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From Democracy Means Fair Employment Practices Pamphlet No. 198, CIO Education Department, October 1951. (source: Tobias Higbie via Flickr)
This diary is intended – with limited technical detail, so as not to lose everyone in the weeds – to be a guidepost for deciphering this week’s (scheduled) public discussions, and reporting about those discussions, in the Senate – beginning today, Tuesday, January 25th – about how that federal legislative body operates, or should operate. [The 112th Senate met for the first time on January 5, 2011, and then "recessed" until 10 a.m. today - which, under its Standing Rules and precedents, continues the "legislative day" of the Senate's first session into today's session, and potentially future sessions, until the Senate formally "adjourns." As a related aside, I question whether "Jefferson's Manual" - guidance for a legislative body without any of its own rules - likewise provides that multiple "recessed" calendar day sessions of the Senate, separated by weeks, count as one "legislative day."]
Included below are a number of facts, about existing Senate rules and practices, which starkly contradict the conventional wisdom generated by reflexively-partisan Senators themselves – as uncritically accepted and repeated by the national media – about what existing Senate rules do and don’t “require.” As most of us recognize, members of the American media today who have relatively easy access to Senators, and to other powerful national figures, rarely meaningfully challenge those privileged to hold such power. That evidently goes double when simplistic, widespread partisan myths have come to predominate and obscure the inconvenient, unspoken truths about the non-partisan institution in which United States Senators serve. . . .
This is one citizen’s informed attempt to publicly state those consequential, unspoken truths, however much they may continue to be studiously ignored by the wielders and courtiers of power in Washington, D.C. – people who are evidently very driven to protect abusive Party practice and privilege, even at the expense of the public, self-governing institution of our federal Senate itself. This diary mostly summarizes; my December diary about Congress focused at length on the alarming fundamentals of its operation today, in both the House and Senate, and further details the dramatic difference between a debating “filibuster,” under the Senate’s simple-majority regular order, and an optional “cloture motion” that seeks to supplant that order with a supermajority voting threshold; and – with regard to the undiminished ability today of a Senate majority, under existing Senate rules, to force the real (debating) filibuster – this technical comment capped an in-depth examination of Senate rules and precedents that selise and I conducted last year in three FDL working diaries.
There have been many misleading claims made, or dishonorably implied, about the Senate and its rules by Senators themselves in recent years, under both Republican (Bill Frist) and, especially, Democratic (Harry Reid) majorities, so it’s difficult to know which myth to address first, or at all. What follows, therefore, in brown text, more or less in order of their appearance, are three of what I consider to be the most prevalent and damaging myths, with the facts, in red and black text, that refute them – facts reported without fear of or favor to any political Party. [As I've repeatedly said, any evidence to the contrary about my assertions of fact - anything that I've overlooked or misstated - is welcome and invited.]
A crucial premise about the so-called “filibuster” that members of the Reid-led Senate have perhaps most successfully planted as widespread, unquestioned “truth,” is that a Senate majority can’t feasibly force a minority to actually filibuster (engage in extended, physically-taxing public floor debate) in today’s Senate. Or, at least, can’t do so without some sort of (unspecified) change to the Standing Rules of the Senate. Yet that Party-peddled, misleading “truth” is clearly false, on both counts. Again, our technically-detailed, researched “proof” of that is summarized here.
My sense is that, if the media would report and Americans understood that, in fact, forcing real, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style filibusters is still possible under the existing rules of the Senate, requiring a minority to actually conduct such filibusters, rather than merely threaten to filibuster, would be the clear preference of an overwhelming majority of Americans.
But, meanwhile, the media unhelpfully continues to convey to the public various versions of the myth, as illustrated by this example from an article by Paul Kane in Saturday’s Washington Post:
That [1970s cloture] rule change has led to the end of the old “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”-style filibuster, as the onus is placed heavily on the majority to show up and deliver 60 votes. The minority no longer has to speak at length to stall legislation; it merely needs one senator on the floor to object to passing legislation or approving a nominee.
What Paul Kane neglects to point out in his reporting, as elaborated below, is that such a state of affairs for the majority Party is a voluntary state of affairs, brought about only if and when the majority Party elects to file – with the signatures of 16 Democratic Senators – a cloture motion, and refuses to lift its voluntary imposition of the pretend quorum call that prevents the Senate floor from going “live” without the micromanaging of Party leadership in the backrooms.
