Tired of having their agenda obstructed by minority Republicans, Democrats in the U.S. Senate want the rules changed.
Despite the obvious sour-grapes motivation, some of the Senate’s rules — the filibuster and the practice of secret holds, in particular — long ago morphed from tools to encourage careful deliberation to recipes for endless gridlock. Neither practice, in its current form, serves the nation well.
The filibuster is the parliamentary delaying tactic made famous by Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 classic, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” But it no longer requires the physical stamina Stewart’s character displayed, speaking on the Senate floor for hours on end. Rule changes in the 1970s turned it from a rare exercise of conscience into a routine supermajority requirement. It now takes just 41 votes in the 100-seat body to block a bill, or a judicial or other executive branch nomination.
When the 112th Congress convenes Wednesday, the Senate is expected to consider modifications to the filibuster rule that would require more effort to stage one. We’re all for reform that would return the filibuster to something like its pre-1970s form.
Doing away with it altogether, though, could open the floodgates to legislative excesses that were feared by the founders and should be today. The Senate was created as a check on the popular impulses of the House, whose members are elected every two years. By contrast, only about a third of the Senate is elected every two years, with members serving six-year terms, creating a more stable body and encouraging a longer view of issues.
It’s a role that has often frustrated aggressive political agendas, but has kept the nation on a relatively even keel for most of its history.
And although the filibuster has been overused in recent years, it didn’t block the last Congress from passing controversial legislation, including health-care and financial regulatory reform, stimulus programs and bank bailouts. Reserve it for rare occasions, but don’t kill it.
The practice of “holds” is a different matter. You might recall Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) using it last year to unilaterally block 70 of President Obama’s nominees in an effort to steer the Air Force’s refueling tanker contract away from Boeing and to the EADS/Northrop Grumman partnership, which would have assembled the planes in Shelby’s state.
A single senator currently has the power to block a bill or nomination from proceeding, simply by threatening a filibuster, and can even do it anonymously. It’s an affront to democracy, transparency and accountability, and deserves an unceremonious death.
Instead, sadly, we’ll probably hear lots of contorted arguments for saving it.
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