Posted on 01/06/2022 7:50:16 AM PST by Kaslin
A new year is here and Congress will no doubt be in a hurry to pass pivotal legislation in the early months of the year. Much of the summer and fall will be spent campaigning for the November elections. And, in the run-up to campaign season, congressional leadership will do everything in their power to protect vulnerable members from making tough votes. The window to get anything of significance done is already narrowing.
For congressional Democrats – who hold slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, as well as the White House – the sting of defeat is still fresh from their inability to pass the Build Back Better Act in 2021. The pressure will be even greater to deliver a victory for the party before Americans go to the polls in November. Unfortunately, it seems the Democrats’ preferred method to alleviate that pressure will be to revisit the elimination of the legislative filibuster in the Senate.
The filibuster has been around since 1798 when it was inadvertently created by then-Vice President Aaron Burr. Burr held that Senators should not hold separate votes on ending debate, thus it became theoretically possible to prevent votes on legislative initiatives by extending debate for as long as possible.
Naturally, Burr’s nemesis – and noted advocate for big centralized government – Alexander Hamilton opposed the move. He also opposed any supermajority requirement to advance legislation and it was one of his objections to the Articles of Confederation. According to Hamilton in Federalist 22, the real purpose of such requirements “is to embarrass the administration [and] to destroy the energy of the government… It is often, by the impracticability of obtaining the necessary number of votes, kept in a state of inaction.
Hamilton’s objections are precisely why mechanisms like the legislative filibuster are so crucial today. Most of the framers understood an overactive federal government to be a threat to American liberty. The nation was structured in such a way so as to prevent the beliefs of the minority from being subjected to the tyranny of the majority. Only measures thoughtfully considered and obtaining some consensus ought to be passed into law.
The necessity of this view is in action today. When [both] political parties attempt to avert the filibuster/cloture process the Senate has in place today is when they are most boldly partisan. Most recently, congressional Democrats, with only 50 seats in the Senate tried to pass a multi-trillion dollar spending bill with a number of radical provisions, all amidst the backdrop of record setting national debt. It was by the grace of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) that the Build Back Better Act is not law today, wreaking havoc on taxpayers and the economy.
For decades, senators in both major parties sought to defend the rights of the minority party by upholding the filibuster and the right to extended debate. As recently as 2005, this included the man now leading the charge to abolish the filibuster, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). In 2005, Schumer said of efforts to abolish the filibuster:
“The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the Founding Fathers called ‘the cooling saucer of democracy’ into the rubber stamp of dictatorship. We will not let them. They want – because they can’t get their way on every judge – to change the rules midstream, to wash away 200 years of history. They want to turn this country into a banana republic, where if you don’t get your way, you change the rules. It would be a doomsday for democracy if we do.”
Schumer’s words could very easily be applied today. His Senate Democratic caucus cannot get its way on social welfare spending or election reform legislation. Because of that, they want to change the rules midstream, wiping away what has been Senate precedent since 1798. They want to turn the Senate into an institution where, if you don’t get your way, you change the rules.
Thankfully, it seems Manchin and Sinema are once again holding the line against a broader partisan incursion. There is no doubt Schumer and the rest of party leadership will turn the screws harder in the coming weeks. It is vital for senators of all stripes to vocally defend the filibuster, as many of them have for the entirety of their Senate careers.
Good luck with that.
Nothing short of a convention of states will do anything to “rein in big government”. They are out of touch and out of control.
Better is keeping the Constitution as written and originally understood and intended will rein in UNCONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT.
How’s that worked so far?
I used to be a COS guy, but i’ve soured on it. Doesn’t/wouldn’t go far enough.
There is only one way now.
Chuckie should go forward w/ the filibuster plan on the assumption that a desiccated old pervert polling on a par with the desirability of having cholera is not going to drag down all the Dem marginal seats.......25 Dems have already jumped the sinking ship.
Hope springs eternal for the left......it IS possible that a midterm election with a massively unpopular president of the majority party will go well for the incumbents.
And BTW, it’s also possible that Nanzi Pelosi will be voted Miss America, Kamala Harris will enter a nunnery .....and Ted Lieu will win the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in the fields of string theory and quantum mechanics.
"Article I, Section 8, Clause 7: To establish Post Offices and post Roads;"
"10th Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
After all, most peacetime “federal” domestic policy is based on stolen state powers and uniquely associated state revenues imo.
State revenues are stolen by corrupt, post-17A ratification Congress by means of unconstitutional federal taxes, taxes that Congress cannot reasonably justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
Insights welcome.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.