Thus, that Party-comforting myth is very much intertwined with another pernicious myth, which is that the parliamentary debating tactic of the “filibuster,” and the optional “cloture” process, refer to the same thing, and that the minority Party in the Senate is responsible for both. In fact, however, a Senate minority (rarely) engages in parliamentary debating “filibusters,” but only the Senate majority Party (now routinely) engages in filing “cloture” motions (which alone can trigger a supermajority voting threshold in the Senate for legislation and nominations). That fact is why this is the present state of affairs in our public discourse:
No Democratic Senator today can publicly admit that “filibuster” as they’re using the word actually means “cloture,” because the Democrats, as the current majority Party, are responsible for filing the record-breaking number of cloture motions in recent years, despite the absence of obstructive debating filibusters by a Senate minority.
So there you have the self-inflicted “Catch-22″ of Rule XXII‘s cloture motion, for the Senate Democrats: Only the majority Party files optional Rule 22 cloture motions in the Senate (and yes, the Democrats have their unspoken reasons for doing so, as explained below – avoiding public debate, and reverse-engineering legislation through Congress without meaningful debate or amendment high among them). In turn, only cloture motions can impose a supermajority threshold (and debate-free delay) on the Senate, in place of its simple-majority regular order, for the passage of legislation or confirmation of nominees. Despite, or because of, those truths, incumbent Democrats are desperate to pin the blame for their own actions, as the Senate majority Party, on the minority Republicans.
Remember that cloture, created as an option in 1917 at the behest of an imperious Woodrow Wilson, who was eager to see the United States enter the World War over a principled Senate minority resisting his efforts, was designed to be a method to bring ongoing, debating filibusters to a predictable end, in an era when the Senate was out of session a good part of the year. Yet cloture was rarely attempted and rarely invoked until the last couple of decades – a time during which Senate floor debate (in “the world’s greatest deliberative body”) has become an endangered species, and the aggrandizement of the American presidency ever more acute.
That “Catch-22″ state of affairs in turn raises important questions:
1. Why don’t minority Republican Senators point out this inconvenient truth (which they’d have to, of course, if ever challenged about it by a knowledgeable member of the media), to expose the deceit inherent in the Democratic Senate’s incessant talking point about minority “filibuster” abuse and obstruction?
Answer: Even a generally-principled Senate minority Party would hesitate to look such a supermajority-cloture, action-blocking gift horse from the majority Party in the mouth. At a minimum, the present minority Party probably sees no merit in volunteering such information about the voluntary cloture rule, and thus putting their comfortable ability to direct the Senate majority from the backroom, without debate, at risk of being rescinded (knowing full well that no rule changes or violations are needed to effect that rescinding), due to a resultant public outcry. Especially now that the Senate Republican minority apparently has the Democratic President on its side in this cloture/filibuster/obstruction fairy tale, which, if past is prologue, happens to neatly help the minority end-run the Democratic majority of the Senate – whose leaders and private caucus are still busy pathetically bowing and scraping to that President in his power-usurping role of Chief Backroom Legislator.
2. Why don’t the majority Democrats simply force minority Republicans to take the floor to filibuster, instead of turning immediately to supermajority cloture at a mere threat to filibuster (or at a refusal to grant unanimous consent to some private majority request to waive regular order, also a primary cause of the “secret hold” problem)?
Answer: This, I think, is the real source of both Party conflict and (bipartisan) incumbent myth-making about the Senate, and I doubt that I can identify all of their private, unspoken reasons. But here are some that I perceive:
a. Senators enjoy their three-day work weeks (with travel days on Monday and Friday), and can’t be bothered to wait around in Washington, in case a minority debating filibuster should materialize and intrude on the weekend, or otherwise call them from their backroom activities to the Senate Chamber (for a live quorum call, for example) more than is usual. ["Usual" today is almost never, except when a vote is underway, or a scripted speech is ready for delivery to the C-SPAN television camera in an empty Senate Chamber. A Chamber in which formal Senate floor business is generally recessed or suspended during daily sessions, in all but name, by the Majority Leader, by means of the place-holding "quorum call" that doesn't call the (Constitutionally-required simple-majority) quorum, and may only be lifted by unanimous consent or by the unseen direction of the Majority Leader.] Since attendance at desultory committee hearings (now routinely scheduled to overlap with Senate floor “sessions” on those same three days) is spotty at best in the Senate, what Senators are in fact spending most of their time in Washington doing out of public view (when not being “hotlined” by the Party to say yes or no in private to some leadership-designed end) bears much closer public examination than the Capitol Hill media has provided.
b. Lobbyists (whose foreign and domestic corporate clients indirectly fund the re-election campaigns of our Senators) prefer that the Senate do its business in the backrooms. Both the fake quorum call and the optional supermajority cloture rule facilitate such backroom, top-down, Party-directed business “negotiating,” in place of public legislating. (Note that both of those means of conducting the Senate’s business are controlled by the majority Party in the Senate.) And Senators no doubt prefer the lack of accountability and scrutiny that such a Backroom Senate provides. Corporate lobbyists have probably also grown used to and now depend on the make-believe 60-vote threshold that Harry Reid and the Democrats have chosen to impose on the Senate over the last four years.
