Filibusters

Mitch McConnell has just announced a blanket filibuster of everything and anything until and unless, one assumes, the Bush tax cuts are extended vote rich people. And he is going to have 47 Senators in his caucus come January, which means that he can lose a whole 6 Republicans and still block anything and everything. And he's been doing pretty damn well of late in an environment where he can lose a whole 0 Republicans and still succeed. So I think it's fair to say that he and his ilk have made it eminently clear that absolutely nothing Obama wants done will get done over the next two years.

Think about it. What do Republicans want? Health-care reform repealed. They can't get that, because Democrats control the Senate and Obama is still President. But what in the world is stopping them from saying, okay, until you repeal health-care reform, literally nothing will get done in the Senate. No substantive votes will be taken. Nothing. No confirmations, no treaties, no resolutions, no legislation, nothing. There is nothing stopping them from saying this, and there is no reason why they won't, given their current behavior.

Which makes things interesting. Jeff Merkley has a proposal to reform the filibuster, and it sounds good to me. He would ban filibusters on motions to begin debate, since, after all, the supposed point of the filibuster is to promote debate. And he wouldn't allow filibusters of amendments, since a robust and vigorous amendment process is also part of open debate. And he would also eliminate the practice of virtual filibusters, requiring an actual floor debate with at least 5 objecting members for the first day of the filibuster, 10 for the second say, and 20 from then on.

I have to say, I think this is brilliant. The point is that you cannot object to this as a power grab, since it would still be true that 41 Senators could block anything if at least 20 of them were just plain more committed than the majority, and you can't object to it in the grounds of turning the Senate into the House, abolishing the tradition of grand debates in the "world's greatest legislative chamber." In fact, the proposal would enhance (read: restore) that tradition by making the filibusterers actually debate. The only way to object is that Republicans don't actually want to stand up and filibuster things, because it would make them look somewhat bad, but they do want to still be able to defeat the will of 59, now 58, soon to be 53 Senators with only 41, now 42, soon to be 47 votes. So the only way to object to this is if what you want is for no one to be able to get anything done in the Senate as long as 41 people are opposed to it, and you don't want those 41 objectors to have to, you know, put in effort making it happen.

Needless to say, every Republican will oppose it. But the 53 Democrats? Might they realize that their chamber is quite simply deceased if they don't do something? Here's hoping.

UPDATE: This is also a good way to reconcile the behavior of the Democrats during the Bush years, when we filibustered some stuff, with opposition to the Republican practice under Obama, when they filibuster everything. The desired reconciliation is a filibuster rule that allows filibusters occasionally, on Big Important Things, when the minority party really really thinks that the majority party is overreaching/being unconstitutional/doing things so unpopular that it's worth obstructing it, but wouldn't allow routine obstruction of everything. This proposal would create an automatic institutional rule making that happen, since it would ultimately require something well over 20 Senators to be willing to actually, you know, filibuster in order to block something. It's a brilliant strategy.