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“A filibuster is an extended debate in the Senate
that can prevent a vote. Senate rules contain no motion
to force a vote. A vote occurs only once debate ends.”
And now (drum roll, please), an abbreviated history
of everyone’s favorite vote blocker. The first
recorded use of the tactic was in 1790, when senators
filibustered to prevent the state’s capital
from becoming Philadelphia. From there, the filibuster
was used countless times, by Democrats, Republicans,
and Whigs alike, most notoriously by Senator Strom
Thurmond in a protest to the passage of the 1957 Civil
Rights Act. In 1917, the at the suggestion of President
Woodrow Wilson, the Senate adopted a rule that allowed
the Senate to end a debate with a two-thirds majority
vote, which is known as “cloture.”
Cloture is rarely used; the Senate needs a two-thirds
majority, which, today, it almost has, but doesn’t.
In other words, even with cloture as the filibuster’s
easy out, the current Senate can’t use it.
So what, you might ask, is the point of this small
informational session? Well, just last week, Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist announced that The Party
(cue Godfather theme music) would be trying to repeal
the age-old annoyance known as the filibuster.
The Republicans are all about reconfiguring the rules
these days. Just moments after securing their majority
for another two years, The Party rewrote the ethics
rules that they themselves had created in the 1990s.
It would be hypocritical to say that Democrats have
not used the system to their advantage. And no doubt
when Congress passed the ethics bill in the early
1990s, back when the Democrats still had control of
both House and Senate, there was dissent from the
left. No doubt we were the ones arguing for its removal.
But there is a distinct difference between making
decisions that benefit the country and making decisions
that benefit the party. Even former Speaker of the
House Newt Gingrich, the right wing’s go-to
man of the 1990s, told Todd S. Purdum of the New York
Times that the rewrite, “was a mistake, because
it was a public statement that the party would change
the rules to benefit one individual. That’s
a mistake, period. Are the rules subordinate to the
interests of the powerful, or are the powerful subordinate
to the interests of the rules? In a free society,
the rules govern.”
One would not expect this degree of eloquence from
Newt, but it’s comforting to see that at least
some Republicans have recognized the party’s
questionable tactics. Changing the rules to suit Tom
DeLay’s purposes was a snarky, nasty move. The
proposal to repeal the filibuster is no less so.
“The Republicans see the filibuster as an annoying
obstacle,” wrote the staff of the New York Times
in a recent editorial. “But it is actually one
of the checks and balances that the founders, who
worried greatly about concentration of power, built
into our system of government. It is also, right now,
the main means by which the 48 percent of Americans
who voted for John Kerry can influence federal policy.”
Annoying or not, the filibuster is the last remaining
remnant of the so-called system of checks and balances.
The House, Senate, Executive Branch, and Court all
consist of mostly Republicans, even though nearly
half the American population voted a partially democratic
ticket. Repealing the filibuster would not only re-appropriate
power (as if it isn’t concentrated enough),
but it would also disenfranchise those millions of
voters who expect their legislative body to represent
them and not tow the party line.
This is a two-party system, and that doesn’t
mean that the party in power has the responsibility—or
the right—to take the voice of the minority
away. The filibuster crosses, and always has crossed,
party lines. In a time when Democrats are left with
very little in the way of clout, the filibuster is
the security blanket that prevents this political
game of Risk from turning into Monopoly.
Allow me to make an analogy. Americans benefit from,
say, the existence of more than one telephone company.
If Sprint raises their prices, MCI can always offer
customers a lower deal, and this prevents one company
from dominating the market. If all the telephone companies
were to consolidate, they could set their prices as
high as they like, because there would be no competition
and Americans would have no choice about which phone
provider they used.
Right now, what we’re dealing with is a consolidated
government. And if the filibuster ceases to exist,
our functional two-party system will quickly decline
into a one-party dictatorship. If democracy is defined
as (and here I turn to Dictionary.com) “Government
by the people, exercised either directly or through
elected representatives,” then surely the filibuster
is our last chance to protect this form of government.
Because 48 percent of the voting public chose a different
form of government, and now, without this last-ditch
effort to block legislation, that 48 percent of the
people has no voice.
And that, my friends, is not at all democratic.
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