The Kroog Versus The Filibuster

Paul Krugman takes up BooMan's argument from August and Yggy's more recent post that the Senate is broken, and rightfully concludes the Republicans are doing all the breaking.

Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?

Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Some conservatives argue that the Senate’s rules didn’t stop former President George W. Bush from getting things done. But this is misleading, on two levels.

First, Bush-era Democrats weren’t nearly as determined to frustrate the majority party, at any cost, as Obama-era Republicans. Certainly, Democrats never did anything like what Republicans did last week: G.O.P. senators held up spending for the Defense Department — which was on the verge of running out of money — in an attempt to delay action on health care.

More important, however, Mr. Bush was a buy-now-pay-later president. He pushed through big tax cuts, but never tried to pass spending cuts to make up for the revenue loss. He rushed the nation into war, but never asked Congress to pay for it. He added an expensive drug benefit to Medicare, but left it completely unfunded. Yes, he had legislative victories; but he didn’t show that Congress can make hard choices and act responsibly, because he never asked it to.

So now that hard choices must be made, how can we reform the Senate to make such choices possible?

I'm willing to bet that 70% filibuster rate is even higher now just this year alone.  The Republicans threatened to filibuster everything, to the point of nearly paralyzing the country.  Everything this Congress will do will require 60 votes in the Senate now, and it's the Republicans doing it.  They are the Party of No...and these are the same Republicans who were threatening to get rid of the filibuster openly saying that the Dems were abusing it trying to stop 10 of Bush's 229 judicial nominees in 2004...a filibuster percentage of  less than five percent.

(More after the jump...)

Compare that to the current GOP filibuster rate of 70% plus and you tell me who is abusing the filibuster, and who is being the bitter partisans here.  There's no question, and no argument to make.  The GOP was willing to get rid of the filibuster over the Dems using it five percent of the time.  The Dems backed down as a result.  That's how Bush got his nominees passed and his legislation passed as well.

So how do we reform the filibuster?

Back in the mid-1990s two senators — Tom Harkin and, believe it or not, Joe Lieberman — introduced a bill to reform Senate procedures. (Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.) Sixty votes would still be needed to end a filibuster at the beginning of debate, but if that vote failed, another vote could be held a couple of days later requiring only 57 senators, then another, and eventually a simple majority could end debate. Mr. Harkin says that he’s considering reintroducing that proposal, and he should.

But if such legislation is itself blocked by a filibuster — which it almost surely would be — reformers should turn to other options. Remember, the Constitution sets up the Senate as a body with majority — not supermajority — rule. So the rule of 60 can be changed. A Congressional Research Service report from 2005, when a Republican majority was threatening to abolish the filibuster so it could push through Bush judicial nominees, suggests several ways this could happen — for example, through a majority vote changing Senate rules on the first day of a new session.

Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option — not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.

But that's the GOP plan:  to paralyze Congress and to prevent the Dems from doing anything to fix the economy, the environment, and the banks...and them blaming the Dems when the situation deteriorates.  They've been doing it all year and only Arlen Specter's party switch has given the Dems any opportunity to get any legislation passed at all in the second half of 2009.  The GOP has said no to everything, and are betting voters will side with them.

It's going to have to be fixed eventually.

[UPDATE 10:32 AM]  Charles Lemos over at MyDD has a great follow-up to this.