c. Cloture means a fairly predictable schedule of voting – which is basically the only public duty that today’s Senators bother to stay in Washington to fulfill. No voting means no attendance necessary in Washington. An unpredictable (because democratically-derived, without a foregone conclusion) voting schedule thus harshes their mellow (as Majority Leader Reid – who assiduously caters to the irresponsible sense of entitlement displayed by the pampered charges of both Parties – would be the first to attest)…
d. There is a general fear and loathing of public debate among a large majority of members of the Senate of both political Parties. Which makes preventing a return to real filibusters, and the associated “live” Senate floor, a primary, if unadmitted and unstated, objective of the current Senate “rules” or “filibuster” reform proposals. Never mind the fact that the longest one-man filibuster in Senate history lasted only about 24 hours (or that one-man filibusters have been possible since day one of the Senate, before the 1806 rule changes that a committee appointed to study the rules favorably reported). Furthermore, successfully-invoked cloture requires no public debate from the minority, even as it imposes a supermajority threshold on a measure, and delays Senate action for days or weeks, with or without further debate. [Important related note: The core of the pending Democratic rule changes in the Senate tinkers with that optional supermajority cloture rule, rather than recognizing or urging a reinstatement of the default, simple-majority regular order of the Senate that the Democratic Party has effectively abandoned.]
e. If 60 Senators agree, cloture makes it easy to shut down public legislating and meaningful debate on amendments on the Senate floor. With or without invoking cloture, so do the fake quorum call and “filling the tree” (which Harry Reid has abused more than any of his immediate predecessors) – a Party-driven practice that prevents any Senator from offering an amendment to a measure when it’s before the full Senate. The only check on Harry Reid’s abuse of those practices, or of the potent Motion to Table, or of the practice (enabled by the fake quorum call) which allows only a select number of amendments pre-screened by majority and minority Party leadership – with the unanimous consent of their members – to receive floor consideration, is his privately-convened, off-the-record Democratic Caucus – now filled with Senators busily serving their own interests at the expense of the nation. No Senate rule requires or contemplates such abusive, undemocratic practices by the Senate Majority Leader.
f. Senators prefer to let their Party leaders do their thinking for them, by and large. Self-directed, independent legislating conflicts with the agendas of the unseen power-brokers who finance Congressional and Presidential campaigns, and would otherwise rock the boat in Washington – itself an obvious necessity for the passage, or even active promotion, of legislation, and for diligent oversight of the Executive Branch (and its dangerous, ongoing abuse of the war power, which Congress continues to countenance), that together could, for example, lessen the destructive impact of unchecked Global Corporate predation on many Americans. Otherwise, existing Senate rules that provide for non-debatable (meaning they can’t be filibustered…) Motions to Proceed (to “any matter”) offered by any Senator, during the two-hour “Morning Hour” of each legislative day, would not be routinely and without fail waived by unanimous consent, in advance, at the conclusion of the preceding Senate day, every day. Senate Standing Rule VIII:
2. All motions made during the first two hours of a new legislative day to proceed to the consideration of any matter shall be determined without debate, except motions to proceed to the consideration of any motion, resolution, or proposal to change any of the Standing Rules of the Senate shall be debatable. Motions made after the first two hours of a new legislative day to proceed to the consideration of bills and resolutions are debatable.
I note again that the various proposals now on offer to “reform” the Senate rules, from some power-hungry, debate-hostile (or simply ill-informed) Democratic Senators, appear to be designed to continue the routine, abusive Democratic deployment of the supermajority cloture motion (in one form or another), to the exclusion of the simple-majority regular order of the Senate.
To provide one deplorable example of the half-truths, at best, being used in this partisan campaign by incumbent Senators to limit the future right to debate in the Senate (even though public floor debate in the Senate is increasingly rare), here’s how one of the most ardent Democratic proponents of “reforming” Senate rules deliberately misstates the existing rules and options available to a Senate majority – from a footnoted paper published on January 9, 2011 by Tom Udall, a member of the Senate Rules Committee (see the “follow in the footsteps” link below):
In order to call up business on the floor, the Majority Leader must make a “motion to proceed.” Normally, the motion is agreed to by a unanimous consent agreement. The problem is that the motion to proceed is debatable under the Rules, meaning that it can be filibustered. Therefore, if a single senator threatens to filibuster the motion to proceed, denying the Majority Leader the unanimous consent agreement, the Senate must go through the lengthy Rule 22 cloture process in order to move to debate the underlying measure.
