Then I could say genius things like this:
Requiring 60 votes rather than 50 to pass legislation in a body with 100 members is a terrible idea. It’s always been a terrible idea. Nobody would design a legislature that way. But lately, filibustering has been used for even newer and more terrible reasons, like simply slowing bills down to be annoying.
Because it’s not like, say, mathematically, you’d need 51 votes to pass legislation in a 100-member body. (You can’t always count on having the VP as tie-breaker, Matt.)
Matt Yglesias is so smart. No wonder he gets paid to blog, and I do it for free.
And from what I understand, the complaints of filibusters in the current Congress are complete BS. They’re basically threats of filibusters and bluffs that are never called. I think it’s been a decade since we’ve had a genuine put-on-a-diaper-take-the-floor-and-refuse-to-relinquish filibuster.
What ever happened with the kerfuffle you and Matt had about the “Arab bomb” the Jews were developing to kill only Arabs but not Sephardic Jews? I remember him getting real stupid about that too?
I don’t think that was him. You’re confusing him with someone else.
Aziz Poonwala. Wrong dipshit.
http://www.yourish.com/2005/09/17/71
He’s actually admitted he was wrong about that, but it came years later. So he’s still a dipshit.
Irrelevant. The point is the ability of 41 senators to block legislation that a majority thinks is a good idea. The details of how they do it don’t matter.
Frankly, if I were designing a legislature, I probably would put some kind of super-majority rule in place, at least as a hurdle for creating programs that would have bureaucracies that would create their own constituencies and be hard to remove. Matt is young and immature and has no notion of the law of unintended consequences. But please don’t blame the Ivy League for him. I went to an Ivy and emerged with my ability to think unimpaired. Of course, I was a science major, so that might have made a difference.
When the Dems are in power and the filibuster is used against them, they complain, however, when they are out of power [which will happen in November] then the filibuster is a necessary part of the “check and balance legislation process.†This is so similar to Hillary’s famous speech that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism†when President Bush was in power, and of course now, Republican dissent is seditious!
It is actually comical if you can get past their memory deficits and blatant hypocrisy.
Dissent has not gone from being patriotic to being seditious; dissent has gone from being patriotic to being racist (an accusation that also serves to distract attention from the Favored One’s intimate association with a Jew-hater).
The Senate is designed to work just as it does. As a power check. To make it harder to pass “feel good” laws.
What pisses me off is that the LAST extension of unemployment “required”, as per Dear Leader a way to PAY for it. This time the republicans had a bill to do so, and the dems didn’t want to do it…
Double standard time is not apparently just for Jews. If I still prayed it would be for the republicans to find a half way decent person to run against Obama. And that they have the stones to pull ALL the punches. I want a “read my lips, no new taxes” campaign ad featuring the President saying, “your taxes will not go up one DIME”, followed by: “The mandate for insurance is NOT a tax; unless we need it to be to prevent it from being unconstitutional that is…”
Lying ass. I always wondered, if Presidential failure Carter would retain his mantel as the worst, most impotent president with a full term to fail forever. And now we now. He has to be heaving a giant racist sigh of relief right now.
I hope to God they don’t try to lame duck session their agenda through after the elections. This country will explode.
Robert Heinlein had a character suggest that a bicameral legislature have one house thar required a 2/3 majority to pass a law. The second house would require a 1/3 minority to repeal a law.
Long Rifle,
Preventing that lame duck session from succeeding is what filibustering is all about. Forty one Packs in the Senate, if they all hang tough, could block such an undemocratic move. Unfortunately Brown and the Maine hags still have strong RINO tendencies and are likely to vote for some piece of vicious idiocy the Dems want to put through, as they did with the recent destructive financial industry bill, perhaps asking a small bribe for their states in the form of earmarks or something.
“The details of how they do it don’t matter.”
Yes, it actually does. If they did it through threats or acts of violence, it would be completely different from them doing it by making the Senators late for dinner. Trying to conflate the various methods only grants the lowerst common denominator – in this case, forcing bills through with violence – a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve, and may well turn it into the only means the minority can use to overrule the majority, because the majority will use it right back on the minority.
The real mistake is that they made the threat of a filibuster the equivalent of a filibuster. Make the schmucks that won’t let go of the microphone actually wear the diaper and pee in the jug if it’s that important to them, don’t just back down over the threat of it. In this day of Blackberries, it’s not like the Senators couldn’t run their offices while the session is still in progress, coordinate bathroom breaks so the majority can relieve themselves without giving the minority a chance to call a vote when there are too many absentee senators to overrule them, and so on.