tuesday, and the looming figure of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on one side, and the likes of Klobuchar and, assuming he runs, former Vice President Joe Biden on the other.

All the other candidates in the race fall somewhere along that spectrum -- roughly like this:

Sanders   Warren   Gabbard   Castro   Gillibrand   Booker   Harris   Klobuchar   Biden

Actually, with her wealth tax and her idea of putting workers on corporate boards, Warren's agenda is as aggressive as theirs and maybe in some ways more so.

And given she has shown as much as or more rhetorical heat denouncing "the system", it's possible she deserves the label "socialist" as much as Bernie does.

I don't know enough about the others from Booker leftward on the list to say.

What about Sherrod Brown?

From Booker leftward, the candidates are, broadly speaking, in favor of the "Green New Deal" and "Medicare for All." 

 . . . .

From Harris rightward, there is a healthy skepticism of the practicality (and political savvy) of backing those massive government programs.

Still, the Republicans and the conservative movement did invite this, what with their endless denunciations of all things progressive as socialism, Marxism, cultural Marxism, and even communism since the days of the New Deal.

The young and the ignorant for whom the actually existing Communism is ancient history were perfectly set up by the revival of that sort of rhetoric during the campaign of 2016.

Chris Hayes, Lawrence O'Donnell, and the others had an easy time of it selling their redefinition.

MSNBC just now talked about how thousands of Bernie supporters in key states Hillary lost went for Trump instead of her.

Not really a surprise, considering how both of them yelled about the rigged economic system, the evils of free trade, the rigged political system, and the stagnation of the working class.

And how much both of them claimed the two major parties were corrupt and in cahoots with a free trade loving plutocracy that cared only for itself.

Too, it was during his visits to Pennsylvania that Trump promised to strengthen both Medicare and Social Security, and denounced the Democrats for wanting to subvert them.

PS.

Of course, even the two most popular items on the original Bernie agenda, tuition free education at public colleges and universities and Medicare for All, are impossible without undoing pretty much all of the Republican tax cut, removing the cap on the Social Security tax (or is it the Medicare tax?), and boosting way up the marginal income tax rate for the higher and highest brackets.

And all of it is impossible without getting rid of the filibuster.

Politicians and the voters at large have to learn that elections have consequences, for real.

As for the wealth tax, all of the good it might do and less of the harm can be accomplished by putting the government back into breaking up too large corporate entities into smaller entities less willing or able to extravagantly reward their executives or their owners.

And just say no to worker-control.

Are the lead items of the Democratic agenda empty promises?

They are if the Democrats, assuming they become the majority in the senate in 2020, don't dump the filibuster.

If they won't get rid of the filibuster for the principled reason that it is an at best questionably constitutional, ludicrously anti-democratic feature of an already inherently anti-democratic chamber then they had better do it for the pragmatic reason that it is a ludicrously anti-Democratic feature of an already inherently anti-Democratic chamber.

Otherwise their entire progressive agenda is fake news.

The Dems Need to Debate the Filibuster

You’d think the presidency of Donald Trump would provide a big warning about winning first and figuring out how to govern afterwards. 

If you go out on the campaign trail and make a bunch of promises that you can’t keep, you’re going to suffer some nasty consequences and the already monumental cynicism and distrust of the electorate will only grow more intense.

. . . .

We don’t need 27 candidates competing to outdo each other with a laundry list of progressive reforms that they’ll have no chance of implementing.

If they think they can get these things done with a Democratic House and Senate if they eliminate the legislative filibuster, then they should own that. 

And they should explain how they’re going to convince the Senate to make the change. 

Because, it’s not just Republican senators who are opposed to doing away with the filibuster entirely, but also Democrats from every band of the party’s ideological spectrum.

. . . .

I think what is more likely to happen, if anything happens at all, is that a new Democratic administration will be stymied in their efforts to do much of anything. 

They will do what they can through budget reconciliation, just as Obama did to pass health care reform and Trump did to get his tax cuts. 

