I am afraid that it is business as usual in the United States Senate. Yesterday, the group of mostly newer Democrats in the Senate dropped their effort to minimally reform the filibuster rules. The New York Times article (here) reported that they did so because they did not have the support necessary to change the rules. That means that even though all the Democrats in the Senate signed a letter saying that the filibuster rules needed to be changed, they were apparently unwilling to vote to change them. Any changes are now left to some hoped for compromise by the leadership of the two parties. I hope I am wrong, but the idea of Senators McConnell and Reid coming up with meaningful filibuster reform does not seem likely.
What is almost worse is that last night Senator Merkley (D-OR) appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show and gave some incomprehensible explanation about some rules that had never been used before that were blocking the effort. It sounded like a cover up, and if reporting in The New York Times is correct, it was a cover up. See for yourself.
Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal
I think all you need to know about how messed up the Senate is is that one of the reasons the rule to change filibusters didn't pass is becau it was subject to a filibuster, so needed 60 votes to pass (and nobody was actually required to filibuster it to make that 60-vote threshold necessary) and the other reason was that the Democrats were too afraid to just change the rules on their own, which they are perfectly entitled to do.
ReplyDeleteKind of sums up everything that has been wrong with the Senate - particularly since Obama has been office, doesn't it?