Reconciliation Is Destroying The Senate! Run For Your Lives!

The Senate’s grand and noble tradition of suppressing all commercial, social, and cultural progress through the use of the filibuster is about to be ripped to shreds by savage democrats slashing the senate’s grand body with the shunned and shameful bloody blade of reconciliation. Ah, wait. This Republican version of reality may be a tad hyperbolic.

On aspect of this discussion is actually quite frightening, according a January 28, 2010 Pew Survey only 26% of Americans know that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to cut off a filibuster. That means that 74% of the country does not understand the Senate legislative process well enough to understand why so little is getting done there. They may hear that the Republicans have used the filibuster to block most legislation, but they do not know what that means. Such voters are as apt to blame the Democrats as the Republicans (who are now filibustering virtually all legislation) for the lack of legislative progress.

As currently practiced, the filibuster rule allows any senator to demand that any bill be held until 60 senators vote to invoke “cloture” on the filibuster. This cuts off debate and forces a vote on the bill. Once cloture is invoked, the bill itself may pass with a simple majority, but effectively the bill has earned a 60 vote majority.

To listen to the Republicans talk, of course, this is really what the founding fathers intended, that all major pieces of legislation require a super majority. They seem to have forgotten a little document called the US Constitution. According to the Constitution (Section 5) a simple majority of the Senate is all that must be present to allow the Senate to conduct business.

The Constitution also specifically mentions only two instances when more than a simple majority is necessary to pass legislation. A two-thirds majority of the Senators present is required to overturn a Presidential veto of a bill (Section 7) or to impeach a public official (section 3). That the Constitution gives the Vice-President the power to vote in the Senate to beak at tie indicates that our founding fathers envisioned most legislation to be passed by a simple majority. The filibuster, a term first used in 1851, is simply a Senate rule.

The “Nuclear Option” is not the same as “Reconciliation” as some Republican Senators abetted by Fox News (why are you watching news you can’t trust?) have claimed. The nuclear option is a parliamentary procedure that the Republicans considered using to cut of Democratic filibusters of some G. W. Bush judicial nominations. This procedure has never been used, and is considered “nuclear” because it might blow-up the filibuster forever.

“Reconciliation,” on the other hand, is a relatively commonly used procedure for “reconciling” Senate and House versions of legislation. Ruth Marcus does a reasonably good job of balancing the partisan views of this process and the history of its use. She does, however, overly stress the dangers of this procedures use opining that it may disrupt the “ability of the Senate to get anything else done this year.” With the Republicans filibustering every single piece of meaningful legislation, and Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) saying, “I think we’re better off when we’re gridlocked because we’re not passing things,” how big a threat is that? Sounds like nothing worse than the status quo.

Personally, even considering the certainty that someday the Democrats will lose control of the Senate, I’d like to see them use the actual nuclear option to kill the filibuster. Let the majority move legislation through the Senate and take the electoral consequences!