The Senate’s current rules make it very easy for a determined minority to painlessly create crisis moments and work their will on the body

Y’know, come 2012, isn’t that [the "minority" party] about all the Dems are going to have?

The “determined” part = not so much.

Seems to me the Dems are throwing away one of the few tools they might have to stop Republican steamrollering. Unless, perhaps, that’s their objective.

Seems to me the Dems are throwing away one of the few tools they might have to stop Republican steamrollering. Unless, perhaps, that’s their objective.

Totally. If the Democrats had actually wanted filibuster reform as a way of removing obstacles to their professed agenda, it would have passed long ago. I’m just hoping that at least some of them will be sufficiently fed up with “all kabuki, all the time” to vote for reform, without regard to long-term consequences. Letting all this procedural game-playing get in the way of real debate must be exasperating to the Senators themselves. It takes a toll.

work their will on the body, despite a lack of public support

As though public support matters at all to those in Congress.

The Al Jazeera story puts it more bluntly.

The Berman you-name-it bill passed overwhelmingly because that is how things work in a city where policy is driven by campaign contributions….

Reading reports and comments from all over, the consensus is that there is only one party in the United States — the Fascist party.

This is such a hypocritical argument. You cannot lambaste Republicans for filibustering, then turn around and say Democrats need to filibuster Republican legislation. If the filibuster isn’t reformed, I shouldn’t here one bit from you or anybody else with your same argument about Republicans filibustering everything in the next session.

@Sebastos: The filibuster wasn’t really that big of a deal until these past two years happened. Democrats are serious about it _now_, because _everything_ they wanted to do was being filibustered. The only option they have to get rid of the filibuster is either (a) inciting a Constitutional crisis by using the nuclear option or (b) waiting until the next session of Congress.

Frankly, I think it’s very important that Dodd the Disappointment is gone. Without him grumbling like the old-timer he is, I think the Senate might actually make some headway on reform. I hope Merkley and Udall have reached out to a coupla old bulls, too — maybe Inouye or Kerry or Feinstein — to get their support on this.

It would probably mean a lot to see a very senior member of the caucus support this.

Feinstein is already on record as a “Blue Hagfish” (my term for Democrats opposed to filibuster reform), unless she has walked that back (which would be important news!).

This started in the minds of basically a couple freshman Senators, who quickly grew tired of the dysfunction in the upper House. I talked to one of them yesterday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), about the effort. “The big challenge was to get the conversation going,” he said. “The old guard Senators who had been here two or three decades, never bothered with the rules. They thought they weren’t changeable. Us newbies, the folks elected in the last two or three cycles, started saying it’s dysfunctional, broken and we need to fix it.”

Appalling – that the old-time Senators wouldn’t even know that it was possible to change the rules!

Let me get this straight. Filibuster reform and any other reform to the Senate rulebook has to take place on January 5th, or else nothing can be done for another two years. Somehow I doubt if Mitch McConnell can’t figure a way to keep the Senate tied up in procedure for one single day.

You shouldn’t be surprised. I doubt that any of the old set-in-cement senators have read a single bill in 20 years. The privileged, the few, the ignorant.

He won’t be able to keep the Senate tied up in procedure on that particular day. The rules that allow the filibuster and other procedural dodges can’t bind the next Senate until and unless they’re readopted, which is usually the first order of business for each new Senate on its first day. On the other hand, if filibuster reform fails and the old rules are readopted, then the Human Roadblock, the Zombie Bulldog of Kentucky, can obstruct to his heart’s content for another two years – at which point the next Senate may well have a Republican majority. That’s his goal.

On December 1, Senator Merkley explained here.
/~~~

I don’t really see it making that much of a difference. Dems don’t have the spine to filibuste4r anything anyway. They whine and bitch and vote against and call it a victory.

This is such a hypocritical argument. You cannot lambaste Republicans for filibustering, then turn around and say Democrats need to filibuster Republican legislation.

Not at all. Democrats have never tried to make everything require 60 votes like the Republicans have.

Let me get this straight. Filibuster reform and any other reform to the Senate rulebook has to take place on January 5th, or else nothing can be done for another two years.

Another point: it’s actually not that particular day that’s important, it’s that the reform has to be done before the old rules that allow procedural dodges are readopted. If indeed nothing – including the readoption of the Senate’s rules – got done on January 5th, then it could still be done on January 6th, and it still couldn’t be filibustered.

