9 ms·

> minority rule, in the Senate If you look away from the senators and consider the people the senators represent, it was intended to be even without the filibu

by gopalv 3y ago

> minority rule, in the Senate If you look away from the senators and consider the people the senators represent, it was intended to be even without the filibuster. But what should be truly opposed is the cowardly way in which the filibuster is done today. You should make 41 people vote against the bill, on record with their names, then go back to their constituents and explain why they did it in a town hall sometime soon. Right now a senator can rely on the fact that their re-election is five years away when killing a bill which is supported by their constituents. 41 of them cannot assume they have years for the public to forget their vote on this particular thing (like hurting small businesses by inaction too).

overboard2 3y ago
The one person performing a filibuster is presumably doing so very much on record, complete with soundbites.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  That's not the kind anyone means anymore, at least when it comes up in relation to the US Senate. They generally don't actually filibuster, they place a procedural hold that requires 60 members to agree to override it.
  - lumost 3y ago
    This is where the insanity really started. It used to require 8-20 senators to physically filibuster to actually kill a bill. On a major bill, the small number of senators also risked reputational harm from the sound bites of them reading their phone books. Now anyone can start a filibuster, it largely goes unrecorded - and pressure for party unity prevents it from being killed.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      So it sounds like it's an even smaller minority rule now?
      - lumost 3y ago
        You could have a single senator block the entire senate from delivering anything. The only back stop on this is whether a party would kick out a miss behaving senator or primary them.
        lazide 3y ago
        Eh kinda - it’s that way because everyone wants the rules to be that way. A large enough majority can just change the rules. It isn’t that hard to actually do. But they prefer it this way.
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Yep, during the Obama administration, Sen. Ted Cruz famously shut down the government for awhile, nearly by himself, pissing everybody on both sides off, except for the small number of people who vote in Republican primaries, who ate it up.
        listenallyall 3y ago
        In an effort to provide balance, I'll point out that months before Cruz's stunt, Wendy Davis, a Texas state senator, filibustered for about 11 hours to prevent a vote on an abortion bill. > people who vote in Republican primaries, who ate it up. To the best of my knowledge nobody made a movie about Cruz's speech. Davis's speech, on the other hand, became the subject of a documentary debuting at SXSW: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2022/03/09/documentary-chronicling-wendy-davis--13-hour-filibuster-to-premier-at-sxsw https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2022/03/09/docu...
        sanderjd 3y ago
        I honestly don't understand what point you're making.
- dataangel 3y ago
  Yes but you have that be the person in the safest seat.
- sp332 3y ago
  Not since 1972. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/filibuster-joe-biden-senate-60-votes/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/filibuster-joe-biden...
- rpearl 3y ago
  No, fillibusters are a matter of procedure now. Nobody's standing up there talking to perform a fillibuster anymore. From https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/filibustering-in-the-modern-senate https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/filibustering-in-the-mod... "When a Senator signals the intent to filibuster, an informal cloture process starts to determine if 60 votes exist to move a measure forward in two ways. One cloture vote is to approve a motion to consider a measure; the second vote is on the actual measure. If either cloture vote fails, the measure remains in limbo. "
  - Kon-Peki 3y ago
    If you want to see a real filibuster in action, go to Nebraska! Machaela Cavanaugh has been filibustering the legislature for weeks! 12+ hours a day, weeks on end. She has monumentally impressive resolve. Actually, I think you missed it. The Nebraska legislature finally passed a bill today.
    - eek2121 3y ago
      That is great and all, but what folks are communicating here is quite different. Filibusters in the Senate do not require you to even show up, you can simply claim a filibuster to stop a vote from happening.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  You don't deserve to be downvoted for just not knowing that this isn't how the filibuster works anymore. All the well known pop culture treatments of it - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The West Wing, etc. - show this form of it.
dsfyu404ed 3y ago
The senate was never meant to represent people. It was meant to represent the interested of the states as sovereign entities. The house was supposed to be the populist dumpster fire. But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.
- soco 3y ago
  That's an interesting take, to call democracy a dumpster fire. Some people I suppose would have rather kept their parties with tea.
- turndown 3y ago
  >But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires. this was done because the election process via the state assemblies was so corrupt that Americans regularly made fun of the Senate for this fact.
  - dsfyu404ed 3y ago
    Sure, but so was everything else the states did at the time and they did eventually clean up their act. It's hard to say whether direct electing the senate was good or bad because it's not like there's a control country we can compare to. It certainly gave the states as entities less influence which is probably not great.
    - beachy 3y ago
      You could compare it to the UK's House of Lords, where seats are (unbelievably to me) hereditary - passed down from toffs to their children.
      - derefr 3y ago
        I've always thought of the House of Lords as a descriptive, rather that prescriptive, power structure. You don't intentionally design peerage into a system of government. Rather, you've just got these people who are, at the time of the government's founding, equally powerful (at least in sum) to the government — thus, peers to the government. These people can do whatever they like; they can even have their own private standing armies et al, because your own standing army — the military — isn't powerful enough yet to prevent that. Thus, you have to give these powerful people a seat at the table, or they'll challenge the legitimacy of your government (or maybe even just get together to overthrow it.) Maybe that's even what they were just doing, until you got them to calm down and talk to you. One might say that the whole process of establishing a government out of a feudal or contested state, is the bringing of these "peers" to a common table, convincing them that it's in their best interests to solve their problems with the nascent government using plain in-the-open debate, rather than violence or subtle manipulation. Whereever the peers meet to have that open debate, then, is a de-facto "House of Lords." It doesn't need any laws about it to make it so. The laws grow up over time to enshrine what would be happening regardless. And in that light, the way "appointment to" a Westminster-system House of Lords works, makes total sense. The government isn't granting people a seat at the table just because; rather, it's tracing the transfer of political power through dynastic inheritance (and explicitly stamping whoever received it with a heritable noble title, so that there's no argument about who the government thinks received the political power.) This is also why noble titles can be extinguished — if nobody directly inherits a lump of political power, then there should no longer be a seat at the table for "the person who currently holds that lump of political power." The ideal end to a House of Lords, AFAICT, is that eventually all the noble titles go extinct; all the seats are removed; and the House becomes obsolete. I'm not aware of that having ever happened yet anywhere, but it seems to be the intention from the start of every government. (The American system, at first glance, is incompatible with this end; but it could in theory have approached it, if the American people had been less fans of federalism, and had instead insisted that their own states revert to territories in exchange for seats allocated in a central parliament. I think this could have even been likely, in an alternate world where any of the colonies went down a monarchic or oligarchic route with their state governments.)

