The conventional wisdom keeps insisting that Republican filibusters are just giving Dems a taste of their own medicine. When they were in the minority, Dems blocked legislative progress as often as they could, the argument goes, so they have no right to complain now that the GOP is doing the same thing.
But this just isn’t so.
Seven months into the current two-year term, the Senate has held 42 “cloture” votes aimed at shutting off extended debate — filibusters, or sometimes only the threat of one — and moving to up-or-down votes on contested legislation….
Nearly 1 in 6 roll-call votes in the Senate this year have been cloture votes. If this pace of blocking legislation continues, this 110th Congress will be on track to roughly triple the previous record number of cloture votes — 58 each in the two Congresses from 1999-2002, according to the Senate Historical Office.
The Republican minority has created a de facto 60-vote minimum to do anything of substance in the Senate. They’ll allow routine up-or-down votes on renaming post offices, or those rare bills that enjoy near-unanimous support, but otherwise, it’s filibuster time on the Senate floor. And while the number of filibusters has been going up pretty consistently for 20 years, these Republicans appear to be in a league of their own.
Their excuses are pretty pathetic.
“You can’t say that all we’re going to do around here in the United States Senate is have us govern by 51 votes — otherwise we might as well be unicameral, because then we would have the Senate and the House exactly the same,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
To which Reid responds: “The problem we have is that we don’t have many moderate Republicans. I don’t know what we can do to create less cloture votes other than not file them, just walk away and say, ‘We’re not going to do anything.’ That’s the only alternative we have.”
McCain’s rationale is pretty absurd. He’s effectively arguing: Water down bills or we’ll bring the chamber to a halt. This from a man who used to say “elections have consequences.”
If the GOP doesn’t like a bill, they can vote against it. If it passes anyway, they can urge the president to veto it. But holding the chamber hostage just further demonstrates why the modern Republican Party is unable to govern.
Besides this isn’t about the GOP waiting for bipartisan bills; it’s about obstructionism. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said a Republican colleague of his told him that a strategy has been adopted by the minority to “prevent any accomplishment” by the new Congress:
“I had a Republican colleague tell me it is the Republican strategy to try to prevent any accomplishment of the Democratic Congress. That is set in their caucus openly and directly that they don’t intend to allow Democrats to have any legislative successes, and they intend to do it by repeated filibuster.”
The only resolution is public outrage, which might encourage the GOP to allow the Senate to start voting on bills again. Otherwise, they have no disincentive.