It’s just that the Senate always adopts its rules on the first day, and that’s likely to happen again – it’s uncontroversial, and in accord with common sense. The question is simply whether the adopted rules will be the same old ones, or a new set of rules with the relevant reforms incorporated.

So, what do I need to tell my senators that I support?

The way they change their votes from yay to nay after they are assured that a bad bill will pass without their vote is cute tomfoolery. Also voting yes on cloture and no on the bill is another cute Blue Dog Bill Nelson trick.

The Senate is unnecessary. They’re all corporate stooges. The citizenry would be far better served (and save TAX revenue by eliminating their massive salaries with massive benefit packages) to abolish the Senate.

Joe Lieberman (Obama’s mentor) is an example of a typical Senator.

And I hope they never do! Neither party should ever again have the chance to do such a thing – it amounts to a government shutdown “lite”. The filibuster should have been eliminated years ago – there was never any good reason for it to exist, and its historical record (especially its use against civil rights legislation) refutes any claim that it formerly served noble purposes. Mr. Smith goes to Washington was a fantasy.

Forcing “real” filibusters, as Merkley apparently intends (where they actually have to stand up and talk) would be a step forward, but the thing should really be eliminated completely and without trace.

The way they change their votes from yay to nay after they are assured that a bad bill will pass without their vote is cute transparent tomfoolery.

Fixed it for ya.

It seems like about half the Democrats in the Senate have threatened to filibuster with the Republicans at one time or another. It seems doubtful to me that they will give up their chance at extortion/corruption for the sake of… making our government work. I hope I am wrong, but still- I wonder if any Republicans might bite on this? It seems unlikely- because in the end they can always change the rules when they get the majority, so why help Democrats? Still, with such a narrow Democrat majority, they might be able to get a majority with the Dino’s on a whole bunch of issues…

And I hope they never do!

Agreed but I was responding to the unfair use of the word “hypocrite” toward Mauimom

We see that if we are watching the voting. How certain people vote up front and then the stragglers come in later and vote. Saw it today in fact. That’s the way I saw it anyway. I could be wrong, of course.
A lump of coal for those who don’t vote their actual, true conscience. (If that’s not being too secularist.)

Name Calling – the gift to give if you’ve got nothing better to share. What a day, huh?

What a day, huh?

Right? My gosh.

To be truthful – may I?- I almost felt bad. Some people show up with a target on their t-shirt. And, although I thoughtfirepups were being honest, but also circumspect, in a way it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Or, wacking fish with a paddle. Strange way to look at it, in hindsight?

A lump of coal for those who don’t vote their actual, true conscience.

The filibuster is only one of the tools they use to earn that lump of coal – but it’s one of the most effective. It’s the paper moon over their make-believe drama.

Seems to be. And, btw, the last part of your comment is almost romantic, in a weird way.
But, that’s okay. I kinda like weird.

As far as one in particular was concerned, s/he came here for a fight. Either that or had the social graces of a wolverine.

BTW, you haven’t done your fudge thread yet?

danps is upstairs!
Building the Shadow Internet

No. Food Sunday. Tomorrow. Hoping to do it before church, ’cause, hey, how hard can it be to say. Who loves Fudge? Who has a favorite recipe? I mean, really.
BTW. I called the bank this am and it’s cool.
I cooked off and on all day. Made a really good chicken and veggies soup and baked a carrot cake. Comfort. Food.
Pet that cat of yours for me, will ya?
(((Peggy)))

Pet that cat of yours for me, will ya?

Will do. :)
And woohoo for the bank situation.

Thank you, Lurk. :)
Would you like a slice of carrot cake? Not cut yet, but it smelled really really good while it was baking. Okay, you. You get two slices.

Fuckin’ losers. And, I had to be all nice and all. They thanked me for being a loyal customer. Bite me. :)
You get cake too, of course.

I pretty much can’t say “bank” unless there are a few fuck words sprinkled around the sentence. Fuckers.

I’m not sure how it’s unfair. The argument is incredibly hypocritical. And it’s been made by so many people. “Now that Republicans are in power, of course Democrats are going to get rid of the filibuster.” (Not that the Republicans are even in power in the Senate, but that won’t stop people from making the argument!)

People are afraid that Republicans are going to pass Republican legislation. They want to block any Republican ideas. Yet, for the past two years, these same people argued that Republicans are scum because they were afraid of Democrats passing Democratic legislation, and they wanted to block any Democratic ideas.