And we’re supposed to trust Udall’s word about what his drastic Nuclear Constitutional Option “reforms” will, or won’t, do to the United States Senate…??
That statement was part of Udall’s description of the abusive practice of “secret holds.” [To their credit, there is a credible, honestly-bipartisan move in the Senate, lead by Senators Ron Wyden and Chuck Grassley, to end the corrupt practice (no Standing Rule changes needed) of anonymous holds, with or without the blessing of Party leadership.]
The “secret hold” in Udall’s statement is the mere “threat to filibuster.” Or, to put it another way, the denial of “unanimous consent” to Majority Leader Reid’s private requests to waive regular order (that is, to bypass any debate on a motion to proceed). Regular order which would simply mean a period of public floor debate on the motion to proceed in advance of a simple-majority vote on final passage of the motion to proceed. Except that the regular order is blocked by the (unmentioned by Udall) modern Senate custom of convenience and Party leadership control, in which the Majority Leader imposes the make-believe quorum call on the Senate Chamber to prevent the Presiding Officer from putting the pending question, absent floor debate, to a simple-majority vote of the Senate – in order that the leadership of the majority Party can privately reverse-engineer Senate action, and otherwise preordain legislative ends, in private. Whereas, without the make-believe quorum call holding the Senate hostage, if a real, physically-taxing debating filibuster did not actually materialize, the Senate would soon be passing the motion to proceed without any need to file for cloture, and the measure in question would be in front of the Senate for its consideration and the offering of amendments, minority “threat” to filibuster or no threat to filibuster. Alternatively, as I just indicated, under existing Senate rules, any Senator could refuse to give consent to the daily request to “deem expired” the “Morning Hour,” and then at the appointed hour, make a motion to proceed which would not be open to debate at all.
“Constitutional (simple-) majority rule” has been repeatedly invoked by those now asserting the need for Senate rule changes to reform corrupt Party practices - apparently in furtherance of continuing, with greater ease, the majority’s abuse of supermajority cloture process, irony be damned. That misdirection in turn helps promote the destructive myth that Senate rules may be changed by simple majority on the first legislative day of a new Congress, but otherwise only by a supermajority of 67. Whereas, in fact, nothing in Senate rules “requires” that Senate rules be changed (or legislation passed or nominees confirmed) by supermajority vote. Ever – so long as the Senate majority declines to file a cloture motion in the absence of (or during) any debating filibuster that can otherwise simply be waited out, and also withdraws its pretend, Senate-suspending quorum call order, thereby forcing legislative business back onto the public, “live” Senate floor.
Every Senate, therefore, already has the right to change its rules by Constitutional simple majority, “as provided in [those] rules,” if and when it pleases, while in session, at any time (as this comment further details). Those claiming otherwise, in order to quash full and fair debate, and to avoid the remote risk of a debating filibuster, include, as indicated, Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, who is on a reckless, ill-advised mission to follow in the footsteps of President Wilson (whose contempt for Constitutional checks and balances Udall apparently shares), and of another debate-hostile Senator from New Mexico who preceded him, and, more recently, Majority Leader Bill Frist.
To succeed in his scheme, Senator Udall must first pretend, and get others to pretend (an effort in which he’s been quite successful), that “minority filibuster” has the same definition as “majority cloture motion,” and that Senate rules may only be changed by 67 votes (even when 16 members of the majority haven’t filed a cloture motion, before or during an actual filibuster). Once those myths are accepted as fact, it is, in Udall’s mind, suddenly both “constitutional” and wise to violate existing Senate rules carried over from the previous Senate (and from every preceding Senate since the Senate was established), in order to “change” them by way of the Nuclear Constitutional “point of order” Option. That Option would destructively enlist the President of the Senate (the neutral Presiding Officer of the Chamber) in the dishonest, partisan use of a “point of order” to permanently overturn and upend fair, established Senate “order,” while ignoring clear Senate rules and precedent making such an Option “out of order.” Such a power-abusing, fraudulent abuse of the vital role of points of order in enforcing the parliamentary procedures of the Senate, if employed with Vice President Biden’s connivance, would dissolve all Senate rules this year, and every two years from here on out. [In contrast, actual rule changes made as the Senate rules provide - which means at any time by simple majority, debate and potentially-extended debate included - remain in force until the next time that the Senate decides to revise that rule.] And all of that proposed disorder and unpredictable partisan chaos for the Senate is apparently simply a dishonest means to an end that would further entrench the present majority Party’s abuse of the optional supermajority cloture rule in the Senate (abuse that a 1975 cloture-rule revision helped spawn).