And maybe eventually, the Senate Democrats will come around to the conclusion that they have to eliminate the filibuster to address something critical like climate change or gun violence.

It might help if the candidate actually ran on getting rid of the filibuster and explained precisely why this would be a necessary move for implementing their agenda. 

If they are not willing to advocate for the change then they shouldn’t be making big promises that could never happen without it.

The worst thing to do is to say that you’ll win first and figure this all out later. 

People are desperately tired of politicians making promises they have no plan to keep.

Chris Wallace calls bullshit on the blame shifting

Chris Wallace to Mike Pence: You could open the government tomorrow.

"The American people want action on our southern border," Pence insisted. 

"They want border security. Eight-hundred thousand federal workers want us to find a way to open the government."

"You could open the government tomorrow," Wallace said, repeating the line three times. 

"The House has passed bills to open the government tomorrow, why don't you sign them and open the government and then you can negotiate about this?"

The point could be made that Bozo can't just sign them because they haven't been passed in the senate.

But of course, that's because McConnell is protecting himself, the senate Republicans, and the president from further proving to the public that they own the shutdown by refusing to bring them to the senate floor for a vote, forcing senate Republicans to vote them down or even filibuster them, or else pass them and thus force the president to refuse to sign in order to continue what would then be his and only his shutdown.

Mitch McConnell supports the wall in the senate, attacks Democrats

Right now on the TV he's echoing the Trump propaganda of panic about gangsters, drugs, and terrorists for the wall.

He's blaming the Democrats for not supporting "common-sense" legislation.

A roll call vote is underway for something.

Will the Democrats cave?

Maybe.

All the newsies on MSNBC say no way, but they also said the wall money wouldn't even clear the house.

And it did.

They are also saying McConnell won't change the rules and abolish the filibuster altogether, as the Duce has urged at least since he became president and perhaps earlier.

I don't recall.

The Nazi moron in the White House in a rage, blathers and lies and brags

Spewing hate for immigrants, coyotes, and Democrats, predicting a red wave in November, bitching about the expense of housing and dealing with minors, calling the consent decree prohibiting putting the kids in jails with their parents a "loophole" for which Democrats are responsible.

Bitching about the filibuster rule in the senate, probably thinking - correctly - it guarantees failure for the two Republican bills now sitting in the House, one more draconian than the other.

Blaming the Democrats for making it impossible to keep families together.

Furious at the emerging need to hire thousands of judges while other countries like Mexico with "strong immigration laws" don't hire judges, they hire border guards.

Denouncing Mexico, NAFTA, and so on.

Claiming he hates all our trade deals with everyone - they are all horribly bad, he nearly shouts - but he hates the deal with Mexico partly because they could stop the flow to the US from Central America and they give us "no help".

He sounds like Hitler on a roll in the Fuhrerbunker as bombs fall on Berlin and the Russians approach.

Oh, and another victory lap about him finally settling the North Korea threat, bragging we are loved all over Asia because of what he has done.

Nobody blathers as uselessly, offensively, and long as this motormouth braggart and pathological liar.

Immigration reform bills: Both options headed for failure

Billions to cage and punish and deport immigrants but cuts coming to Medicaid, Medicare Social Security, and ACA funding.

Both are unlikely to survive a vote in the House and both would certainly fail in the senate.

Update.

Talking alone to the press, he wants Pelosi and Schumer to come to the White House and negotiate a complete new immigration package.

Blah blah.

"Take away zero tolerance and we would be overrun, there would be millions of people, everyone would come here."

"Can't have open borders, you can't have a country without borders."

"We are being laughed at. Everyone laughs at us about immigration."

He's not going to get Democrat votes for Republican anti-immigrant bullshit by hammering the table and demanding it.

Oh, and he fully expects the courts to require eventual separation despite his executive order to keep kids with their parents in the criminal justice system, unless legislation revoking the reigning consent decree gets through the congress.

Don't count on that.

Elsewhere in the news, the Army and other federal agencies are busy setting up tent cities to hold the thousands of families who are going to be arrested at the border under the zero tolerance policy.

