The Filibuster - Keep, Adjust, or Destroy?

[goldenvalley]

Jul 15, 2021 19:33:17 GMT Traveler said:

IF Dems won more senate seats than they did, we wouldn't be relying on Manchinnema. They would have gotten more independent votes, but the riots scared them away. That and the fact that the rioters and looters went free for the most part. Responsibility matters. Not that the POG is at all responsible in the slightest, but MSM's strawmanitis got us Dems again. I still detest the NYT editorial page.

I'm not sure cracking heads (purely figuratively meant) during the protests would have made much difference. There are many states that have governors and legislatures that are completely populated by Republicans.  There is no way to get a US Senator from any other party in those states, with or without protests/riots.  It's kinda miraculous that Arizona elected the astronaut guy (sorry his name escapes me) who was a Democrat.  

[AnBr]

Jul 15, 2021 19:33:17 GMT Traveler said:

MSM's strawmanitis got us Dems again. I still detest the NYT editorial page.

I have a Facebook friend that is considerably more to the left than me, however he considers himself an historian and tries to look at things as free of bias as he can. The subject came up of the Post vs the Times and he rejects the Post because he perceives the Post as having a heavy bias, even if it aligns more with his own politics  and tried to make the case that the Times is more neutral. I concede that the Post may have more of a left leaning bias than the Times, but see it as more of the old adage that reality has liberal bias and the Times has given into the sin that has afflicted so much of the media; to be so scared of a charge of having a liberal bias that they bend so far backwards with bothsidesism that they end up with a right-wing bias, whether intentional or not.

Yes, the Times still has many progressive reporters/columnists such as Krugman, but they have taken into their midst disingenuous, unprincipled reich-wing hacks fabricators that make a mockery of any attempt on their part for balance. I used to think of the Times as being the paper of record, but the Gray Lady ain't what she used to be. The Post comes closer that these days.

[Traveler]

Totally agree. The grey lady has lost its luster. Still subscribe to both.

[indy]

Jul 21, 2021 0:50:58 GMT Traveler said:

Totally agree. The grey lady has lost its luster. Still subscribe to both.

I think that is a great attitude. The choices we are left with are few and stark. We can whinge over editorial decisions but they still need to be supported regardless.

[LFC]

Here's an article about Krysten Sinema and how she's changed from a strong progressive to being much more centrist / conservative and the progressives can't seem to apply pressure. It's to the point that she won't even speak to progressive groups who campaigned and hit the streets for her. I don't know what her political calculation is. Maybe she just doesn't think that support of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is as important in Arizona. This was an interesting take.

But other Arizona Democrats, like state Sen. Juan Mendez, have openly urged progressives to focus their energies elsewhere. Powe, who has observed Sinema operate for over a decade as an active member and past officer in the Maricopa County Democratic Party, told The Daily Beast that Sinema has clearly made her political calculation.

“Kyrsten is fierce, and she’ll do anything to win. If anything means transforming her values, that’s what has taken place,” she said.

“We’re going to have to pressure her, go through the process,” Powe added, “but she’s not gonna move.”

[jackd]

Probably Manchin won't move either.

[AnBr]

Jul 13, 2021 19:22:53 GMT LFC said:

Jul 13, 2021 19:16:28 GMT goldenvalley said:

I'm not happy to see voting rights treated as something that is secondary to focusing on the economic package. Other than that I'd say the priority economic package is good for most Americans in their day to day lives.

It's not. There are two categories of legislation today; one that takes 50 votes and one that takes 60 votes or is dependent on first removing the filibuster. That's it. (The only other choice, and it's not legislation, are executive orders. Like it or not that's the political world we live in.) AFAIC lumping 60-vote policies like voting rights, police reform, LGTBQ rights, or any number of other things with 50-vote economic policies is political journalism malfeasance.

And here is the biggest failing of the ultra left. It is as if they never heard the phrase "politics is the art of the possible." They shun achievable goals because they aren't their most important or do not go far enough only to demand the impossible or at least improbable, ignoring political realities of what is and is not achievable at the current time. They fail to grasp that you must take what you can get at the moment, but still keep trying for more. Voting rights may be far more important, but that does not mean that you put aside the achievable because you cannot get the more important, but currently impossible ones at the moment.

[LFC]

Manchin. Ugh.

Manu Raju
@mkraju

Manchin says he’ll not support carve-out of filibuster rules to raise debt ceiling in Dec. Says he has a “difference” with his party on using reconciliation. Says two sides need to cut a deal. “The filibuster is the only thread we have in America to keep democracy alive and well”

He sounds like he's stuck in time about 20 years back.

