lying down in front of the bulldozer
Sunday morning, I heard this piece on NPR and got terribly excited about revisiting my undergrad history degree and writing up a clever treatise about my affection for the filibuster in the traditional Mr. Smith Goes To Washington sense, and my equal distaste for the procedural filibuster rules that we’ve had in place in the US Senate since 1975, but nobody really understands because no one’s ever bothered to teach the current rules in high school civics classes, leaving generations of US citizens woefully ignorant of the way our modern government works, since pretty much every textbook only includes the traditional definition.
It took me only a little while to realize that just a few years ago, I’d already written it.
In any case, we’re talking about this again, and it seems we’re perhaps closer than we’ve been in a while to changing those rules, so that if a minority of Senators are going to block a bill by talking it to death, they’ll be honor-bound to actually do so, rather than simply declaring that they would, and the rest of the Senate simply taking it as read, and not knocking Mr. Dent’s house down while he’s away at the pub moving on to other business, which is pretty much how the current “cloture” rules work, and why the Senate needs sixty votes to get anything at all done, and exactly why, in fact, so little has gotten through the Senate recently, when one also takes into account the increased focus on partisanship over compromise in today’s political climate.
So, if you find this sort of thing interesting as I do, feel free to go back and re-read “put up or (don’t) shut up” again, because I still think it’s kind of relevant.