For the record:
1. No motion to suspend, modify, or amend any rule, or any part thereof, shall be in order, except on one day’s notice in writing, specifying precisely the rule or part proposed to be suspended, modified, or amended, and the purpose thereof. Any rule may be suspended without notice by the unanimous consent of the Senate, except as otherwise provided by the rules.
2. The rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules.
The opening paragraph, on Page 1217 [PDF Page 1 of 12], of the “Rules” PDF of Riddick’s Senate Procedure:
The Senate has readopted or made only seven general revisions of its rules since 1789 – on March 26, 1806; January 3, 1820; February 14, 1828; March 25, 1868; January 17, 1877; January 11, 1884; and November 14, 1979. The rules of the Senate, however, are subject to amendment at any time and have been amended regularly in part in most, if not in all, Congresses since 1884, and on occasions several times in the same Congress.
From Page 935 [PDF Page 2 of 4] of the “Motions” PDF of Riddick’s Senate Procedure:
“A motion directing the Chair to put to the Senate without further debate the consideration of a resolution to change the rules under his [claimed - pow wow] constitutional right to get a vote on changing the rules at the opening of a new Congress [by first dissolving or violating the carried-over rules of the preceding Senate - pow wow] is not in order.“
Helping to shield Democrats from the criticism that the radical “constitutional option” deserves, is a common failure – even among some Senate researchers who irresponsibly cater to the whims of powerful partisans, despite characterizing versions of the nuclear/constitutional option as akin to a “bold-faced coup” – to understand or appreciate the role and importance of “regular order” in a non-partisan legislative body like the Senate. If an existing “order,” once established, is not honored during floor proceedings by the Senate’s members and its President (when, for example, those members desire to change that order), then raising “points of order” – whose purpose is to ensure that the Presiding Officer/Vice President, with the assistance of non-partisan advice from the Senate Parliamentarian, enforces the established order in a fair, unbiased way – becomes an exercise in futility for members, and an arbitrary charade and mockery of process by a power-abusing majority and/or Senate President, that’s worse than having no order of procedure at all.
So as the debate presumably proceeds in some fashion in the Senate this week, in the shadow of the media hype about tonight’s State of the Union address, I hope that this information about three widespread Senate myths will provide, for those trying to follow the debate, a yardstick against which to measure and interpret the claims and counterclaims that Senators and the media will be making.
And as I hope this diary helps illustrate, there is little or nothing “required” by the current Senate rules themselves that can be held responsible for the failures of the modern Senate. If I were to single out a Standing Rule (rather than corrupt Party practice) to be held somewhat responsible for the present, deplorable state of the Senate, it would be the abuse of Rule 22′s 1917-created optional cloture motion, as revised in 1975 – a cloture rule whose continued abuse is apparently favored by both Parties. That rule enables a Senate supermajority to silence a debating Senator – or, rather, these days, to just ignore a Senate minority, whether it debates or not, with 60 votes in hand – after a set period of time. Since that was and is an optional rule, it doesn’t appear that a Rule XXII supermajority cloture motion can be said to be unConstitutional, even when, as now, it’s routinely deployed in the absence of obstructive debate. But the rigidly-partisan way in which supermajority, debate-foreclosing cloture motions are now being wielded in the Senate by the Democratic majority – to the detriment of deliberate, democratic public legislating, despite the absence of obstructive minority debate, and often in response to the mere withholding of unanimous consent for majority requests to waive public debate entirely – is an absolute disgrace, which none of the rule changes proposed by incumbent Senators, or their allies, seem designed to address or remedy, or even to acknowledge.
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I tuned in to the Senate for about an hour, on C-SPAN2, on-line, having just posted this diary. It was, well, “an experience”… One that I’ll try to summarize in this comment, without benefit of the Congressional Record for reference, given how closely the “experience” mirrored the descriptions in this diary.
At about 4:44 p.m. Eastern, Senators Tom Udall of New Mexico and Jeff Merkley of Oregon were on the Senate floor trading points back and forth about their proposed rule change resolution, S. Res. 10 [Section 5 of which Senator Merkley is also offering as a standalone measure, through S. Res. 21 - which seems to propose the creation of a form of bastardized "talking filibuster" that would take place in the midst of the supermajority cloture process, for some unexplained reason, rather than making use of the perfectly good existing "talking filibuster" that's already available and ready for the majority to revive in the Senate without the need of any rule changes (or violations) at all].
As the diary indicates, the half-truths and distortions, apparently for fear of angering Party leadership, are so thick on the ground in these discussions, that it’s extremely difficult to understand what is actually being proposed or why – perhaps more so for those with at least some familiarity with existing Senate rules.