by gopalv 3y ago

overboard2 3y ago

The one person performing a filibuster is presumably doing so very much on record, complete with soundbites.

yamtaddle 3y ago
That's not the kind anyone means anymore, at least when it comes up in relation to the US Senate. They generally don't actually filibuster, they place a procedural hold that requires 60 members to agree to override it.
- lumost 3y ago
  This is where the insanity really started. It used to require 8-20 senators to physically filibuster to actually kill a bill. On a major bill, the small number of senators also risked reputational harm from the sound bites of them reading their phone books. Now anyone can start a filibuster, it largely goes unrecorded - and pressure for party unity prevents it from being killed.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    So it sounds like it's an even smaller minority rule now?
    - lumost 3y ago
      You could have a single senator block the entire senate from delivering anything. The only back stop on this is whether a party would kick out a miss behaving senator or primary them.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Eh kinda - it’s that way because everyone wants the rules to be that way. A large enough majority can just change the rules. It isn’t that hard to actually do. But they prefer it this way.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Yep, during the Obama administration, Sen. Ted Cruz famously shut down the government for awhile, nearly by himself, pissing everybody on both sides off, except for the small number of people who vote in Republican primaries, who ate it up.
      - listenallyall 3y ago
        In an effort to provide balance, I'll point out that months before Cruz's stunt, Wendy Davis, a Texas state senator, filibustered for about 11 hours to prevent a vote on an abortion bill. > people who vote in Republican primaries, who ate it up. To the best of my knowledge nobody made a movie about Cruz's speech. Davis's speech, on the other hand, became the subject of a documentary debuting at SXSW: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2022/03/09/documentary-chronicling-wendy-davis--13-hour-filibuster-to-premier-at-sxsw https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2022/03/09/docu...
        sanderjd 3y ago
        I honestly don't understand what point you're making.
dataangel 3y ago
Yes but you have that be the person in the safest seat.
sp332 3y ago
Not since 1972. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/filibuster-joe-biden-senate-60-votes/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/filibuster-joe-biden...
rpearl 3y ago
No, fillibusters are a matter of procedure now. Nobody's standing up there talking to perform a fillibuster anymore. From https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/filibustering-in-the-modern-senate https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/filibustering-in-the-mod... "When a Senator signals the intent to filibuster, an informal cloture process starts to determine if 60 votes exist to move a measure forward in two ways. One cloture vote is to approve a motion to consider a measure; the second vote is on the actual measure. If either cloture vote fails, the measure remains in limbo. "
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  If you want to see a real filibuster in action, go to Nebraska! Machaela Cavanaugh has been filibustering the legislature for weeks! 12+ hours a day, weeks on end. She has monumentally impressive resolve. Actually, I think you missed it. The Nebraska legislature finally passed a bill today.
  - eek2121 3y ago
    That is great and all, but what folks are communicating here is quite different. Filibusters in the Senate do not require you to even show up, you can simply claim a filibuster to stop a vote from happening.
sanderjd 3y ago
You don't deserve to be downvoted for just not knowing that this isn't how the filibuster works anymore. All the well known pop culture treatments of it - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The West Wing, etc. - show this form of it.

