Filibuster

The Senate late Monday supposedly arrived at a deal regarding Senate filibuster rules. Gary Bauer at Campaign for Working Families and Tony Perkins of Family Research Council (FRC) both commented on the substance of the deal.   Our brief comments follow.

Senate Surrender   By Gary Bauer

Well, they did it again. A group of squishy Republican senators led by John McCain caved in to threats from Harry Reid. It’s happening with such frequency it seems to be habitual.

To their credit, the Republican minority in the Senate has been holding up some really bad Obama nominees using prolonged debate or the filibuster. As we noted Friday, Obama initially appointed some of these individuals using recess appointments that were later declared illegal by two federal courts. He has since renominated them and Harry Reid is demanding that the Senate vote to confirm them.

To overcome the filibuster, Reid needs 60 votes, which he doesn’t have. To overcome that hurdle, Reid threatened to change the Senate rules eliminating the filibuster on executive nominations. Normally it requires 67 votes to change the Senate rules, and Reid certainly did not have that either.

So, Reid was prepared to use a disputed procedure known as the “nuclear option” that would effectively change the Senate’s rules with a bare majority of 51 votes. Republicans understandably did not want the rule changed, but Reid’s price for not changing the rule was for the GOP to allow the nominations to proceed.

Yesterday, a handful of Republicans blinked, and it appears as though Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had little say in the matter. From press reports I have read, the deal that averted the so-called “nuclear option” was brokered by Senator McCain.

Without going into all the details, the end result is that Democrats got what they wanted without having to face the public controversy of changing a long-standing Senate rule.

In reaction, Senator Ted Cruz tweeted, “Today, re: the so-called nuclear option, Senate Republicans preserved the right to surrender in the future.” Sadly, I fear he may be right.

I’ll make a wild guess here: The next time there is a Republican president and a Republican senate, Democrats will use the filibuster to stop that president’s nominees. And if the Republican Senate majority has enough “moderates” in it, they will be unwilling to suspend the filibuster even if it is being used against them. So essentially what we have is a filibuster that only Democrats are allowed to use . . .

Reid It and Weep!   Excerpt from Tony Perkins article ar FRC

At the heart of the debate were the Senate’s filibuster rules, which gives the minority party at least one weapon to stop the President from appointing unqualified people to important positions. Regardless of what Harry Reid is saying now, both parties have been fond of the filibuster when they aren’t in the majority. And why not? It’s one of the few tools a minority can use to block the majority’s agenda.

Senator Reid, in an aggressive play, threatened to manipulate parliamentary procedure to change Senate rules so that it would only take a simple majority — not 60 votes — to end a filibuster. Knowing that would only empower Democrats more, the GOP threw up their hands and gave the Left what it wanted: confirmation votes on five of the President’s most extreme nominees. In exchange, Senator Reid promised to keep the 60-vote threshold in place — for the time being.

Republicans had a chance to negotiate something better: Reid’s word that his party wouldn’t change the Senate’s rules between now and the next election. Their failure means that the next time the GOP tries to block a White House nominee, the Senate will be back to square one — with Senator Reid’s finger on the trigger of the “nuclear option” to change the rules.

The Crank opined that maybe it was difficult to tell when  Senator McCain was negotiating with his head up his own ass or Harry Reid’s.

We wonder if it was worth the effort.  If Republicans barely take the Senate in 2016 the nuclear option is going to have to be on the table in order to possibly undo some of the worst of Obamacare and Obamanomics.  The filibuster as nothing to do with the threshold necessary to overcome a presidential veto however our Republican squishes cannot be depended on for anything. Reader comment  on this political art and science matter always welcome.  R Mall

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