Most pups here at the lake understand this to be the case, but for any newcomers to this “reform the filibuster/Senate” thread, consider this proposition:

There is nothing illegal or unconstitutional about the Senate changing their rules any time a majority of them and their President (our Vice-President) agree to change them–the only obstacle is political.

Our own powwow has written extensively on this topic at this blog. Here’s another source to peruse that speaks to this point directly.

[Thank you for pointing out that fact, and providing that link, bobash.]

Sebastos @ 11:

The rules that allow the filibuster and other procedural dodges can’t bind the next Senate until and unless they’re readopted, which is usually the first order of business for each new Senate on its first day.

Not for the first time, that’s false.

Sebastos @ 15:

It’s just that the Senate always adopts its rules on the first day, and that’s likely to happen again – it’s uncontroversial, and in accord with common sense. The question is simply whether the adopted rules will be the same old ones, or a new set of rules with the relevant reforms incorporated.

Again, that’s absolutely false. Adopting or readopting its rules is never “the first order of business for each new Senate on its first day,” because it’s unnecessary, as Senate Standing Rule V made explicit:

2. The rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules.

Here’s “the first order[s] of business for [the] new [111th] Senate,” from its first day back on January 6, 2009, for anyone who’d like to go in search of that phantom “adopt[ing] [of] its rules on the first day.”

Anyone who has done any careful reading about the past Senate controversies over cloture understands that the controversy itself centered on the fact that the Senate does not begin unbound by the rules of the last Senate at each new Congress, even as two-thirds of its membership continues from the previous Senate. In other words, it is, and has long been, very “controversial” in the Senate even to claim that each new Senate should start with none of its pre-existing rules in force.

Everyone – including some who know, or should know, better – is welcome to continue to believe in their favorite partisan myths about the Senate, but – unlike many incumbent Senators, unfortunately – I feel an obligation to set the record straight, when I can, for the benefit of those who care to learn the non-partisan truth about that national legislative body, as best an outsider can decipher it – for the sake of that legislative body itself, which does not deserve the contempt and abuse that both political Parties have richly earned for themselves by deliberately abandoning the Senate’s vital ways and means. As it happens, in this case the myths about Senate rules are dangerous to the future of democratic self-government itself, in my opinion, never mind if the radical proposals mixed in with obvious and legitimate reforms (like ending secret holds) have any chance of passing.

Note, in particular, this language in Rule V (reflecting the historical reality of the Senate since its founding), that Tom Udall is desperate to ignore and avoid (primarily because the minority would get to debate his plan to profoundly restrict every Senator’s right to be heard in the Senate), while he sacrifices majority votes by waiting until the next Senate to propose his scheme:

“… unless they are changed as provided in these rules.“

Also note that the Standing Rules of the Senate may be changed on one day’s notice any time of any session that a simple majority of the Senate decides to change one or more rules. Unless and until a “filibuster” develops to delay such a vote, which can’t be waited out. [Unlike Sebastos, I openly define that word, because it's necessary to comprehend the Senate process involved: Here, unlike in the Brennan Center report that Sebastos draws upon, "filibuster" means only extended, physically-taxing floor debate that delays the final vote on the proposed rule change.] If no filibuster develops, and the rule change passes, it remains in effect in the Senate indefinitely, until the Senate next decides to change or amend that rule.

But should such minority filibuster debate actually emerge in opposition to a Senate rule change, offered “as provided in these rules,” then if, and only if, a Senate majority (yes, the majority, not the minority that’s speaking on the floor) decides that it won’t or can’t wait out the filibuster debate, and therefore chooses instead to file an optional “cloture motion” (under Rule 22), 67 votes will be required to end the ongoing filibuster before the simple-majority final passage vote on the proposed rule change takes place. [Yes, that's right, contrary to the conventional wisdom, "60-vote" thresholds in the Senate are forced by the majority filing an optional cloture motion, not by the minority filing a cloture motion.]

And should the Senate majority decline to force and wait out any actual filibuster by those opposed to their suggested rule change, and voluntarily invoke Rule 22 by filing a cloture motion (as the Harry Reid Senate now routinely abuses the rules to do as a matter of course on legislation, to prevent, rather than to end, floor debate and amending), the cloture rule itself permits a delay of 11-15 days before the final simple-majority vote on passage can take place. [In comparison, the one-man record for a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style filibuster in the Senate is 24 hours.] And under cloture, a Senator need not continue to hold the floor and speak, as in a filibuster in which cloture is not invoked, but rather need only say “I object” repeatedly to unanimous consent requests, to prevent a waiving of the extra floor time that the voluntary imposition of Rule 22 by the majority triggered.