[pnwguy]

Oct 8, 2021 17:06:05 GMT LFC said:

Manchin. Ugh.

Manu Raju
@mkraju

Manchin says he’ll not support carve-out of filibuster rules to raise debt ceiling in Dec. Says he has a “difference” with his party on using reconciliation. Says two sides need to cut a deal. “The filibuster is the only thread we have in America to keep democracy alive and well”

He sounds like he's stuck in time about 20 years back.

If he could bring back the coal industry he would gladly stay 20 years back. He lives on West Virginia Savings Time.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 7, 2021 13:33:25 GMT @probabilistic3 said:

Jun 7, 2021 12:21:27 GMT LFC said:

Manchin killed the voting rights bill and is trying to defend himself. His defense is pretty weak gruel.

Any bill that is not supported by both Republicans and Democrats would further entrench divisions in the country. So goes Manchin's stated logic of steadfastly opposing any progress. (Personally, I have not paid much attention to the details of the HR1/SB1 - so don't have an opinion whether this is a worthwhile vehicle to pursue to ensure voting rights for all.)

If lack of bipartisanship in legislation is so dangerous to the wellbeing of our country, then why doesn't he agitate against the Republican state legislators who have been passing legislations related to voting, counting, and certifying elections exclusively on a partisan basis? If this is such a danger to the nation what has he done to prevent it from occurring? Preening about motherhood and apple pie in Charleston gazette doesn't count.

None of the reporters seem to have enough presence of mind to ask these simple questions.

The For the People Act is a moot question now.  The bill at hand is called the Freedom to Vote Act and it is slimmed down from the other one.  Manchin is a co sponsor.  Read the article, there are lots of details to it.  

[jackd]

Manchin's a cosponsor but he won't budge on the filibuster to pass it.  Claims he can get 10 Republicans.  Color me skeptical.

[LFC]

Schumer appears to be going for it. If Sinemanchin are going to be the cause of the country going down in flames they should at least be on record so history heaps the blame where it belongs, them and the GOP.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that the chamber will debate and vote on rule changes to help pass voting rights legislation on or before Jan. 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Schumer had said before the holidays that the chamber would redouble its stalled efforts to pass voting rights bills upon its return, and has now tied that push to the one year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“Let me be clear: January 6th was a symptom of a broader illness — an effort to delegitimize our election process, and the Senate must advance systemic democracy reforms to repair our republic or else the events of that day will not be an aberration — they will be the new norm,” he wrote in a Monday letter to colleagues.

“Given the urgency of the situation and imminence of the votes, we as Senate Democrats must urge the public in a variety of different ways to impress upon their Senators the importance of acting and reforming the Senate rules, if that becomes a prerequisite for action to save our democracy,” he added.

The obstacles to voting rights reform are the same as they’ve been all term: opposition from every Republican senator (with the possible exception of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act), and insistence from Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) on preserving the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold.

[jackd]

I think there's more than Manchin and Sinema. In a vote, they may be able to hide behind those two.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 4, 2022 17:07:26 GMT jackd said:

I think there's more than Manchin and Sinema. In a vote, they may be able to hide behind those two.

Yeah, but I was hoping that some of the R Senators that are retiring might have the guts to do something good on their way out the door.  Faint, feeble hope....

[AnBr]

Very faint.

[LFC]

Manchin and Sinema are lying about the history of the filibuster and the MSM, being about as useful as ever, didn't call them out on it. My guess is the lazy "journalists" can't be bothered to look up facts. After all, history is hard!

Manchin, who has steadfastly refused to support a carve-out to the filibuster for voting rights legislation — ready to allow democracy to be destroyed — said this to reporters just a few days ago:

[The filibuster is] the tradition of the Senate here in 232 years now. … We need to be very cautious what we do. … That’s what we’ve always had for 232 years. That’s what makes us different than any place else in the world.

The statement is completely false (yet wasn’t challenged by the reporters), as the Washington Post’s fack-checker Glenn Kessler explained today:

The filibuster, contrary to Manchin’s suggestion, is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, which went into effect 232 years ago…

…t was decades — 1856 — before the Senate established a right of unlimited debate…The word “filibustering” was first used on the Senate floor to connote unlimited debate in 1853, according to [legal scholars Catherine] Fisk and [Erwin] Chemerinsky. But it was not until the 1880s that filibusters were successful in derailing legislation…

That would make it 166 years that it’s been around, not 232 (and certainly not created by the nation’s founders, who explicitly rejected a supermajority for passing bills). Except even that is not exactly true. The current form of the filibuster, in which 60 votes are needed to even open debate — and an opposing senator is no longer required to hold the floor, speaking throughout the filibuster (eventually giving up or changing minds of proponents of a bill) — has only been around since 1975, as attorney Max Kennerly notes.