Internment camps, migrant camps, concentration camps - a stink by any other name.

President Asshole

The threat of a veto was just to attract attention to him blathering, bragging, whining, declaiming, attacking Democrats and Obama for dreadfully weakening the military and for many other things, insisting the senate abolish the filibuster, demanding a line item veto, and so on and so on, and berating the congress - a Republican controlled congress - for not giving him exactly, everything, and only what he wants.

The Republican senate could kill the filibuster but doesn't want to.

A line item veto would require a constitutional amendment and make the presidency much stronger in the legislative process.

The constitution assigns the president the power to veto only whole bills.

They just don't have the balls

Personally, I think the filibuster is unconstitutional.

But that is neither here nor there.

The Democrats like it and anyway haven't the nerve to abolish it, even only for judicial appointments.

Defund Planned Parenthood

I support the bill, but not the shutdown.

I supported abolition of the filibuster when the Democrats controlled the senate and I support it now.

The filibuster is unconstitutional.

House passes bills to defund Planned Parenthood amid shutdown threats

Axe the filibuster

I think they should go ahead and do it, for God's sake.

The senate by its composition makes a mockery of majoritarianism and democracy, both; and the filibuster, no part of the plan of the Framers, makes the mockery all the worse.

The constitution is not explicit, but it's clear enough the Framers took majoritarian voting in both houses for granted except where they specified a different requirement, as in the ratification of treaties or votes for impeachment.

On that understanding, the senate is not empowered to abandon majoritarianism by adopting a rule because nothing controlled by the constitution itself can be changed except via Article V, though we have long had and lately much exercised the habit of allowing the Supremes to do that while egregiously claiming they are doing nothing of the kind.

And that means the filibuster is unconstitutional, anyway.

(And so are the senate's rules for the adoption and amendment of its own rules.)

Conservatives set ridiculous filibuster reform litmus test for Obamacare repeal

As for repeal of O-care, no, I don't favor it.

Of course not.

The three stooges

Senate reaches deal on Cordray, possibly on NLRB nominations

Not one of the three really wants to dump the filibuster and go to majority rule.

Not one.

Tell me again why Harry and the senate Democrats kept the filibuster rule

Background check loses with 54 votes

Of course, 60 were needed.

Majority rule is just way too scary for our senate.

The Great Compromise: A constitution for minority rule

The End of Majority Rule?

E. J. Dionne discovers the havoc of politics dominated by a crackpot minority, itself dominated by a determined and even fanatical plutocracy, enabled by the Connecticut Compromise, also known by its fans as “The Great Compromise.”

Those are the names commonly given the surrender of the nationalists at Philadelphia to the small state holdouts who already wielded power there and in the then US Congress far out of proportion to their share of the population of the Union.

When for the sake of a unanimous consent that they did not quite get in any case the nationalists finally gave up, what did they give up?

The nationalists, two leaders of whom would soon be writing under the name “Publius” to convince New Yorkers to ratify the Philadelphia constitution, had intended representation in the senate, like that in the house, to be proportioned to population – though the senate was already envisioned to be in the long run less numerous than the house, with the senators to have longer terms and face the electorate in sections rather than all at once.

When the nationalists lost that they gave the smaller states astonishing over-representation per capita in the senate, each state to have two senators regardless of population.

To go with it they gave them exactly the same excess of power, as a group, over the vastly more populous large states in a process of constitutional ratification that included special protection for slave slates, as well.

They gave to the smaller states an extra jolt of power in the Electoral College.

They gave to the smaller states a constitutional guarantee that small states could not be combined by the congress to form larger ones, their grossly excessive power being thus diminished, without their individual consent.

(But an amendment merely to remove this guarantee would not be a congressional act combining any states and so would require the particular consent of no individual state.)

And they gave as well a guarantee that no amendment could deprive any state of its equal representation in the senate without its consent.

(But an amendment merely to remove this guarantee would not be an amendment to deprive any state of its equal representation, and so there is no state whose particular consent would be needed.)