So the majority Democrats in the Senate have a choice:

1. End the fake quorum call (that doesn’t call the quorum, but essentially suspends Senate business without formally recessing) to force a return of the real, debating filibuster, and with it, public floor debate and simple-majority regular Senate order.

Or (continuing the corrupt practices of the current Senate):

2. Continue to suspend Senate business with endless fake quorum calls (which don’t call the quorum, and may only be lifted by unanimous consent), thereby removing the need for the minority to actually speak on the floor if they want to prevent the Presiding Officer from putting the pending question to a simple-majority vote of the Senate.

Or (as those hostile to democratic debate and minority rights in the Senate propose):

3. Continue the practices of Choice #2, but also try to pretend that all Senate rules are gone, as of the first day of the next Senate, despite both rule and precedent and Senate history proving otherwise. So as to impose a new “rule” to permanently restrict (the possibility of) extended Senate floor debate in future – never mind that there hasn’t been a debating filibuster in two decades – by violating Senate rules and the regular order that’s upheld on a non-partisan basis by the Senate Parliamentarian. All because some members of the majority want to “adopt” a rule without debate that would enable the majority to continue to abusively invoke the cloture rule in the absence of filibusters, using less than 60 votes for the next two years (when all Senate rules may, or may not in the new disorder, next vaporize en masse) – in lieu of simply reforming their corrupt majority practice of imposing supermajority rule on the simple-majority regular order of the Senate with cloture motions filed in the absence of filibusters.

All this may sound arcane and convoluted – Udall is counting on that, and the lack of Senate debate on the issue will help keep it that way – but the effects of Udall’s proposal(s) on public legislating, democratic debate, and honorable rules-bound practice in the Senate going forward would be profoundly destructive and lasting for the institution as a whole, regardless of Party.

Mind you, the Parties themselves don’t give a damn about destructive outcomes for the institution itself, by and large. Both Parties have very effectively trashed the Senate, and its public, deliberative, democratic legislative purpose, by increasingly deploying such destructive and undemocratic practices as the fake quorum call (suspending the business of the Senate most of many “sessions,” apart from occasional, random and unrelated speeches delivered by members to an empty Chamber), and by abusing optional rules like Rule 22 (cloture). Incumbents have long counted on, and continue to count on, the public misunderstanding Senate process and ignoring Senate proceedings, and are aided by superficial and Party-filtered media coverage of Congressional deliberations in shielding their mythical version of Senate rules from informed public critique.

But we should care enough to try to prevent the Parties from succeeding at further trashing the institution of the Senate: By understanding that some federal politicians hope to formalize in rules – by introducing a destabilizing, more-partisan “might-makes-right order” to the debating Chamber of the Senate – procedures that have so far been only destructive Party practice (which needs no rule change or violation to bring it to an end).

Senator Merkley is right about the need to return to real filibustering in the Senate – and for that no rule changes or violations are needed, contrary to the impression that has been given by the media (including by Harry Reid’s office through HuffingtonPost reporting), as I’ve dissected at length in the past. Reform of Party leadership/caucus practice, alone, would take care of that, and Merkley does his cause no favors by pretending otherwise. Furthermore, there is an existing “Morning Hour” process in the Senate that allows any Senator to move to proceed to legislation without overcoming a filibuster. Yet in today’s Senate every Senator agrees daily to “deem expired” that process in advance, apparently because utilizing that process would mean the emergence of more self-directed legislators who are not beholden to Party leadership for a daily Senate agenda.

I can think of one way to formalize in a rule a reform of the majority’s present abuse of optional Rule 22 cloture (one that wouldn’t have been necessary, had the Parties honored the purpose of Senate rules in the first place): Require that no cloture motion be filed (by the majority) in the absence of an ongoing, obstructive, debating filibuster on the floor (conducted by a minority). That would recouple “cloture” with “filibuster” (practices that are now wholly divorced from each other, since filing for cloture has continued past the practice of debating filibusters), as they were designed to be from cloture’s beginning in 1917. Though I can see the precise definition of “obstructive” debate causing some problems for the agreement on such a rule, and no rule is necessary for such abuse of Rule 22 to stop.

