CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
September 17, 2009 09:03 AM UTC
41 Comments
I disagree on the conclusions, but can’t fault the overview – it’s very thorough. One question: does it have to be a Democrat who calls for a quorum? The painful part would be having the “backup” Republican calling for quorum counts every hour or two.
Yes, it’s terribly painful to Democrats to maintain their presence during a filibuster. At most 7 of them (plus perhaps one or both of the independents – I think one more likely) can be “out of hand” at any one time, assuming they all support a bill so much that they’re willing to put up with these shenanigans. Realistically, this means only one or two Senate Dems can be truly absent during a filibuster…
But, if you go with most of the polls, support for a public option is strong enough that Democrats holding out against the wingers might be a PR gain. In fact, if, as you suggest, it’s the Inhofe’s and the DeMint’s leading the filibuster charge, then Democrats could stand to gain significantly. Democrats have a problem right now: they’re losing their popularity among their base, and it’s got a lot to do with health care. People who vote for Democrats don’t want a lousy plan, but they do want a plan. A few days in chambers listening to whacko Senators preaching from the podium (and breaking out to the Capitol steps for the occasional press conference about it) would not be a Bad Thing, IMHO. Let it go on for a week. Do some work, then come back to the filibuster. I believe that’s within the power of the majority to schedule, no?
If you go for a traditional filibuster, you cannot schedule any other business. The work of the Senate literally grinds to a halt. The only way you can schedule other work is if you stick with the modern filibuster (i.e., no babbling).
That’s why the filibuster is such a powerful weapon.
The anti-filibustering side has to be even more determined than the filibustering side. That’s why filibustering is such a non-idle threat: because it’s a heck of a lot easier to filibuster, troublesome than it is, than to break a filibuster, if you don’t clearly have 60 votes on your side.
It can happen. But that’s the answer to the constant refrain of “I don’t understand: why don’t the Democrats just make the Republicans carry out a filibuster?”
Because it’s a huge pain in the ass to do it. Are Democrats prepared to have the entire caucus live in the Senate building for a month or two, never leaving, while the Republicans just send in two Senators at a time? Do you think that’s something they can afford to do casually?
Either the Democrats rustle up 60 votes, or they can’t break a filibuster unless somehow the Republicans screw up. It’s just that simple.
That means holding on to 57 Democrats, including the severely sick Robert Byrd, plus Independents Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman, and adding at least one Republican vote. Good luck.
Folks who keep saying “but we have 60 votes! I don’t understand!” indeed, don’t understand.
I remember the Republicans talkng about a nuclear option if the Democrats didn’t cower to the Bush agenda.
which only requires a majority vote. THat is the nuclear option around the filibuster
Is it a procedural vote to end the filibuster ? Why does it have such an ominous name – because it is somehow dirty pool ? Just curious.
It was to change Rule XXII to only require a majority, not a supermajority to end debate. wikipedia has a surprisingly good summary of it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N…
There has been so much bad faith on behalf of the minority party right now regarding healthcare, from Joe Wilson, to the tea party express, to pandering for health insurers, that I think the dems should use it if they have to, so we can finally get the shit done.
The republicans are going to use everything in their arsenal to stifle meaningful healthcare reform, and indeed we have seen a lot of it already.
I’ll see your death panel/Nazi/socialism/government takeover canards and raise you a nuclear option.
because it meant that once the change was made, it’s going to be around for a long time and was going to be a complete game changer then and well into the future. Just like the problem they are currently facing in filling Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. Making a change like that always has unintended consequences…..
The filibuster has been used in the past mostly to “protect” the South from civil rights legislation.
…let the Civil Rights Act come to the floor?
those were Dinos!! Really, they were just waiting for a reason to run back into the fold of the Party of Lincoln. It had been 100 years since Lincoln, after all.
Not really sure how you can call them DINOs, because back then that’s what a Democrat was.
But I know history, and I realize that Democrats have changed. They’ve gotten much worse.
or ironic. or something. i guess i forgot the requisite “:-)”
But I’m glad someone here can laugh with me rather than get all indignant at the mere mention that a Democrat might have once been racist.
if you consider trying to reform health care as worse than opposing civil rights. I like them better, but you think differently I can see.
Dems who voted against civil rights either:
(1) became repubs
(2) retired
(3) changes their minds about civil rights
And I don’t think reforming health care is worse than opposing civil rights. Mostly I was joking, but in the sense that the party went from the relatively conservative JFK to a sling of Carter/FDR-style liberals, many of whom are extremely corrupt, it got worse.
Republicans got so much better after that, until 2000 when they ran on good issues, took power, and promptly rammed shitty legislation down their own voters’ throats. Medicare Part D? Ridiculous. Patriot Act? Mostly ridiculous. No Child Left Behind? Awful. The Department of Education needs to be boarded up altogether.
Right now we should all be worried.
Wow. What a lot of silly arguments we could have avoided over the last few years. You are a treasure. Must admit…I’m one of those make them go through with the damned cots on the floor filibuster arguers. Consider me reformed.
I was on the Senate side as a D staffer when the R’s had control in the 108th session. One of my clearest memories of that session was watching the R’s trying to line up 60 votes on the energy bill, and they only got 59 because Tom Delay wouldn’t concede on MTBE language so the NH Senators voted no on cloture. We were counting each vote in the office during the roll call. If I recall, Reid also pulled a ~16-hour(?) solo filibuster on something that session.
If it’s only the majority party who can make a quorum call, then “all” the Dem leadership needs to do is make sure no one makes that call when there are fewer than 51 Senators in the chamber. Right?