While pointing to a large chart that was clearly labeled, with a very visible title, “CLOTURE MOTIONS FILED” (in preceding decades), Jeff Merkley proceeded to declare that these were “filibusters” conducted in preceding decades. Those two events (“filibusters” and “cloture motions”) long ago diverged from each other, so that such confusion of terms today by Merkley is inexcusable. [Of note, from 1917 until about 1970, a period when cloture motion filing was still coupled with the existence of actual debating filbusters, an average of one (supermajority) cloture motion a year was filed by the Senate majority Party to overcome debating filibusters.]
Tom Udall then asserted that his “constitutional option” is “not a power grab.” As evidence he cited, among other things, an April 25, 2005 Republican Policy Committee paper (prepared at the time that Majority Leader Frist was threatening the Democratic minority with the “nuclear option”).
At 5 p.m., the experienced Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa joined the other two on the floor, and proceeded to make the following astonishing, unscripted assertions about Senate “gridlock”:
Both Jeff Merkley and Tom Udall then shamelessly and dishonorably invoked the name of Robert C. Byrd in support of Udall’s radical rule change proposal, by citing a statement he made in 1979 while discussing Senate Rule V (then Senate Rule 32) on the Senate floor (citing “the dead hand of the past”) – while completely ignoring the passionate statement that Senator Byrd made last year, in person, in the Senate Rules Committee, and in writing to every colleague, pleading with them not to unnecessarily tamper with Senate rules, but to instead reform Senate practices to bring back the debating filibuster.
Tom Udall declared that the Senate is “in a constant filibuster” regarding judicial nominations from the President.
Merkley and Udall announced at 5:30 p.m. that they planned to soon propound unanimous consent requests to bring up their resolutions for immediate consideration by the Senate. Lamar Alexander (who rightly said in a recent speech that “the Senate is reduced to a shadow of itself” and that “the Senate needs to change its behavior, not its rules”) is headed to the Senate floor to speak for the Republican caucus.
Just before 6 p.m., first Udall, then Harkin, then Merkley offers his unanimous consent request to bring their rule change resolutions up for the “immediate consideration” of the Senate, asking that no amendments be in order on each, and that Udall’s receive 6 hours of total debate time, Harkin’s (on S. Res. 8) 4 hours, and Merkley’s 6 hours.
Senator Alexander objects to all three unanimous consent requests. Which the Senate majority allows him to do by maintaining its routine abuse of the fake quorum call, in order to keep formal Senate business suspended, until Party leadership directs its next play. [And despite the fact, as noted in the diary, that Merkley and Udall and Harkin could exercise their rights under the "Morning Hour" to bring their measures before the Senate - but almost certainly will not.]
At 6:04 p.m., Merkley yields the floor in the empty Senate Chamber and “notes the absence of a quorum” (which the Clerk – again, as usual – proceeds not to call).
Of note: Many of the false claims made by Harkin/Udall/Merkley this afternoon, about the “unConstitutional requirement” that 67 votes be obtained to change Senate rules, actually appear to be directed not at the public, or, obviously, at the actual requirements of Senate rules, but rather at the Senate Republican Caucus (as though that Caucus, by utilizing the power that the majority Party gifts it, has prescribed a new supermajority rule). A minority Caucus which, because the Democratic majority drops an issue upon mere objection, continues to exercise its easy “objection” to majority requests to waive regular order so as to quickly bring up measures for Senate consideration (if not for amendment, in this case). Again, behind everything that happens on the floor is the fact that the Majority Leader’s fake quorum call keeps the Senate floor from going “live,” and thus, as in this case, prevents Senate business from proceeding apace when “in session,” and prevents any need to actually debate to prevent the Presiding Officer from putting the pending question to a (simple-majority) vote of the Senate.
“Catch-22″ is putting it mildly… If this is the level of transparency and honesty that Senators generally employ when discussing far-reaching proposals on the floor – proposals about which I’m less familiar – the level of public deception that partisan Congressional incumbents have evidently grown accustomed to employing is appalling.
The excellent political cartoon that someone kindly added to the diary – from the days when actual debating filibusters still happened in the Senate – manages to nicely capture the incoherent, almost absurdly-confused nature of the “debate” that my preceding comment summarizes… And they’re promising (threatening?) more tomorrow.
Powwow
Sorry I think I need a lawnmower. I read it twice and came away with a headache . I really appreciate you going to all the effort to try to explain these procedures though. I watched a little C-Span also , waste of time. I never know whats going on because their procedures seem so unorthodox.
What I came away with is they lie and the rules they are trying to pass are even worse then the ones they already have. It wouldn’t even do any good to have their playbook as they don’t even follow it.
Again thank you.
~~~repaired~~~
You’re very welcome, quanto. Sorry that I let the grass get too tall… On the bright side, the next time you read or hear about this subject, a few more of the terms will probably sound familiar, so that your effort today to absorb this material likely isn’t a wasted effort.