Such a “recoupling” rule change would have no need to invoke the radical “nuclear option” (disguised as the Udall “constitutional option” by a pretense of timing), before being adopted. No Senator should fear an open, honest floor debate – including the possibility of a genuine debating filibuster interposing – about such a needed reform of bad Senate practice. Both Parties would gain something from it (the majority, by being forced to leave simple-majority regular order in place, in lieu of cloture, if no one actually filibusters; the minority, by a return of open amending and debate on the floor). Many Senators nevertheless might resist such a reform, because they know that they can’t competently debate in public, and have grown used to the Reid Senate majority handing them painless, supermajority-invoking delay on a silver platter, by filing cloture motions before anyone has taken the floor to filibuster.

Of course, if Americans and the media continue to unquestioningly buy what partisan Senate incumbents are selling, such public debate-friendly reforms will be bypassed, to the detriment of the nation and its people, if not to the ruthless exercise of Party power in Washington.

I noticed some related questions about cloture posed by MarkH in another, older thread, that I’ll answer here, since no one else answered him and the answers may clarify the misunderstandings of others:

What I would wonder is what happens if 60 votes for cloture aren’t found and debate continues, but no senator speaks against the legislation? What mechanism allows a senator to then call up the question for a vote or at least a cloture vote? Can the opponents of the legislation just continually force the body to go through repetitive cloture votes (without actually continuing any debate)?

Replacing debate with cloture votes isn’t an improvement. - MarkH

If 60 votes aren’t found to invoke cloture (when the vote on the motion is held on, at the earliest, the second day after the majority chooses to file such a motion), Rule 22′s supermajority provisions are not triggered. [Note that the minority won't be forcing repeated cloture votes, because it is the majority that files cloture motions, these days in the absence of obstructive floor debate by the minority.]

Then, if no Senator requests floor time to speak (for or against) the legislation or nomination then pending before the Senate, the Presiding Officer must promptly put the question to a simple-majority vote of the Senate. [For this reason, there is no mechanism for a Senator to ask that a vote be held; absent debate (or a live quorum call), the Presiding Officer must put the question to the Senate.] Except: Today, there’s that fake quorum call in the way – which effectively suspends all Senate business until the Party Bosses give their okay, and unanimous consent is granted to resume floor activity. However, the fake quorum call can vanish tomorrow at the mere say-so of the Senate Majority Leader, who has the power to end it, since it’s not a rule, but mere convenient custom – which has gotten completely out of hand – to allow Senators to be absent from the floor for extended periods of time.

So, for example, the new Udall-sympathetic Brennan Center for Justice report about the “filibuster” – a word that its report (which omits or glosses over crucial details about Senate procedure) uses to simultaneously describe (and thus to confuse and conflate) the very different processes of extended, obstructive floor debate by a minority, public or private objections by Senators to unanimous consent requests by the majority to waive rules or regular order, and cloture motions filed by the majority in the absence of obstructive floor debate – ignores the fact that under regular Senate order, in the absence of the fake quorum call (or a few real quorum calls), nothing but floor debate can prevent the Senate from voting on a measure.

Senators don’t need a power to “put the question” (or need to file for cloture) if no one takes the floor to speak. The Presiding Officer does so automatically, and would be doing so, regularly, if both Parties hadn’t substituted the fake quorum call for an active Senate debating floor – allowing them to retreat to the backrooms in place of doing the public’s business in the Senate Chamber. Mere “objection,” without more (speech or debate), can’t stop such a vote, when the majority has not invoked cloture, provided a bill is brought to the floor under regular, democratic order for public debate and amending.

Should the fake quorum call be removed (and thus debate or a vote be ongoing on the floor), and a Senator in favor of the pending question decide to re-attempt cloture – that vote he or she can force, two days hence, by filing another cloture motion signed by 16 Senators. However, in the process of choosing to avoid waiting out any non-stop minority debate on the floor that lasts for more than 36 hours or so (the earliest that the cloture vote can be held), that Senator will be voluntarily invoking a 60-vote (or 67-vote) supermajority threshold for a vote on the measure, before the simple-majority final passage vote, and, if cloture passes, the possibility of almost two weeks of further (basically painless for the minority) delay before a final simple-majority vote may be taken.