And they backed all that up with a process of amendment providing the small states excessive influence in three distinct ways.

Amendments can initiate in the congress or in a convention called for by the states.

In the first case each must be proposed for ratification by a two-thirds vote in both houses, and then be ratified by three fourths of the states.

In the second, a convention must be called if two thirds of the states ask for it, and its proposals can then be ratified again by three fourths of the states.

Thus the people of America are properly represented in the process only at one step, that requiring a two thirds majority in the house, and play no role at all in propria persona, as is the case in the entire constitution – that last, of course, being an absolute point of pride with that wild democrat, Madison.

In the step requiring a two thirds majority in the senate, in the step allowing two thirds of the states to demand a convention, and in the step of ratification by three fourths of the states the power of the small states is vastly exaggerated, to the very great cost of the American people, the vast majority of whom live somewhere else.

The constitution does not specify the manner of representation and voting in a new constitutional convention, called for by the states.

We can guess what the small states and their political allies would insist on.

Some fun facts to know and tell: 

• Wyoming has two senators for half a million people.
• California has two senators for thirty-six million people.
• One voter in Wyoming has the same clout in the senate as seventy-two voters in California.
• Wyoming, Vermont, and Delaware outvote California and Texas in the senate.
• About a million people in the first three can overpower sixty million in the latter two.
• One person defeats sixty.

 And all of this can be said against that atrocity of Philadelphia before we even raise the subjects of the filibuster and the single senator hold and the home state veto.

Notes EJ,

The filibuster makes matters worse.

It's theoretically possible for 41 senators representing less than 11 percent of the population to block pretty much anything.

The less populous states, of course, as EJ points out, are generally though by no means in all cases rural and conservative.

Exceptions noted, the rule holds in enough cases to make the overwhelming small state advantage of power a distinctly conservative advantage.

Oh, how they love their constitution, those conservatives!

Oh, how they love federalism and states’ rights!

EJ concludes, writing for the blues,

There is no immediate solution to the obstruction of the democratic will.

But we need to acknowledge that our system is giving extremists far more influence than the voters would.

That's why American democracy is deadlocked.

It was supposed to be.

They planned it that way in Philadelphia.

Hamilton for majority rule

Federalist 22

Here is a tirade against the equality of votes of the states in the US congress created by the Articles of Confederation.

Hamilton views that rule as a tool of obstruction enabling seven states, seven being the smallest integer greater than half the then whole number of states, together representing less than a third of the people, to permanently obstruct efforts of those representing over two thirds of the population, in defiance of what he calls the essential feature of popular government, majority rule.

At the time various important matters required the consent of nine states.

But the inequality of population was such that a group of nine states could be formed, nine being the smallest integer not less than two thirds of the whole number of states, to carry any such great measure as they wished against the opposition of all the others, though the nine represented less than half the population of the country.

So this, too, gave grossly disproportionate power to the small states in blatant disregard of the majoritarian principle.

What must Hamilton have thought of the Great Compromise that preserved exactly that obstructive power for the small states?

What must he think of the surenchère of the modern senate whose rules effectively, though not directly, require sixty votes out of a hundred to pass nearly anything any senator finds he deplores?

As to the alleged power of the senate to impose such a rule of voting on itself, if it lies in the power to make its own rules it is there in invisible ink, since there is no text to say such an absurd power is included in that of rulemaking.

On the other hand, there is nothing anywhere that says the two houses of the legislature must vote only by majority rule on all things not otherwise specified in the constitution itself (various confirmation votes in the senate, etc.).

To claim the constitution requires by implication majority voting on everything on which it does not forbid it is a better invisible ink argument, but still an invisible ink argument.

The fact that the filibuster in its original form was invented by accident and played almost no role at all until the 20th Century does support the idea that everyone took it for granted voting in both houses would, with the given exceptions, always be by majority, including the framers, the ratifies, the people at large, and certainly Hamilton in Federalist 22.

