The Filibuster Be Damned!

I have already written exhaustive rants about the filibuster, so I will keep this one short. There was a time when I felt emphatically that the filibuster had to remain as a defining element of Senate debate, as it has been an effective tool in keeping the Senate from passing truly heinous laws based on whatever particular craziness seemed to leap out of nowhere and grip the popular majority for a time before running its due course and returning to sanity. With the House, we get all kinds of super kooky bills that have been backed a majority of members and then killed (most often secretly) by this or that Senator that didn't poo poo publicly the House's legislation, which was the Congressional equivalent of a drunk text, but instead would send a nice handwritten note or while deliberating great deliberations in the world's greatest deliberative body would take a moment, perhaps over a nice cup of tea, and sidle to the Senate Majority Leader's desk, tap the House Bill, written out in an elegant hand, and then would shake his head ever so slightly. He would then move on to make a congenial jab at an old Princeton chum from across the aisle before returning to his chair, feeling proud of his tact and poise, something the barbarians in the House simply would understand (comportment! please!). Then he would congratulate himself for staving off another disaster and all before he drank his morning tea.

But don't be fooled, every now and again one of great lions would shake the dust and crumpet crumbs from his great mane, climb to the front of the room and roar. It was unthinkable before the 1980s to indicate that you would filibuster, and then when challenged, meekly step aside. No! You knew that every now and again, the cause of the moment was sometimes taken up by a dangerous majority of the Senate, and it was now not only a point of taste but a point of honor that you should enter into this contest of wills alongside your like-minded and right-minded colleagues and roar down those that challenged your power. And roar they did. Why Strom Thurmond (no lion was he...more like a sickly leopard) proved that he was made of the stuff of which Senators from ancient days had been hewn, when he spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes straight in his attempt to derail the Civil Rights Act!

But one by one the old Senators fell away until only the greatest of the last generation of gentleman senators, the grandmaster of the Senate Robert C. Byrd, remained. Now he too has passed. But long before he took his final rest, as the others were replaced by the Congressional equivalent of new money Senators, the filibuster, which was made great by the risk that you would actually, in rare instances, take the podium, became instead a veto pen wielded by exactly 100 legislatures, each of whom thinks of him or herself as a petty monarch at best or a Grand Duchess at worst.

Well fie I say! FIE! What I once believed to be an integral part of the Senate and the safeguard of the legislative process has now become, instead of a proceed with caution/dangerous roads ahead sign,there is now a stop sign and a checkpoint that makes the Berlin Wall look like it was made out of legos and guarded by Rainbow Brite and those creepy little star creatures.

To Hell with the filibuster! Let America do as the rest of practicing democracies do...pass legislation with a 50% majority (or now again 2/3rd as may be called for by those greatest of all procedural guidelines, Robert's Rules of Order aka my personal Bible). And, just in other countries, when we realized we passed some crazy bullshit, have the House Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader keep calling Congress into session until the ubercrazies take their meds and start talkin' sense again.

Damn...that was a long as rant. I believe it shall be my blog of the

Hey Democrats! Grow a Pair

Yesterday, the people of the Massachusetts, in not their finest moment, replaced the venerable Ted Kennedy, the last Prince of Camelot, with Scott Brown, a Republican. Not since 1972 has that bluest of blue states elected a Republican to the Senate.

Shit happens.

All of the pundits that are not on FOX are very clear: this was not a critique of the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, but it was a comment on the continuing frustration of the slow pace of economic recovery and the even slower pace of real change in the lives of everyday people. Basically, the anger at those in power continues, and the people will shift their anger to whoever is in power, Democrats or Republicans.

Why oh why people continue to flip back and forth between two options that have gotten them nowhere fast for a long ass time is beyond me. A year ago, Republicans were evil. This year, Democrats are evil. Wake up people, it's time for a viable third party system in the United States.

But I digress.

What is really annoying the hell out of me is all the woeful tears around health care reform. Oh no! The Democrats have lost their filibuster proof majority. I have a few things to say about that.

1.) The Democrats never had a 60 vote majority. The had 58 votes in their column. There are two independent Senators: Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Idiot Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. That smegma sucking Lieberman demonstrated very clearly during the health care reform debate process that he had no issues with jumping the Democratic ship when necessary or whenever he had an itch in his saggy nuts. Maybe now that the illusion of the filibuster proof majority in the Senate has been shattered, Harry Reid will smile, pat Lieberman on the back, and then strip that bastard of his chairmanship and let him try his luck with the Republicans. Good morning, Joe and fuck you very much.

2) Since when has a filibuster meant death and destruction? Senators have grown soft. Let me tell you a story. Back in 1963, President Kennedy introduced a bill called the Civil Rights Act. At the time, the Senate was controlled by the Democrats and the Democrats were split between Northern and Southern wings. At the time, also, it took 67 votes to invoke cloture and cut off debate, thereby ending a filibuster. Northern Republicans and Northern Democrats felt so passionately about the Civil Rights Act, particularly after the assassination of President Kennedy, that they called the oppositions bluff. Debate on the Civil Rights Act took place, non-stop, for 57 days. But, in the end, justice and patience won out. Enough pressure was applied on those that opposed the Civil Rights act that they caved. This was done both by internal doggedness by bill proponents, and external pressure by the Civil Rights movement.

Yes, indeed. Real change happens when the public demands real change. When oh when will we learn this lesson?

So yes, Democrats, the "easy" passage of the health care reform bill (and what a compromised fiasco it is already) is now out of your grasp, unless you plan on railroading it through before Senator-elect Brown can be sworn in. But passage of the bill is NOT impossible, it just requires your courage, conviction, and commitment. Unfortunately, I believe that he days when Lions walked the Senate halls are dead. Now only angry ghosts and fainting goats leap from hearing room to hearing room, bleating loudly, and falling over at any loud sound.

I'll Take A Public Option for $900 Billion, Alex

Hot diggity damn. I was tooling around Yahoo this evening, just minding my own business, when what too my wondering eyes should appear but a miniature clause in the Senate Health Care Reform Bill that would create a public option for reindeer Americans and the rest of us too.

WOOOOOOHOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!

Sorry...I just had to let that out.

But before anyone goes and puts on their happy pants and starts making appointments for backne surgery, you better pick up your phone. As it stands, Harry Reid doesn't know if he is going to be able to wrangle up the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster on the bill. And though Miss Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine voted in committee for the health care bill, she doesn't sound so tickled now that there is a public option included in the bill that will go before the entire Senate.

Confused as to how she could vote a bill that included a public option and not know it? Well. She didn't.

Harry Reid is a sly mo'fo. Basically the Senate had a whole mess of a number of bills that emerged from the Senate Health Care Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. Since no one bill emerged whole from either committee that was identical, Senator Reid, as the Almighty God of the Senate, basically gets to put together what he likes from either bill (and what he thinks has the best chance of passing) and can then lay out that bill for a full Senate vote.

Now comes the tricky part.

The Senate and the House differ in a number of aspects but the two biggest differences between the Senate and the House are that in the House there can be no amendments offered to a bill that are not germane to the primary motion and there is no filibuster in the House. In the Senate there are no predetermined limits to debate unless those limits are established at the outset of debate on a bill AND once a Senator has been yielded the floor the Senator has the right to continue speaking and/or control the floor until he or she remands the remainder of his/her time back to the President of the Senate. This is where the filibuster comes in...if you can't limit debate from the outset it becomes a game of wills and stamina. Also, in the Senate almost all amendments are germane to the main motion whether or not the amendments have anything to do at all with the motion at hand. To translate from Geek Speak that means that you could be debating a bill in the Senate about Hamburger Helper and Senator X can stand up and offer an amendment to your bill that would cut off food stamps to the elderly. In the House, the rules are much more strict and if you are debating a bill on Hamburger Helper you could perhaps offer an amendment that would change it from Hamburger Helper to Tuna Helper but if you tried to shut off granny's foodstamps, your motion will be ruled out of order as being not germane to the main motion.

What this usually means is that in the Senate if the opposition wants a main motion to fail they will attach a rider to that motion that is targeted at a pet project of the majority. So now you have to vote not only on a public option but also you have to decide if the amendment that passed that will strip a federal subsidy for a rail line through your home state that your constituents want is more important to your political future than making sure that millions of uninsured, only a fraction of which are voters in your home state, have a viable public insurance option. See the trap there?

There is a way to keep those sorts of amendments from being offered (they are called riders) on the Senate floor but that takes almost as much procedural wrangling as getting a cloture vote (cloture is what the vote is called that sets a predetermined time for debate and makes a filibuster impossible, a cloture requires 60 votes, once cloture is passed then a bill only needs 51 votes to pass).

So now that we have a public option in the bill, it is time for all of us to do our work. We need to be on our Senators like a Leather Daddy on a Pig Bottom. You need to call, write, fax, and stalk your Senators and make sure they know that you will not tolerate any health care reform bill that does not include a public option. With the right amount of public pressure, Senators will tow the line. But if even one Democrat or Independent gets a bug up his or her ass and decides to not follow the Majority Leader's lead...we are up shit creek without a public option.