If you can keep “suspect” Dems away from the chamber, then you wouldn’t really need to worry how many are on hand. Right?
It seems like this would be easier to do than to keep 50 Dems in close proximity to the chamber.
Any Senator can request a quorum. As for “suspect” Dems, I’m not sure I follow your question.
I just needed this cleared up to make sure I understood.
(What I was referring to with “suspect” Dems was only germane if only members of the majority party could call for a quorum. Thus I was allowing for a scenario in which some in the majority party were supportive of the filibusterer’s objective (i.e., members whose loyalty was suspect). But all of this is moot now.
Is the ruling limiting quorum calls to 2 per filibustering Senator still in effect? That is, I think, one of the big things that limited use of filibusters in the past.
Of course, this isn’t your daddy’s Republican Party. Either they’re all pod people, or they’ve got some mighty huge leverage over their party, because even the “moderate” Republicans seem to be falling in line to support the filibuster on this one.
IMHO, it’s a ridiculous abuse of their position as a Senator – one that, like Joe Wilson’s outburst the other week, would have been largely condemned or at least gone unsupported in the past. But the GOP of today is a “win at all costs” kind of organization, more interested in power than in governance. In today’s GOP, this is “the right thing to do”.
The big change in the filibuster rules came in ’75, when they switched from a two-thirds super-majority to a three-fifths super-majority. The compromise left the other provisions intact, which in retrospect was a mistake.
That said, Senators didn’t forsee the Senate becoming a hyper-parliamentary body, which is really the issue here. When someone like Olympia Snowe – who’s ridiculously popular in Maine and theoretically could have switched parties – can be brought in line, then the system as a whole is broken.
That’s the problem; it’s not so much that we need the right guy in the White House; it’s that the system, in and of itself, is broken. And I don’t see a way around that.
the other way is that it slows passage of anything way down, which was always the point of the Senate rule structure in the first place. From the beginning it was supposed to be the deliberative chamber, where consensus could be found through debate and hell, why do we have to fight over anything when the best ideas will win? Of course that was unrealistic even back in the 1700’s, but I came to appreciate how hard it is to get anything to pass. The one time I saw that break down in a serious way was the fear-induced passage of the Patriot Act.
From one perspective, there’s actually nothing wrong with the Senate, since it is meant to be the deliberative chamber, where Senators can rise above party (or in the Original Daddies lingo, “faction”) to consider issues in the best interests of the country.
That assumes that the Senate would behave like a super-charged House of Lords (for lack of a better term) as opposed to the parliamentary discipline of the House of Representatives.
Obviously, that’s changed. I think it started doing so when Republicans from the class of ’94 started stepping up to the Senate, and took behaviors learned in the iron forge of Tom Delay’s Republican caucus with them, but you’d know more about that, having actually been there (I was in the House at the time).
it’s not an original observation, of course, but I agree with what I think was the general consensus that the Senate started getting very testy when the House R’s from the Gingrich era started coming over to the Senate
Senators would arrive with pee bottles and would read from the phone book or dictionary.
More recently, the Dems did stage an actual filibuster circa ’02 or ’03 when the Shrub tried to put Miguel Estrada on the Ct. of App.
CSPAN covered the “debate.” I remember watching a few minutes of Hillary delivering a dissertion on the history of the constitution which was probably from the master’s thesis done by one of her staff members.
It beat reading the phone book or dictionary.
I don’t see why this is so bad:
If there’s no quorum after a Democrat has demanded a quorum call, the Senate must adjourn, giving the Republican debaters a chance to go home, sleep, and generally put things off even more.
Everyone goes home and sleeps, and then you do it the next day, right? What’s the problem?
The filibuster doesn’t end unless you can invoke cloture. In order to do that, you need 60 votes – or count on the Republicans to screw up by yielding to a Democrat.
If you don’t follow the rules, the majority party can pick up on the breach and step in. Which is why you have at least one “helper” Republican on the floor along with the filibusterer; one to gab (or at least “hold the floor”), one to make motions or take over when the first has to yield the floor for a break. Most Senators don’t have the stamina of Strom Thurmond. (Thank whatever gods you may!)
The way the quorum call also works is that the majority party has to stay in the chamber while the Minority Party is actually encouraged to have as few as possible in the chamber. This allows the minority party to be in the hallways doing press conferences, news shows, and so on that helps the minority define the debate and gain public support. This is doubly bad, because the filibuster attracts tons of public attention, and the only one able to address the media is the minority party…
Thanks roguestaffer, your analysis was excellent.
I neglected to add that piece – thanks!
You’re doing a real public service posting this.
(Was that 1964 Republican filibuster possibly on the Civil Rights Act?)
Originally, filibuster were one- or two-man affairs; you didn’t start seeing WWE-style battle royales until the advent of civil rights legislation.
Incidentally, the House had a filibuster rule as well, until 1842, I believe.
..but there seems to be an analytical step missing in your commentary. Or, maybe it’s obvious to the world already but flew over my head at light speed:
Because a filibuster is a pain in the arse to the majority party, that party will do much, much, much to avoid a likely filibuster.
In other words, the filibustering party would be quite happy to have one, and it uses this as leverage against the other party?
I don’t know that they’d be happy, per se, to have a filibuster, but that’s a huge motivating factor.
It does not make sense that the Senators who want to sustain the filibuster do not have to be present. Surely it would be more logical that if they’re not around then provided quorum is present then they only need 3/5 of those present to vote.
And why did in times of old did anyone bother with the actual filibuster? On the faint hope that a speaker would falter and give them the ‘ball’?