Besides, after listening to those three Senators on the floor today, I have to say that I totally sympathize with your feeling that “I never know what’s going on…” when watching C-SPAN. I don’t think anyone could “know what’s going on” in the Senate if those Party-slanted explanations were to be accepted as fact (and given that all the real work is being done in private).
To your credit, you seem to have come away with the right take on the charade anyway, demonstrating good critical thinking abilities, in spite of the Senate’s best efforts to mislead: “What I came away with is they lie and the rules they are trying to pass are even worse than the ones they already have.” That sentence pretty much sums up this diary. And your wrap-up is one obvious conclusion to be drawn from the diary: “It wouldn’t even do any good to have their playbook as they don’t even follow it.” They don’t, indeed – which is a big part of the problem.
I can only pity anyone who took at face value the claims that those three made today – that a Senate minority of 41 members has “the right and absolute power to veto anything” in the Senate, that the “talking filibuster” can only be reintroduced by new rule, that the Democratic majority has no responsibility for the cloture motion epidemic, etc., etc., etc. Such claims are provably false, and yet Tom Harkin doesn’t appear to be the least bit concerned that he might be humiliated by, or challenged to explain, his obvious partisan distortions and deceit about the institution in which he’s served for more than two decades… Perhaps the worst of it is that I don’t know that there’s a single Democratic Senator left in the Senate today who is capable and honor-bound enough to competently correct the record, place things in their proper historical context, or otherwise chastise Party colleagues for their knowingly-distorted, lame attempts to “educate” the public about how the Senate works with aggressively cherry-picked facts and arguments designed to protect their Party. The Senate “statesman” has gone the way of Senate debate.
highly recommended. thank you powwow.
Powwow,
If C-Span really wanted to provide a service they could have you on as an interpreter to clarify the obfuscation. Of course if that happened then the average person would understand what is going on and call bs on them and take away some of their elitism. I see the same thing happen with doctors and lawyers, why else would they use Latin terms except to befuddle the masses.
again Thank You
selise! Great to hear from you. And thank you.
Seeing your handle close to Tom Harkin’s name in a comment thread made me remember an excellent description that you provided in our first ‘forcing the filibuster’ working diary, which was a response to a comment of mine fuming at a HuffingtonPost column written a year ago by – yup – Tom Harkin, who evidently hasn’t reformed his ways since, in the slightest.
Here’s the opening of Harkin’s post, to which I was reacting:
And here’s the perceptive description of “bullshitter” that selise posted in response:
And:
Those closing sentences beautifully describe what I witnessed on the Senate floor yesterday, while listening to Senators Tom Harkin (in particular), Tom Udall, and Jeff Merkley describe the Senate’s rules, and their proposed “reforms” thereof.
As selise so wisely summed it up in that earlier comment:
Precisely.
A brief status report on the public floor “debate” today in the Senate about how the Senate should revise its operations.
Nothing seems to have transpired on that front in public on Wednesday, through 3 p.m., by unanimous consent agreement reached yesterday evening; they were preoccupied on the floor all day with a Tucson Massacre resolution. At present the Senate is in another of its constant non-quorum-call quorum calls, while C-SPAN2 plays background music to pass the time. In other words, the Senate Chamber is effectively recessed in all but name at the moment, without having bothered to formally recess subject to the call of the Chair. [On Edit at about 4:10 p.m.: Mark Begich just briefly interrupted the Chamber's silence, to ask, on Senator Reid's behalf, for the reading of a couple of bills introduced today - including a DeMint bill to repeal the health care reform law (McConnell made a similar request yesterday), which thus is, or soon will be, pending on the Senate Calendar without benefit of committee referral or consideration.]
Meanwhile, instead of public debate or discussion on the floor, and in line with how the Senate now functions on the most consequential matters that it handles, all dialogue about possible reforms is being conducted in the backrooms between Party leadership, who are attempting to come up with some sort of unanimous consent approach to reform (such as, it seems likely, resolving the Secret/Anonymous Hold problem).
