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Two things I disagree with... this isn't the "nuclear option", and I'm not sure that this is connected with modern polarization. The reason that these quorum r
by klodolph 5y ago
Two things I disagree with... this isn't the "nuclear option", and I'm not sure that this is connected with modern polarization.
The reason that these quorum rules are so old is because people have been evading quorum for decades or centuries. Just take Bob Packwood (D-OR) as an example... in February 1988, he was forcibly carried into the US Senate chamber by capitol police. Or look at Abraham Lincoln, who tried and failed to evade quorum in the Illinois senate in December 1840.
The nuclear option, IMO, is civil war. Which has happened and continues to happen across the world, at great cost to life. Absentee legislators... IMO, just bureaucracy in action. I will accept an inefficient or wasteful bureaucracy any day, if the alternatives are worse--and there are many plausible worse alternatives.
- salawat 5y agoI use nuclear option in the sense that in a functioning legislature, strategic denial of quorum should be an unneeded arcanity. We are not in those times. I'd actually be curious to research how frequent the act is. Intuitively, one would hope it only happens in exceptional circumstances; but it's definitely something that with increasing frequency, we should be taking as an indicator of disunity and severe divisiveness. As a hypothetical legislator (on the majority side), this should be a signal to deescalate. Instead? All speed ahead is the traditional response. You can argue it's normal; and preferable to actual blades and bombs violence. I argue that if you have a group shoving a stick in the spokes of Government that hard, the violence is well under way.