Adopting the filibuster as a matter of routine for nearly every matter before the senate, and hoping that the country will reward you for it by being disgusted with congress's lack of ability to get anything done, is not what they were envisioning when they enacted it.
Political junkie history trivia interjection here.
It used to be that any one senator could stop laws from passing. Later on cloture was reduced from unanimous consent to 2/3rd of the Senate. Finally it was reduced again to 3/5th of the Senate.
There are lots of other issues here, and I didn't want to interrupt your discussion, but I find it fascinating that, if anything, it was always intended that very few senators could/should hold up things. The Senate was intended to be the more deliberative and slow-moving body, and large latitude has always been given for the minority to shut things down with discussion.
Back to your regularly scheduled discussion.
Filibustering every single routine bill to come through the senate out of cynical political game-playing is a travesty. These people swore an oath to serve the country, and they're disgracing their office with about 8/10 of the filibusters they're invoking.
(Might as well weigh in with an opinion)
Part of this is because politicians just don't like each other that much anymore -- nobody gets together for poker or dinner parties. That's a shame, and it hurts the country. Part of it is that Congress is under incredible scrutiny by cable news outlets, talk radio, and the blogs -- people are being sent there to fight an ideological battle, perhaps to the exclusion of doing the nation's business. Both sides are keeping these long lists of grievances with the other side. Lots of bitterness and lack of trust.
This isn't an unsolved problem, however. The Republic has a long history, and we've seen all kinds of partisanship in the past. Traditionally president of the party in power finds a few members of the opposite party and makes deals with them for bills. This usually ticks off the president's base, but it also splits the opposition and makes them ineffective. Once the opposition is split, moderates from both camps can join in to pass a bill with a dozen or so holdouts at both extremes voting against it. It's been done lots of times. Clinton very effectively did it when he announced "The era of big government is over" He took the other guy's issues and crafted bills that made it impossible for some of the other guys not to vote for them. Once he snagged a dozen or so Republicans, the rest of the process worked out fine. But it really ticked off his base!
I'm not seeing that same strategy being applied today -- perhaps because it wouldn't work. I don't know. I tend to think it would have worked a year ago. It may be too late now. Beats me.
How many republicans would vote for any healthcare bill? Even one that gave kittens to every republican in the country, spit in the eye of liberals and was named "the healthcare bill"?
I posted below that republicans filibustered PAYGO rules and a deficit reduction committee... right after filibustering the routine raising of the debt ceiling.
The republicans see a clear incentive to gridlock every single thing that goes through congress because they think people will blame it on the democrats. It's working out for them ok, so shame on us, I guess.
Hey. Just my opinion. I have a friend of mine that no matter what the subject can give me a list of all the bad things the Republicans did. I have another friend that can do the same for the Democrats.
I'm really glad that neither of these friends are in public office. :)
Kennedy worked with Bush on NCLB. Gingrich, although not in the minority, worked with Clinton on welfare reform (although Clinton did have to veto it 7 times before they would pass something he could agree to).
I just don't see any willingness from current republicans to share a victory with Obama on anything. Either they're personally committed to not working with him on anything, ever, or they're afraid of tea party primary challenges, or both.
The fact that the current republican caucus is primarily old white men from the south probably doesn't help, for reasons that are too inflammatory to go into too deeply except to note that I'm commenting on old white men from the south, not on republicans necessarily.
I believe it's much of the same material told from the conservative side. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/19/debunki...
But I'll just reiterate that we're dealing with a party here that attempted to filibuster raising the debt ceiling, and then filibustered implementing PAYGO rules that same afternoon. They filibustered appointing that bipartisan deficit reduction commission after the original idea had been pitched by republican senators.
So, yeah, there's room for improvement in how Obama's handling these jokers. He could do a better job in exposing what they're doing and forcing them to be productive. More televised meetings with them would be my advice, and he seems to be going that way with the healthcare summit next week (that republicans may decide not to show up to). But they're still the primary jokers in the picture. IMO.