The filibuster has been changed, modified, reformed — whatever word you want to use — several times during the 20th century, and many exemptions have been made to it. That included just last month when the Senate raised the debt ceiling.

Moreover, while Democrats led by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid voted to end the use of the filibuster for lower court federal judges during the Obama years — because Republicans were blocking every one of President Obama’s appointees — Republicans led by Mitch McConnell ended the filibuster for Supreme Court justices just in time for Donald Trump to pack the court with extremists.

None of this is ever raised by reporters and interviewers with Manchin, or with Sinema, as they refuse to support ending or reforming the filibuster while Republicans are intent on blocking everything President Biden and Democrats want to accomplish for the American people.

Both Manchin and Sinema are allowed to promote themselves as upholding constitutional principles — again, though the Constitution has no stipulation for a filibuster — and the sanctity of Senate rules and procedures, as if those haven’t changed hundreds of times.

[goldenvalley]

Good grief the Senate waived the filibuster to raise the debt ceiling a month ago.  

[jackd]

Manchin is a bloviator. He may even believe his own bullshit.

[pnwguy]

Jan 14, 2022 22:24:45 GMT jackd said:

Manchin is a bloviator. He may even believe his own bullshit.

You mean he's come down with Trumpiatic Cancer?  If only there was a vaccine for that.

[LFC]

Oh, RonJohn.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is in the fight of his political career as even Republicans are quietly "having a heart attack" over his candidacy for a third term.

On Tuesday, Johnson took to his campaign Twitter to poll his followers and ask if people want to get rid of the filibuster to pass things like the human infrastructure bill and voting rights legislation.

Within just an hour, Johnson has over 22,000 respondents with 95 percent of them saying that they want to get rid of the filibuster and pass some legislation.

Johnson is having a tough time in his state, with his own hometown newspaper calling him a "delusional huckster" and "political grifter."

[LFC]

Sinemanchin just did their parts to destroy democracy.

Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) joined all the Republicans in blocking a temporary filibuster rule change that would have allowed Democrats to pass voting rights legislation with a simple majority.

The nearly year-long effort to win the two over, through repeated votes, speeches, endless meetings and presidential pressure failed hours before the anniversary of President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Congratulations, you two. You now own this. Sinema, in particular, should prepare to be primaried. Everything Republicans do to steal the vote will be heaped on her in the campaign. Not that it will matter much since Arizona Republicans will probably disenfranchise enough voters to prevent any Democrat from winning.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall just declared that Sinema has put a fork in her political career because its done. She's managed to make herself unelectable in Arizona as a Democrat, Independent, or Republican.

Amidst all the disappointment and tribulation of recent days please join me in taking a moment to step back, in a posture of mindful gratitude, to contemplate the fact that Kyrsten Sinema’s career in electoral politics is already over. Yes, the damage she’s already done will be difficult to remedy. She still has three solid years to do yet more damage. And she probably will. But none of that damage, none of the hijinks and characteristic game-playing to come, will or can change her electoral fate. In political terms, she’s already dead senator walking. And the most perplexing but paradoxically delightful part of it is that she doesn’t even seem to realize it yet.

How can I be so sure she’s a goner in such an uncertain time and in a reelection campaign almost three years away? It’s not just the increasingly likely primary challenge, which could end her Senate career on its own. Her problem runs much deeper. She has already made herself essentially unelectable, whether her quest for reelection ends in a primary or the general election.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 21, 2022 21:08:38 GMT LFC said:

Josh Marshall just declared that Sinema has put a fork in her political career because its done. She's managed to make herself unelectable in Arizona as a Democrat, Independent, or Republican.

Amidst all the disappointment and tribulation of recent days please join me in taking a moment to step back, in a posture of mindful gratitude, to contemplate the fact that Kyrsten Sinema’s career in electoral politics is already over. Yes, the damage she’s already done will be difficult to remedy. She still has three solid years to do yet more damage. And she probably will. But none of that damage, none of the hijinks and characteristic game-playing to come, will or can change her electoral fate. In political terms, she’s already dead senator walking. And the most perplexing but paradoxically delightful part of it is that she doesn’t even seem to realize it yet.