And while we are on the topic, is the president of the US the master of his own cabinet?

He cannot hire them at will, they cannot be fired and resign with the end of the presidential term only by helpful custom, and the constitution sees a need to say outright the president can ask them to tell him what’s going on in their departments.

By implication, they are the masters of their departments and he is so far from their master that he may not have the least idea what they and their departments are up to.

He may have to ask meekly that they tell him, something he is enabled to do only by express provision.

And they are required to reply only by implication.

More invisible ink, that is to say.

Is the president truly the boss of the executive branch?

Some boss.

Update 4/1.

There is a letter from Madison to Washington written before the convention at Philadelphia in which he deplores various features of the government set up by the Articles of Confederation, especially including the extravagant power given the small states by their equal suffrage in the congress.

In that regard, the Great Compromise ensured the new constitution would not be much better.

He also deplores that nothing in the Articles prevents the madness of paper currency and fully intends the new constitution to do that.

On that one he actually succeeded.

Oh, please bring back that constitution from its exile!

Just kidding, of course.

The Democrats aren’t democrats, either

What Killed Filibuster Reform?

Yes, this is an explanation that doesn’t explain, since it leaves us all wondering why the house doesn’t have a filibuster.

It isn’t really about the power-lust of individual senators.

It’s about every Tom and Dick in Party A who can’t stand the thought that when Harry of Party B has a majority he would almost certainly do something Tom and Dick don’t like.

Why, that would be just utterly unendurable.

And vice versa.

And for the same reason neither party will free even the federal government, let alone the states, from the arbitrary and fraudulent constitutional absolutism of the Supreme Court.

Though it scares the shit out of both parties I personally would be willing to see America try the experiment of democracy.

I think we would find out that the world would not end and both parties would behave a lot more responsibly and carefully than the nervous Nellies now say they fear.

Just as they do in every European country where functional if not formal unicameralism dominates and no court obstructs, and yet the competing major parties are not constantly plunging back and forth, all the time, doing and undoing the same things again and again just as rapidly as they rotate in office.

And I particularly resent that the Supremes are such chronic liars and both parties lie, also, about what they want the court to do.

The conservatives claim to want them to enforce the constitution as written and as meant by those who adopted it and its various amendments, but they actually want the court to pretend the constitution was written by Herbert Spencer, as Holmes said.

The liberals frankly claim they want the court to ignore original intent and enforce instead what’s required by contemporary society and its values, but what they really want is for the court to enforce the constitution they, the liberals, wish we had rather than the one we actually have.

And the courts since the beginning of the 20^th Century have indulged both of these illegitimacies, clothing themselves with the totally arbitrary and unconstitutional power to re-write the constitution however they like.

They and what they do are every bit as much a disgrace to America as not just the filibuster but the very existence of the senate.

And no one will change that.

Majority rule? Nah, better not, says The Nation.

Don't Eliminate the Filibuster, Restore It

[Extensively re-written 12012012.]

John Nichols displays none of the traditional progressive penchant for democracy.

Well, what the heck.

It’s just too scary for some people.

Something might go wrong.

Whereas if we just go back to the real filibuster we used to see in movies, what could go wrong?

I think it was Matt Yglesias who, a few years back, gave the history lesson showing the old style filibuster was almost always used to protect wealth and privilege and political expressions of racism like segregation.

And about 90% of the uses of the new style filibuster have been made during O's presidency to protect and advance the interests of plutocracy with record-setting, and downright shocking, obstruction of a fairly modest liberal agenda.

All the same, lot's of liberals are far less democratic in their convictions than one might wish.

Booman, for example, more than once has come out in agreement with the proposal of several conservative pundits and office holders that the 17th Amendment be repealed and the choice of senators returned to state governments.

And that despite the fact that, according to those conservatives, the point of repeal would be to disempower progressivism and create a situation in which its past achievements would be undone.

And very few liberals, indeed, would be willing like Dahl and some others to deny the Supreme Court and the federal courts in general the power of constitutional review of actions of the federal executive or legislative branches, confining its role in that regard to regulation of the states.

