Posted on 08/19/2009 5:08:27 PM PDT by XHogPilot
This past spring, Senator Claire McCaskill wrote to me asking for $50 to help elect more Democrats, so we could have a filibuster-proof Senate. Now that Al Franken has finally been declared the sixtieth Democratic senator, her plea may seem moot. But even with Franken in office, we don't have a filibuster-proof Senate. To get to sixty on the Democratic side, we'll still have to cut deals.
Maybe we should start sending postcards like the following: "Dear Senator: Why do you keep asking for my money? You've already got the fifty-one votes you need to get rid of the filibuster rule."
The post-1975 procedural filibuster is entirely unlike the old filibuster, the one Mr. Smith, as played by the unshaven Jimmy Stewart, stayed up all night to mount in his plea for honest government.
The old filibuster is extinct. No one has stood up and read recipes for Campbell's Soup for decades. In 1975 Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, in his role as president of the Senate, ruled that just fifty-one senators could vote to get rid of the filibuster entirely. A simple majority of liberals could now force change. But instead of dumping the filibuster once and for all, the liberals, unsure of their support, agreed to a "reformed" Rule 22. It was this reform that, by accident, turned the once-in-a-blue-moon filibuster into something that happens all the time. The idea was to reduce the votes needed to cut off debate from sixty-seven, which on the Hill is a big hill to climb, to just sixty.
(Excerpt) Read more at thenation.com ...
You can bet your bippy!
Democrats have no shame. But if they do pull this crap, there will soon be 60 GOP senators.
Liberals came up with the new-and-improved polite filibuster in 1975 and it blew up in their faces, and with Blue Dogs from conservative states it promises to be a headache for Obamunism.
They’ll have to wheel in Kennedy and Byrd to get their votes.
We know better than you redneck trash!
“it puts senators from conservative regions like the South, the border states and the Great Plains in control”
In other words, it puts racists in control. What did we fight the Civil War for, anyway, if this can be allowed to go on? (/s)
There will have to be, because if they lose their majority, their last act in the Senate before the next term majority GOP gets seated will be to go back to the old filibuster rule requiring 60 votes for cloture. Like you said, they have no shame.
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