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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Buried in the headlines yesterday was the news that Scotland Yard has decided not to prosecute any of the Labour peers involved in the peers-for-hire controversy uncovered by the Sunday Times two weeks ago. This is what John Yates, assistant commissioner of the Met police, had to say on the matter:

The application of the criminal law to members of the House of Lords in the circumstances that have arisen here is far from clear. In addition, there are very clear difficulties in gathering and adducing evidence in these circumstances in the context of parliamentary privilege.

These factors, when set alongside the preliminary examination, lead us to the decision that the Metropolitan police will not undertake a criminal inquiry into any of the allegations raised.

Oh, okay. I understand. So parliamentary privilege protects anyone in Parliament from being prosecuted, right? That’s why no MP has ever been charged with any criminal activity concerning their dealings in Parliament, right? Or is it just the House of Lords where being caught in the act is no longer good enough? The Sunday Times sting involved peers literally haggling over the price of changing legislation in front of undercover reporters. How is this not enough for a criminal charge? What more do they want, a signed confession and a peer cackling “I’d do it all over again if I had the chance! Mwahaha!”

Putting aside the Met’s Inspector Clouseau approach to investigating peers,  reform of the House of Lords cannot come soon enough. The principle reforms that need to be addressed are pretty obvious. First, though it’s true that Lords are banned from “exercising parliamentary influence” in exchange for money, it’s also true that there aren’t any real sanctions for doing so and no, “naming and shaming” is not a proper sanction. If corrupt peers aren’t going to face criminal charges, then at the very least they should be expelled from the Lords for a set period or, even better, face outright expulsion.

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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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