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Why Democrats want to change the Senate’s filibuster rules

Why Democrats want to change the Senate’s filibuster rules

By Christopher Hickey and Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

Updated January 7, 2022

The story of modern Washington is the story of the filibuster.

That’s the tactic of dragging out debate in the US Senate to make it harder to get things done. Thanks to Senate rules, whichever party is out of power has the ability, through filibusters, to quash nearly everything the in-power party wants to do unless the minority party agrees.

In the absence of any sign Republicans will work with Democrats to pass voting rights legislation, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised a vote on changes to filibuster rules by Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 17. Changing the rules would allow senators to pass some legislation with a simple majority. But first, Schumer needs to convince the Senate’s most conservative Democrats, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, to get on board.

Now, overcoming a filibuster to pass legislation in the Senate takes 60 votes — votes that Democrats don’t have without Republicans’ help.

Three of the most substantial legislative accomplishments of the past 12 years — President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief bill, former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act — were only achieved by one party finding a way around the filibuster.

Here’s how the filibuster has made accomplishing anything on Capitol Hill incredibly difficult:

Fifty years ago, cloture was almost never invoked. Today, filibuster threats are so common, cloture is required for nearly everything the Senate does. An added wrinkle is that bringing a bill to a vote requires unanimous consent — in other words, all 100 senators have to agree to hold a vote on a bill, an amendment or a presidential nomination.

If every senator is not on the same page, then the bill can only advance by breaking a filibuster on a motion to proceed — and that time-consuming process can take at least two days just to begin debate. In today’s Congress, these votes to bring bills to a vote are often just another chance to filibuster.

Cloture rules have changed over time. The cloture rule was revised in the 1970s to require 60 votes instead of 67. In 2013, Democrats under former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid changed the voting precedent through what’s known as the “nuclear option“ to confirm Obama’s Cabinet nominees with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority. Republicans then used that same option in 2017 to advance Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. Those are the two exceptions; a supermajority is required to vote on and approve any other kind of Senate business.

Cloture ends filibusters because it ends everything else, too. According to Senate Rule XXII, once the Senate invokes cloture, “then said measure, motion or other matter pending before the Senate, or the unfinished business, shall be the unfinished business to the exclusion of all other business until disposed of.” In other words, senators have to hit the brakes on everything but that clotured bill until they’ve brought the bill to a vote.

Now, instead of debating legislation one bill at a time, lawmakers cram as much into every bill as they can. There are fewer bills passed. They’re just much, much longer. The 80th Congress of 1947 and 1948, which President Harry Truman famously attacked as the “Do Nothing Congress” during his 1948 re-election campaign, enacted 906 bills. That’s more than three times the 283 bills that the 116th Congress produced in 2019 and 2020.

Why not end the filibuster? Republicans don’t want to give up their power. And some Democrats, like West Virginia’s Manchin, warn that if Washington seems hyper-partisan now, it would get much worse if one party could pass a bill without help from the other. His vote would be necessary to reinterpret the rules. Manchin and Biden both suggested earlier in 2021 that Congress revert filibusters to the talking-only, Mr. Smith style that was the norm before the 1960s. Pressure could build on Manchin, however, if the filibuster keeps Democrats from delivering on Biden’s campaign promises.

Ahead of the Senate vote on whether to establish the Jan. 6 commission, CNN asked Manchin if he would invoke the nuclear option to blow up the filibuster if Republicans block the bill.

“No,” he told CNN. “I can’t take the fallout.”

That all but ensures that the filibuster is here to stay.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/politics/filibuster-senate-explained/