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Senate Democrats need to use 'nuclear option' against GOP
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| Contributor | kal |
| Last Edited | kal Feb 16, 2010 05:55am |
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| Category | Opinion |
| News Date | Tuesday, February 16, 2010 11:55:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The thing that really bothers me about Republicans' use of the filibuster to derail bills and stall the Senate's legislative process is not the tyrannical behavior of the GOP minority; it is the complicity of the Democratic majority.
While the Senate's 59-member Democratic caucus is one vote short of the 60 votes needed to cut off a filibuster, it has eight more votes than is required to stop the body's 41 Republicans from using the tactic to effectively block the will of the majority.
For much of its history, the Senate permitted unlimited debate on an issue. But in 1917, it enacted a rule that allowed a two-thirds majority of the body's members to cut off debate. That was reduced to a three-fifths vote in 1975. Since then, the Senate has been required to get the backing of 60 of the body's 100 senators to end a filibuster — a supermajority that flouts the basic idea of a majority-rule democracy.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has effectively dismissed some of his fellow Democrats' efforts to change Senate rules so that, eventually, 51 votes would be enough to eliminate the filibuster.
Five years ago when Republicans controlled the Senate, they threatened to do just that when Democrats used the filibuster to block 10 of President Bush's judicial appointments. They called it a "nuclear option" and for good reason. The thing Senate Democrats and Republicans fear more than being in the minority is being out of power. The filibuster allows the body's minority party to stop the majority from acting if it can rally to its side 41 of the Senate's votes.
Until recently, the filibuster was used sparingly. But as party lines have come to mark this nation's ideological divide, the filibuster has become the roadside bomb of the Senate's minority party.
But as frustrated as each party has been by the other's heavy-handed use of the filibuster, neither has been willing to detonate the "nuclear option" out of fear that such action would harm them, too.
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