So, yes, indeed, MarkH, “replacing debate with cloture is not an improvement,” as you say. Why, then, are certain Democrats so bound and determined to continue to replace public debate with backroom-friendly cloture, only more so in future because of a lower vote threshold, they hope – even if it requires abusing their power and openly violating time-tested Senate rules, and orderly, non-partisan parliamentary procedure to do so?

Unless democrats grow a spine or some ovaries and fight, all the rule changes in the world will not matter because there will always be an excuse. Right now I am more angry at the cowardly democrats than I am at the idiotic republicans.

Your continued defense of the status quo is admirable. That’s what defending requiring 60 votes to pass anything is doind. I’ll take real change myself. Which will always be easier if it requires what the constitution envisioned, a majority.

How do I say that the constitution envisioned that? Because they went out of their way to list the votes that required super majorities. And the fact they did NOT list passing legislation and/or confirming nominees is evidence enough that they envisioned those things requiring only majorities. Otherwise, they would’ve listed them as well.

And I saw your comment the other day about how you and I disagree on the bottom line fact that the current rules defact requires 60 votes to pass anything if the minority decides that. I would simply add that’s it’s not just me you’re disagreeing with, it’s EVERY Senate majority leader over the last 100 years too.

I hear what you’re saying, but here’s where I’m coming from.

Number 1) Even if the D’s do NOT change the rules, if the R’s are in the majority after 2012 (or any other time) and the D’s returned the favor by filibustering everything, then there is nothing, NOTHING stopping the R’s from then ending it themselves if they have the majority and the WH. Do you really believe that if things were reversed, i.e. the R’s had just won HUGE victories, claiming BOTH houses of Congress with margins not seen in a generation, AND winning a Presidency by in today’s standards a landslide, and the D’s in the Senate filibustered EVERYTHING, that they wouldn’t have changed it long ago? I submit that they would’ve changed it within the first 6 months of the first year. The Democrats chose not too. I don’t believe for a second the R’s would do the same.

Second) IMO the status quo is unacceptable. This country needs real change, not window dressing around the edges. And the fact will always be that if you want real change, it’s always going to be easier to get it if that change only requires a majority rather than a super majority.

For all of those reasons I support ending the requirement that legislation and/or confirmation requires 60 votes. How they ultimately do that is OK with me. Adding more open debate on the Senate floor for all to see is definitely a GOOD thing as proven by Bernie Saunders last Friday, but at the end of the day, at some point, the will of the majority must prevail. If you’re worried that begins to sound tyrannical, remember, the Senate is but ONE of TWO houses of THREE branches of government. Our forefathers included checks and balances on that tyranny that I happen to believe in. No out of control Senate can do anything unless the other House, the President, and ultimately the Courts agree.

You continue to misread or to misunderstand my position, OFG, if you believe that I think that the Senate today is operating as it should. To claim that I’m “defending requiring 60 votes to pass anything” in the Senate, even as I rail against the majority’s voluntary status quo abuse of the “60-vote” cloture rule, reveals, to put it mildly, an obvious ‘failure to communicate.’ The Senate today, as run by Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the two Party caucuses, is not a healthy institution, nor conducive to democratic self-government.

I do, however, recognize the crucial distinction, as I think everyone should, between how Senators today (strictly segregated into separate private Party caucus gatherings) use (abuse) the Senate, and the moth-balled, but still-intact, essential, non-partisan design and sound structure of the Senate itself, now regrettably submerged and forgotten beneath current, corrupt Party practices.

So if there’s a “status quo” that I’m defending, OFG, it’s the status quo of the Senate before President Wilson succeeded in shoving the cloture rule through that body in a 1917 special session, as part of his campaign to get the United States into the World War. Or the status quo of the Senate for further decades even after supermajority cloture was made a part of Rule 22, since it was so rarely attempted or invoked, and never resorted to in the absence of ongoing obstructive minority floor debate.

But, yes, you’re damn right that I’m disagreeing with some Senate Majority Leaders – not so much with those who served over the last “100 years,” as with those who served over the last thirty years, during which time the filing of voluntary cloture motions by those majority leaders exploded, beginning in the late 1980s/early 1990s, even as the incidence of obstructive floor debate by members of the minority diminished to the vanishing point. [As the long-time House Parliamentarian Charles Johnson has observed to be the case in the House, that unhealthy abuse of cloture motions, which has unfolded parallel to the decline of floor debate in the Senate, may have been a direct result of the commencement of televised C-SPAN coverage of Senate floor proceedings.]