Harry Reid himself unapologetically described the off-the-record Backroom Senate last evening, just after he’d arranged for the Senate to formally “adjourn” overnight (thus quietly ending the first “legislative day” of the 112th Senate and, with it, the nominal, false justification underlying Tom Udall’s destructive “constitutional option” – a first-day timing claim that, among other things, generates the misleading name for Udall’s version of the “nuclear option”):
As C-SPAN2′s livestream view of the empty Senate Chamber puts it at this hour, in an overlaid graphic:
it’s very good to “see” you powwow and to see also that you are still fighting the good fight. i wish i could have been doing my part this past year as i had hoped and planned to, and am extremely grateful that you are hanging in there. at this point i’m now just trying to catch a few threads here and there and at least leave a dissenting comment and link on the topics of the senate filibuster and also of fed gov deficit spending — two issues which imo are being grossly misrepresented by political elite and allies of both parties. (if you are not familiar with the heterodox economic stuff i was previously posting on it may blow your mind if you’ve, like most of us, unknowingly accepted the orthodox paradigm — if you do take a look, all i ask is an open mind.)
it’s quite frustrating to see the same kind of nonsense still being posted on fdl after so many months. the post, “House Adopts New Majority Rules: Where is the Outrage?” was imo especially outrageous. which, imo, makes it all the more important to make alternatives to the party-centric propaganda available. thank you so much!
The title of the fdlaction post you link in your second paragraph doesn’t sound familiar, selise, so it seems I happily missed it at the time, but I’ll give it and the comments a belated once-over.
Regarding the deficit spending/economics issues you’ve been immersed in – I haven’t been paying very close attention to them, though I’ve noted the comments you’ve made about the parallels with the disinformation of the “filibuster” debate. At some point I do hope to delve deeper, though.
Your able assistance in my latest one-on-one attempt to ‘deprogram’ an unknowing victim of the “bullshitters” is very much appreciated. It’s striking how closely that exchange mirrors another recent discussion I had with a different (but also apparently relatively new) commenter @ FDL, who was fixated on another “expert” and their new report on the subject (a report that’s similar to Tom Udall’s effort linked in the diary, although it’s at least a handsome graphical presentation…). [I'm posting here first, by the way, since this thread is about to close, but will respond in a bit to your latest comment and question in the other thread.]
I also want to let you know that I return your expression of gratitude. In my case, I’m extremely grateful to know that at least one other person besides myself sees these repeated explanations, of what I perceive the facts to be based on our careful research, as something other than a waste of my time.
Eventually, on Thursday, January 27, the Party dealmakers emerged from the backrooms to publicly describe their deal (if not the discussions that led up to it), and one of the provisions was indeed reform of the “Secret Hold” practice, which a new standing order of the Senate will implement (unhelpfully, co-sponsor Senator Claire McCaskill immediately tweeted that the Senate “rules” will now prevent anonymous holds).
The full language of the standing order (S. Res. 28), with the 92-4 roll call vote, is available here. Note how clearly it reveals what a “hold” (anonymous or otherwise) really is – a declaration of an intention to “object” to a future unanimous consent request made in public on the Senate floor:
Here’s the Wednesday evening unanimous consent request that paved the way for Thursday’s action:
[The two resolutions needing 60 votes to pass, by the terms of Wednesday's UCAgreement, each exceeded that threshold on Thursday and passed. Senate Resolutions 8, 10 (as amended by last-minute substitute), and 21 (as amended by last-minute substitute), all needing 67 votes to pass by the terms of Wednesday's UCAgreement, each failed to receive even simple-majority approval on Thursday, and were defeated - S. Res. 8 overwhelmingly so.]
Harry Reid, on Thursday, describing his agreement with his counterpart in the other Party:
That bolded sentence is a frank, unmistakable admission, by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, that the Senate’s work – formerly conducted in public on the floor of a “live” debating Chamber, in accordance with simple-majority regular order, by the collective effort of 100 self-directed Senators – is now largely done in private by Party leaders (who also consult with their segregated Party caucuses in private, and often supplant simple-majority order with artificial supermajority thresholds), on the most consequential matters. There wasn’t, in fact, even such a creature as “Majority Leader” or “Minority Leader” in the U.S. Senate until the Parties created them in 1920 (Democratic caucus) and 1925 (Republican caucus).
Thus, as illustrated by Wednesday’s Unanimous Consent Agreement above, when Senators say that “the Senate runs on unanimous consent,” what they’re generally referring to today is the “unanimous consent” of Party leadership, with private caucus agreement, to reopen the Senate floor for “live” business, within tight, specific limits, as structured by those Party leaders (as to number and content of amendments, often with imposed supermajority voting thresholds despite the absence of cloture, and a specific, limited amount of time for floor debate – frequently or usually on measures whose outcome is a foregone conclusion).
Thursday’s reforms (both proposed and enacted, including an in-the-works bill to reduce by as much as one-third the number of presidential appointees needing Senate confirmation) will do little or nothing to formally change those undemocratic, secrecy-shielded practices of the Party-driven Backroom Senate.
Informally, however, there may well be hope, if Party dogma can be minimized, based on this statement Thursday by new Senate Rules Committee ranking member Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee – which is, at last, an honest account from an insider of what’s helped drive both the epidemic of voluntary supermajority cloture motion filings by the Democrats, and Republican “obstruction”: