Chris Cillizza thinks the White House is making the filibuster a campaign issue. He’s a horse-race reporter, so everything’s a campaign issue to him. When all you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail, etc.
But the filibuster is not a campaign issue. It’s a governance issue. If you have 59 votes in the Senate and an artificial construct that demands 60, and a minority party committed to lockstep obstructionism over anything else, you have a governance problem. To be sure, Democrats have other levers at their disposal to get their agenda passed, and there are two most frequently cited – 1) using reconciliation for budgetary items, which cannot be filibustered – and which is basically the plan for passing a health care bill; and 2) highlighting and essentially shaming Republicans over their willingness to obstruct, the “make them filibuster” approach which starts with a coordinated information campaign of the kind we’re starting to see. Both of these are means to a governance end, not a campaign end.
Cillizza cites as proof that this is only campaign talk the article from his own paper stating that Harry Reid hasn’t scheduled a vote on the issue. But Tom Udall’s is calling for a rules change at the beginning of the next Congress, which he believes he can get with 50 votes. That cannot happen until January 2011, so there cannot possibly be a vote before then. In the meantime, you would need 67 votes for a rule change, and if that were possible, we wouldn’t be talking about a 60-vote filibuster. As for the nuclear option, that’s not a vote that you schedule, but a Parliamentary ruling that the chair makes and upholds by majority vote.
The bottom line is that Senate rules are a governance issue, one that is sending the country into decline.
A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.
Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison […]
The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.
People don’t have a sense of process rules, and it would be a silly thing on which to hinge a political campaign. People are interested in results, and Senate rules are impeding those results.
