Whoyagonnacall? Filibusters!

[captainsblog]

For a long time, I've been aware of the vitriolic statement by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Who Thinks HE's Running The Country, Senator Mitch McChinless, aka Yertle the Turtle:

Yet it was only today that I realized just how far this cabal is willing to go to destroy the fabric of this nation. Despite failing at what I thought was the goal, of denying the President re-election, and despite the GOP even losing a goodly number of seats in his august body, it's clear from events of this week that the goal remains to attempt denying just what Deputy Droop said they'd try to deny: not Obama's re-election, but his second term. Even though he won it.

The evidence already in? That still less-than-a-majority minority prevented a treaty from coming to the Senate floor for a vote. A treaty that would not change U.S. law one iota, but which would extend the spirit, and most of the letter, of our nation's own Americans With Disabilities Act to the rest of civilized society. Marxist socialist liberals including former Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole, and former Republican Presidential president George "Pappy" Bush, came to the Senate floor to urge their own party's "colleagues" to pass it.

Like hell they would:

The Senate Republicans were shameless. They didn’t listen to Dole or to President George H.W. Bush, another World War II veteran who signed the Americans With Disabilities Act, on which the U.N. Convention was based. Instead, they listened to former Sen. Rick Santorum, who traveled to Washington to warn that the Convention could interfere with the right of parents to home school disabled children. Santorum, whose daughter is disabled, said the treaty would be a “direct assault on us and our family” because it would allow the government to separate disabled children from their parents. But as Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post:

The treaty requires virtually nothing of the United States. It essentially directs the other signatories to update their laws so that they more closely match the Americans with Disabilities Act. Even Lee thought it necessary to preface his opposition with the qualifier that “our concerns with this convention have nothing to do with any lack of concern for the rights of persons with disabilities.”

Their concerns, rather, came from the dark world of U.N. conspiracy theories. The opponents argue that the treaty, like most everything the United Nations does, undermines American sovereignty — in this case via a plot to keep Americans from home-schooling their children and making other decisions about their well-being.

So Tea Party paranoia triumphed over reaching out to a marginalized group. That dynamic pretty much defines the contemporary Republican Party.

Dick Durbin voted yes on the Convention. Mark Kirk -- the senator who would have benefited most from ratification -- was the only senator who did not vote. He’s still recovering from the stroke he suffered in January.

So this is what we have to look forward to for the next 24½ months until the next midterm election- for everything, from presidential appointments to routine legislation to dealing with the Fiscal Cliff, unless the incoming Democratic majority of the Senate balls up and does what it should have done on January 3, 2011:

Kill the Fil.

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It's historic, folkloric, the thing of almost sepia-tinted newsreels, of Jesse Helms trying to beat back integration or even staunch Democrats trying to Bork a certain appellate Justice. "Cloture," as it's officially known, is the device that allows as few as 41 out of 100 Senators to block passage of, or even prevent debate on, virtually any piece of legislation they choose. Since Senatorial representation is not proportional to population, that means that something around 30 percent of the voting population of this country- most of it Deliveranceland, although there are frothy exceptions- can keep this body from doing its job. The filibuster- as it historically became known- is not in the Constitution, but in the handed-down Rules of the Senate, which 51 of them, even 50 with V.P. Biden breaking a tie, can overrule on Day One of a legislative session.

It's time, people. When reserved for the especially egregious (see Justice Bork, supra,) it is understandable. But when it gets run into the ground to prevent any business from being conducted, any treaty from being passed, any nominee from being confirmed, it's been overused and needs to be smitten.

Republicans will cry foul- the same ones that used parliamentary tricks to get the original Bush tax cuts through the Senate without 60-vote acceptance, and that routinely prevent moderate Republicans in the House from even having a chance to join their Democratic colleagues in voting for anything (their speaker, John "Turn Off That Tanning Booth" Boehner, will not allow any bill to reach the floor unless it has "majority of the majority" support from his own party).

Fuck 'em.

You want protection of minority rights? (Pardon me while I chortle over the irony of your whiter-than-Wonder-Bread body advocating that.) Let's turn to that bastion of white male powerful prestige: the NFL.  Even they had to recognize, after numerous publicized fuckups, that they needed a way to protect teams from blatantly bad calls. So they came up with one. It's not perfect, but it's better than this garbage. Each coach gets two chances, in each half of each game, to "challenge" a broad scope of "calls" by the referees on the field. Because they're limited in number, and because there's a penalty for wasting them (a sustained on-field call costs the challenging coach a precious time-out), they are used sparingly.

So it could be with the losers in the Senate. Pick a number- five? Ten? Forty two?  And limit the number of filibusters per Congress to that number. That way, the McChinlesses and Frothies of that body would hesitate in holding up generally worthwhile things, for fear that when Obama pulls off his mask in 2013 and turns out to be Harvey Dent or whatever, they'll still have some challenges saved up.

You got a better idea? I'll listen to it- long as I don't have to listen to Yertle or Jeff Sessions or Crazy Uncle John McCain railing on about how bad they've got it.

Comments

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

Time to call this what it is -- which is treason...

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

But none dare call it treason!

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

For if it doth prosper...

Maybe we should not so much with the prospering?