Generally, liberals and conservatives alike quote Madison on the role of the courts in protecting minority rights, with the former at least citing the era of the civil rights struggles in support of that notion.

Come to that, they talk the same way about the anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian features of the senate.

But Madison was talking about protecting the propertied classes against the rest of us, a fact the conservatives well know and the liberals ignore.

So far as anyone can tell, he could not have cared less for the alleged rights of non-whites, women, or homosexuals.

And I wouldn't take too much for granted regarding his concern for the rights of non-abrahamic religious minorities.

And, anyway, if you consider the achievements of the liberal federal courts during and after the 20th Century nearly everything they did to advance equality and the sexual revolution - and these are the things that liberals value - was a matter of controlling legislation and other actions of the states.

While during that very same period the senate was an absolute bastion of racism, religious bigotry, sexual repression, and every kind of prejudice and discrimination.

By far, the best thing to do with the senate - according to me, of course - would be to abolish it and restore the unicameralism of the Articles of Confederation.

Second best would be to reform representation to make it proportional to population with each state getting a minimum of one member, as in the house, and reform the rules to make the place majoritarian in its actual procedures.

If we go to unicameralism we might stretch terms in the house to 3 years to allow members to get more done between campaigns, but only if we also institute a recall process for house members - which might be a good idea, anyway.

And we should not stagger house elections as senate elections now are staggered.

The whole membership should continue to come up for election at the same time, as now.

Reforms to allow limits on the duration of campaigns and the money spent on related propaganda by private sources would be good things, I think, as well.

Representation in the house is already proportional to population and its voting, rules, and procedures are, and should remain, majoritarian.

And while we are fixing things my way, the power of constitutional review wielded by federal courts should, I say, be expressly confined to legislation and other actions of the states and inferior jurisdictions.

Too, the - ahem - "creativity" in interpreting the constitution, of the liberal courts more recently but also of conservative courts before them, teaches an important lesson.

While judicial independence has its value there can obviously be too much of this good thing; a way to confine the courts to fair interpretation and enforcement of the law really does need to be found.

Sure, during the 20th Century and since then their flights of invention unencumbered by reality were and have been on the side of the angels, mostly.

That is, those inventions generally suit my values pretty well, now and in retrospect, and apart, of course, from such value as I set on democracy and in flat defiance of my disapproval of judicial, or any other, absolutism.

And within the scope of this personal approval I mean to specifically include the invented constitutional right to privacy, the incorporation doctrine, and the courts' vigorous and free construals of the equal protection clause.

All the same, the Supremes in particular and the courts in general most certainly did not, as is sometimes claimed, invent in favor of the values of modern society as a whole, or even of a contemporary majority.

They invented pretty much to suit themselves and their liberal supporters.

The values of others did not concern them, except as needing to be defied and perhaps somehow outlasted or done away with.

In any case, the judicial absolutism embodied in the idea that the Supremes are or ought to be a sort of "constitutional convention in permanent session," as was once said by a happy liberal - perhaps a judge and at least a lawyer - is, to my mind, an offensive and unacceptable defiance not only of democracy but of the rule of law, altogether.

And I leave it to the reader to rehearse within his own mind the many reasons why absolutism is really not a good idea.

Anyway, not on the whole, ordinarily, or in the general run of things.

Not even judicial absolutism, however benevolent in limited respects some despots - judicial or other - may in the past or elsewhere have been.

We are in marked need, here, of adequate checks and balances.

No judge should have life tenure, I think.

And most should be elected by the people or subject to periodic re-appointment, perhaps according to the same process by which they were appointed in the first place.

[Update 12022012.

Well, yes, restoring the old-style filibuster is better than going on as we are, of course.

Sure, it's a weapon in the hands of the plutocrat minority that would be less easy and a lot more costly to use and so, we hope, it would be used much less often than the new filibuster they have in their armory, now.

So, what's that?

Another damned lesser evil we're supposed to pretend we like?]