It is key to Tom Udall’s scheme that people confuse and conflate optional majority “cloture motions” with extended, debating minority “filibusters.” [I tried to clarify the difference between the two in the comment of mine that OFG referenced, in response to a comment of his that, like his comments here @ 40 & 41, appeared to misstate how the optional cloture process works.]

That’s because Udall’s scheme (which has been seen before in the Senate, in addition to when Bill Frist toyed with it, although never in an era, like this, when obstructive debating filibusters have basically ceased to exist) is centered on the claim – expounded upon at length in the new Brennan Center for Justice report by Mimi Marziani, for example – that it is “unconstitutional” to “require” that Senate rules be changed by a supermajority of the Senate. Because every Senate “should have” the right to change its rules by simple majority. Fine. Sounds eminently sensible and reasonable, right? As far as it goes, at any rate, and provided that we deliberately overlook or conceal the inconvenient fact that nothing in Senate rules “requires” that Senate rules be changed (or legislation passed or nominees confirmed) by supermajority vote. Every Senate, therefore, already has the right to change its rules by Constitutional simple majority, “as provided in [those] rules,” if and when it pleases – as my comment @ 38 in this thread further details.

So Udall, shielded by the myth he promotes that to change Senate rules “requires” an “unconstitutional” supermajority of Senators – because there’s an optional Rule 22 motion, introduced in 1917, that the majority may invoke to require a supermajority to end a debating filibuster, rather than waiting the filibuster out for a couple of days or perhaps a week at most – wants to throw all Senate rules out of the window next year (and thus every two years thereafter, from here on out), simply to avoid the need for his Party majority to honorably change or amend Senate rules (many of which are essentially unchanged since the Senate began) by simple-majority vote “as provided in [those] rules.”

Obviously, if one assumes, as many do, that “cloture” is initiated by a Senate minority (which would mean that a minority of Senators has the right to “require” a supermajority of Senators to pass legislation, confirm nominees, or change Senate rules), who could or would question a verdict that 1917′s optional Senate Rule 22 cloture process was and is structured to produce absurd and even unConstitutional results? Well, Tom Udall, like the Democratic leadership of the Senate, not only pretends that the optional Rule 22 cloture motion is so structured – completely apart from any agency of a Senate majority in the matter – but has managed to convince many partisans – and many members of the media – that such is in fact the reality of existing “Senate rules.”

Whereas, in fact, Rule 22 cloture is, and has always been, both optional, and a tool of the majority Party in the Senate, not of the minority – a minority whose rights in the Senate are much less potent than Senate Democrats like to pretend that they are, in part to avoid accounting for the Democratic Party’s ongoing and undemocratic abuse of Rule 22′s optional cloture provisions.

I may indeed be misreading your position. It’s hard to tell your position. You never seem willing to just come out and say “I support this” or “I don’t support that.

It seems you are detmined to defend the Senate rules, which is defending the status quo. Lot of us want to change the rules. That’s the bottom line.

And the bottom line is we want to change the rules so that a simple majority can pass legislation and confirm nominees period. Is that something that’s so hard to say? Do you support that idea or not? As currently structured, the minority can completely block legislation and nominees even against a well intentioned Majority Leader using all the plays in his book IF the minority is willing to use all the plays in their book.

Now I’d love to see more debate, including more debate on the floor, so long as at some point a simple majority can pass legislation and confirm nominees as envisioned by the Constitution. I think it’s entirely fair to say the consitution envisions passing legislation and confirming nominees only require a majority because they chose NOT to list it under the items requiring super majority votes. They went out of their way to list those votes, so by choosing not to list the two above one can reasonably conclude they don’t require super majorities.

You seem to want to defend the current rules simply because.. what, tradition? If you agree a simple majority should be able to pass legislation and/or confirm nominees, then what difference does it make what rules are used to enforce that so long that those rules encourage debate, give the minority a fair chance to change minds, and encourage transparency. Are you saying if they came up with brilliant new rules tomorrow that did all of those things that you would oppose them simply because they’re new? That sounds like someone merely interested in defending the status quo to me.

You never want to state your bottom line position about passing legislation and/or confirming nominees, so therefore it seems reasonable to me to guess, and I guess that’s because you do in fact support the right of the minority to block legislation and/or nominees completely, without end. If that’s not your position, why not just state it in one senetence like I’ve done a thousand times.