Entangled Alliances

photo credit: CFAPAF

On Thursday night  U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was forced to stall a vote on a $410 billion spending package needed to fund the federal government through to September, because he didn’t have enough votes for it in the Senate. It will now be delayed till later this week, to give enough time for Republicans to have their way with it. The reason for the delay? Reid did not have sixty votes. Sixty votes is, of course, the crucial number for any legislation in the Senate, because it prevents a Republican “filibustering” a bill and thus obstructing its passage . As such, it’s a number that could prove the downfall for Obama’s entire legislative agenda.

But it needn’t be like this.

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Given the latest developments in the saga of the U.S. Stimulus Package, many are now asking whether it isn’t about time the filibuster was abolished.  To recap: in order to secure a filibuster proof majority for the Senate version of the bill, Democrats have allowed a centrist coalition of senators to cut over $80 billion of valuable job-creating provisions from it, thus guaranteeing three Republican votes.

The question of abolishing the filibuster has never been more pressing than at the present, where America is faced with an absurd, almost Daliesque situation: A Democratic Congress and White House allowing (largely) Republican Senators to strip jobs from the legislation that is America’s best hope of stemming the rise in unemployment caused by the biggest crisis since the Great Depression.

First, a quick primer. The filibuster is an archaic Senate rule that allows a lone senator to defy the majority by endlessly debating a piece of legislation, thus preventing a vote on it. In order to end a filibuster, there must be a “cloture vote” – three fifths of the senate, or 60 senators, is required for cloture. It has a rather accidental history (for a brief breakdown, read Matthew Yglesias’s article on it)  and most of its life it has been used sparingly; yet in recent times it has taken on the form of a oft-used partisan tool that arguably obstructs Congress from getting much done.  In the 1960s, no Congress had more than seven filibusters. The 110th Congress, which just ended, featured 137.

Obviously there are serious, albeit transient, political considerations to be taken into account when talking about abolishing the filibuster. Back in 2005 the Republican majority Senate, faced with Democrats willing to filibuster the President’s judicial nominees, mulled over the idea of bypassing the rule – the so called “nuclear option” . This, it was agreed, would have been very “bad” for Democrats. Now, faced with obstructionist Republicans that show no signs of wanting to work with Obama, nuking the filibuster suddenly seems like it would be “good” for Democrats. But an argument based on the current political status quo should never be allowed to make it out the gate, at least not if we are concerned with rules that are based on timeless considerations.

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