dsfyu404ed 3y ago

The senate was never meant to represent people. It was meant to represent the interested of the states as sovereign entities. The house was supposed to be the populist dumpster fire. But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.

soco 3y ago
That's an interesting take, to call democracy a dumpster fire. Some people I suppose would have rather kept their parties with tea.
turndown 3y ago
>But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires. this was done because the election process via the state assemblies was so corrupt that Americans regularly made fun of the Senate for this fact.
- dsfyu404ed 3y ago
  Sure, but so was everything else the states did at the time and they did eventually clean up their act. It's hard to say whether direct electing the senate was good or bad because it's not like there's a control country we can compare to. It certainly gave the states as entities less influence which is probably not great.
  - beachy 3y ago
    You could compare it to the UK's House of Lords, where seats are (unbelievably to me) hereditary - passed down from toffs to their children.
    - derefr 3y ago
      I've always thought of the House of Lords as a descriptive, rather that prescriptive, power structure. You don't intentionally design peerage into a system of government. Rather, you've just got these people who are, at the time of the government's founding, equally powerful (at least in sum) to the government — thus, peers to the government. These people can do whatever they like; they can even have their own private standing armies et al, because your own standing army — the military — isn't powerful enough yet to prevent that. Thus, you have to give these powerful people a seat at the table, or they'll challenge the legitimacy of your government (or maybe even just get together to overthrow it.) Maybe that's even what they were just doing, until you got them to calm down and talk to you. One might say that the whole process of establishing a government out of a feudal or contested state, is the bringing of these "peers" to a common table, convincing them that it's in their best interests to solve their problems with the nascent government using plain in-the-open debate, rather than violence or subtle manipulation. Whereever the peers meet to have that open debate, then, is a de-facto "House of Lords." It doesn't need any laws about it to make it so. The laws grow up over time to enshrine what would be happening regardless. And in that light, the way "appointment to" a Westminster-system House of Lords works, makes total sense. The government isn't granting people a seat at the table just because; rather, it's tracing the transfer of political power through dynastic inheritance (and explicitly stamping whoever received it with a heritable noble title, so that there's no argument about who the government thinks received the political power.) This is also why noble titles can be extinguished — if nobody directly inherits a lump of political power, then there should no longer be a seat at the table for "the person who currently holds that lump of political power." The ideal end to a House of Lords, AFAICT, is that eventually all the noble titles go extinct; all the seats are removed; and the House becomes obsolete. I'm not aware of that having ever happened yet anywhere, but it seems to be the intention from the start of every government. (The American system, at first glance, is incompatible with this end; but it could in theory have approached it, if the American people had been less fans of federalism, and had instead insisted that their own states revert to territories in exchange for seats allocated in a central parliament. I think this could have even been likely, in an alternate world where any of the colonies went down a monarchic or oligarchic route with their state governments.)