The ‘F’ word

February 7, 2007

No, not that one; I’m referring to “filibuster.” According to a report in Roll Call today, the latest Republican effort to block the Senate agenda is going to be over the budget.

Senate Democrats and Republicans are headed for a classic game of chicken this week over the nine remaining fiscal 2007 appropriations bills.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is poised to bring up a joint funding resolution for 13 Cabinet agencies, Congress and numerous independent agencies as early as today, but he has said repeatedly that he will not permit any Senators to offer amendments to the measure.

That stance has prompted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to threaten a Republican filibuster, and both sides are waiting to see who will blink before a possible government shutdown upon the expiration of the current continuing resolution on Feb. 15.

“At some point you get to Feb. 15 and something has to give,” said Senate Appropriations ranking member Thad Cochran (R-Miss.).

At the risk of getting into too much legislative minutiae, we’re actually looking at two GOP filibusters — one to stop the appropriations bill from coming to the floor, and another on the bill itself.

Remind me, what was that the GOP was saying about “obstructionism”?

Congress has been in session for about a month now, and in that short time, Senate Republicans have:

* filibustered a minimum-wage increase;

* filibustered a debate over debate on a non-binding resolution on the war;

* threatened two more filibusters on an appropriations bill that will keep the government open.

I’ve looked around for a list of filibusters by year and couldn’t find one (if anyone knows of one, please let me know via email), but given the past few weeks, I have to assume the Senate GOP of the 110th is on pace for some kind of record.

The interference with the legislative process is annoying, but to reiterate a point I raised a few weeks ago, what’s really annoying is the hypocrisy.

Back when he was in the Senate majority, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell thought it was pretty outrageous that Democrats were using the threat of filibusters to set up a 60-vote requirement for the confirmation of a handful of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. McConnell called the Democrats’ tactics an “ugly denial” of “fundamental fairness” that was “unprecedented in the history of the country” and would cause “great damage” to the U.S. Senate.

Now that the Republicans are in the minority, it turns out that using filibusters to force 60-vote cloture votes is nothing other than standard operating procedure. The Senate is set to debate competing anti-escalation resolutions next week, and McConnell tells MSNBC that all of them “are likely, as virtually everything in the Senate is likely, to be subject to a 60-vote threshold.”

For the last few years, congressional Republicans would cry “obstructionism!” at the drop of a hat. Any effort to stand in the way of the president’s agenda in Congress was outrageous, offensive, and possibly even unconstitutional. What mattered, more than anything, was preserving the notion of majority rule. To filibuster was to be literally un-American.

Funny how times change.

let em shut the government down. after the news reports of this week and last (even the msm reports) i don’t think it will take more than two seconds for americans to realize its the republican’s fault.

  • And where is the Democratic voice crying out about Republican’t obstructionism and the “great damage” they are causing by holding up the budget of the US of A??

    For, without an approved budget, the Republican’ts are denying our military much needed funds and jeopardizing the lives of our country’s fighting men and women. Why do the Republican’ts hate America so? Do they want us to succumb to the terrorist threat? By their actions, I think the answer is obvious.

  • I knew we shouldn’t have been such wusses and we should have called the Rethugs’ bluff on the Nukular Option. First, we likely could have changed the composition of the Supreme Court, a great outcome in its own right. Second, we would have looked a lot better in terms of havign a spine, which is always good. But third and most important, had the Rethugs been dumb enough to overturn all of Senate history and eliminated the filibuster, they would now be sitting there powerless while the Dem majority got all kinds of useful stuff done.

    Calling the Rethugs of the 109th’s bluff on the nuclear option would have been the right strategy by any measure – a complete no-lose for the Dems.

  • This is a no-brainer for the Dems. Just hang tight and watch the Reps either crumble or face public humiliation just like the last time they allowed the government to run out of money. Hopefully nobody will remind them about that, it would be just too much fun to watch.