How can I be so sure she’s a goner in such an uncertain time and in a reelection campaign almost three years away? It’s not just the increasingly likely primary challenge, which could end her Senate career on its own. Her problem runs much deeper. She has already made herself essentially unelectable, whether her quest for reelection ends in a primary or the general election.

Can a second Democrat be elected US Senator from Arizona?  I doubt it.  Sinema will just be replaced by one of those right wing crazies that are now in the Arizona statehouse.

[LFC]

Looks like the majority of Senate Democrats have finally come to grips with the realization that the filibuster has been used by Republicans to destroy democracy. It also drives the opinion of the politically uninformed that both sides in Congress are broken. The abuse of the filibuster helps the GOP in more ways than one.

TPM Reader PT notes — and rightly so — that it’s actually remarkable that there are only four Democratic senators expressing any real level of resistance to changing the filibuster rules. That’s a massive sea change from as little as four or five years ago. As I’ve noted, I fully expect Warner and King to give way in short order if their constituents press them. In reality, it’s just the two odd men (people) out: Manchin and Sinema. I can guarantee you that it is impossible for a Democratic candidate to be elected to the Senate anywhere in the United States while supporting the filibuster. But in this post I wanted to step back from the immediate necessity and advantages of ditching or scaling back the filibuster to note how important it is for the future of civic democracy in the United States for the filibuster to be abolished.

Filibuster defenders now usually argue future advantage. Senator King defends the filibuster arguing that what seems like an obstacle today will be needed as a shield in the future. Filibuster opponents correctly respond that it is folly to believe that the current Republican Party would hesitate for a moment to ditch the filibuster if it represented any meaningful obstacle to getting anything they wanted. They took the wildly unprecedented step of refusing to entertain a Supreme Court nomination for an entire year to steal the seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia. They ditched the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments as soon as they had the chance to pack the Court under Trump. Everything we know about the current GOP tells us it’s folly to believe they’d hesitate.

Also important is that the contemporary GOP simply has much less it wants to do through legislation. They never tried to scrap the filibuster under Trump because they didn’t have anything they really cared about passing. Obamacare repeal failed but on a simple majority vote. The filibuster will disappear the moment it is to Republicans’ advantage to make it disappear. Keeping it around as a future shield for Democrats is pure folly.

But again, let’s step back from these questions of immediate advantage. Even if we were certain that Republicans would abide by the filibuster rules forever, it would still be critical to ditch it. Abolishing the filibuster is actually critical to the future health of our democracy in general. Here’s why.

The filibuster is one of the key drivers of cynicism about electoral politics in the United States and demoralization about political participation generally. It is thus a key enabler of nascent authoritarian movements which thrive on civic and political dysfunction. Candidates and parties get elected promising to do X if they win an election. They get elected and X doesn’t happen. Indeed, not only does it not happen — it doesn’t even come up for a vote. Surely, it must be that the promises were a lie or a sham. The fix must be in.

[LFC]

I loathe this woman so much. She's a complete attention whore. That probably makes her a better fit for the Republican Party anyway.

One of the two most thorn-in-Democrats’-side senators rather brazenly planted her flag on the filibuster today — and she did it at a … Mitch McConnell event of all places.

Calling Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) the “most effective first-term senator” he’s seen in his decades in the upper chamber, McConnell introduced Sinema ahead of her speech and Q&A at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.

“She is, today, what we have too few of in the Democratic Party: a genuine moderate and a deal-maker,” he said.

During her speech at the McConnell Center — where other Democrats have given speeches in the past; President Biden did in 2011 — Sinema gushed about her friendship with McConnell, bragged about her cross-aisle reaching and even predicted that her party would lose control of Congress in November.

“As you all know, control changes between the House and the Senate every couple of years. It’s likely to change again in just a few weeks,” Sinema said.

The Arizona senator then expressed support for strengthening the filibuster in a way that would not only bring legislative progress to a halt in a 50-50 Senate, but also would reverse the rules that her bff McConnell set in 2017 to make it easier to approve Supreme Court nominees during Trump’s presidency.

“I have an incredibly unpopular view,” Sinema said to the audience gathered at the McConnell Center in Kentucky, before saying she supports a 60-vote threshold for all legislation. “I actually think we should restore the 60-vote threshold for the areas in which it has been eliminated already. We should restore it.

“It would make it harder for us to confirm judges. And it would make it harder for us to confirm executive appointments in each administration,” she continued, suggesting it would creates space for “more of that middle ground in all parts of our governance.”

On the upside it doesn't appear that her political career is long for this world. There's almost nobody who likes her. She's at over 50% disapproval in demographic after demographic.