Filibuster
July 17, 2013 Leave a comment
This is the sort of thing that becomes old news fast, but I still think the filibuster issue is important to take note of here. First Kevin Drum lays out (pre-compromise) exactly what is so insidious and historically unique about what the Republicans have been up to:
Or, in some cases, to merely have the federal government operate at all. You see, the nominees that really have Reid seeing red are the ones for the NLRB and the CFPB. Republicans don’t actually have any special objection to any of them. They’ve just decided to shut down those two agencies via filibuster. The NLRB can’t legally operate at allwithout a quorum, and several important CFPB functions also can’t be implemented at allunless the agency has a director. So these agencies of the US government—agencies duly created by Congress and signed into law by the president—are effectively being eliminated by a minority of one house of Congress.
That’s what’s different this time around. Legislation has been filibustered for a long time. Judges have been filibustered for a long time. Republicans are doing it more now than in the past, but they’re not doing something that’s fundamentally new. Executive branch nominees are different. Filibusters of presidential appointments have been rare, and they’ve never been used to shut down entire arms of the government.
Meanwhile, Ezra brings ten facts to show the absurdity of the situation (here’s the two I really like):
1) Before Obama, 20 executive branch nominees were filibustered. Under Obama, 16 have been filibustered. This is a statistic Reid’s office likes to use. If current trends continue, they note, it’s entirely possible Obama could end up seeing more of his executive-branch nominees filibustered than every other president in history combined…
4) Republicans aren’t just trying to block nominees. They’re trying to nullify or change agencies. The fights that have Democrats most exercised right now aren’t over normal nominees. They’re over the National Labor Relations Board, where the GOP has refused to confirm enough members to create a quorum, and which thus can’t legally carry out its normal duties; and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where the GOP has said they’re blocking the nominee not out of any particular concern over his qualifications, but because they oppose the agency as currently constructed and want to see it changed. Democrats consider this a dangerous new tactic that needs to be quickly shut down.
And, yes, the Democrats basically “won” the compromise, but they really should have “gone nuclear” and eliminated this entirely absurd abuse of minority power. Kevin Drum, again, while excerpting Jonathan Bernstein, nicely lays out what’s wrong with not actually eliminating the filibuster:
After all, Republicans didn’t agree to stop the filibusters. They just agreed to provide 60 votes for cloture when needed:
…
What’s different, post-deal, is that Republicans have apparently agreed that these filibusters will be limited — that they will avoid defeating cloture on executive branch nominations, and thus allow Democrats to confirm those nominees as long as they have a simple majority. They can still filibuster, however, and it’s not as if it’s meaningless; it does, in fact, use up Senate floor time that could be used for something else, and it’s not unusual for Senate floor time to be valuable.
This has always been an underappreciated facet of the Senate filibuster. Republicans routinely filibuster people and bills that they have no real problem with, which is why you occasionally have a filibuster one week followed by a 98-0 vote the next week to approve something (or someone). Why? Because it sucks up floor time, and the more time spent on useless stuff like this, the less time there is for passing actual legislation.
The filibuster is an absurdity in a democratic system of government and it needs to go. And you won’t need to remind me I said that when Democrats are in a minority.
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