    For the record, the government would not shut down if this happens. They would just vote for one or more continuing resolutions to keep spending at the same level as last year until the budget bills were finally hammered out.

    But the Reps would be sitting there trying to spin the unspinnable, and the public will know exactly who is to blame. Again.

  • Can we go back to the old[er] filibuster rules? The ones where senators had to hold their ground on the Senate floor and talk without ceasing to bring all business to a halt? B/c if you make filibustering as easy as taking a sip of water, it’s really no surprise that senators will do it about as often.

  • How dare the Democrats operate the Senate the way the Republicans did?

    Mitch McConnel is a sack of slime, but I hope he keeps the troops together as 2008 approaches. All the easier to dump them all.

  • Of course in response to this, Republican’ts will tell you that they only dislike filibusters when they are over judicial appointments; any other kind of filibuster is okay by them (obviously).

  • It would be interesting to see if the Dems make an appeal to the Executive branch to encourage their fellow Republicans to fund their Cabinet agencies and drop the fillibuster. It would be political theater, but this would be a great time to ostracize Senate Repubs by framing them as being against their own Executive branch party members. Make the fillibuster look like a Repub against Repub issue. Divide and conquer, Harry.

  • OK the Democrats in Congress need to play this. They need to remind people that Republicans were the ones – not but a few months ago – that had wanted to get rid of the filibuster. That they were the ones – not but a few months ago – that were wining about obstructionist Democrats that wouldn’t allow up or down votes. Democratic leaders need to pound this over and over in the press and on talk shows and on the Senate floor. They also need to do it in a way that is not so polite that they look like wimps. Republicans need to get beat over the head with this until they are a bloody pile on the floor. They need to tag Republicans with this like Republicans tag Democrats with the wimp (among other things) label. This is not only a no brainer, but should be easy and something that even the brain dead pundit class should be able to glom onto without having to get off their a** to understand and see.

  • and the dems also need to remind the public that it was the lazy 109th congress that left town WITHOUT DEALING WITH THOSE BUDGETS IN THE FIRST PLACE! (forgive me for yelling……..)

  • Ya gotta love the bastards. It’s always, ALWAYS, party before country, party before people. Can we say “lackies” when following their masters voice? Should we remind the electorate loudly and frequently?

  • The dems (or do I need to say the democratics) views changed on this when they got the majority. The procedural rules of the legislature are used by both sides for political reasons, and politics can be a dirty business … both sides are in the mud … and it is not making the pigs very happy

  • It saddens me that we can’t come up with a suitable way that we can all come to some kind of middle ground about various political issues without engaging in mean-spirited para-diddle or political flaming-bag-of-dogshit-on-the-front-porch rhetoric. I thought that about a wheeled large six foot high jelly doughnut, which represents the spoon-fed naiveté and Diane Sawyer-esque candy-assed gloss over that we, as a country, tend to force-feed an ever-grateful body politic that still thinks it’s cool to do the Fonze “thumb-up” thingy. By filling the large doughnut with plastic vacuum-molded life-sized replicas of baby arms and legs and heads, the disenfranchised parade crowd, sitting in their own pews, would perhaps contemplate the other-worldly, alien-like gradual osmosis of the skeptical side of the duality of the mind and the true revelation of the “real” you behind the voice in your head that everybody just assumes is the true self, pardon the contradiction. Obviously, by now, you’re spitting grape nuts, acknowledging my obvious ignorance of the laws of physics, for it does not take a half scoop of fresh brain to realize that after a while, the effects of gravity and the tendency of objects with higher density suspended in a colloidal sweetened material matrix would mean that the plastic replicas would eventually start a premature breakdown of the glutens in the already jelly weakened cell walls of the doughnut and gradually break down the electron shells to the degree that arms, heads, and legs would begin to slowly extend, as if they were being shitted, from the bottom, although the appearance would suggest that “they” are holding on to the confectionary mother ship with a passion, grasping dough-like the terra-firma of their doomed existence, as we all must.

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