> the GOP
We now have an opportunity to test your hypothesis- for at least two years there will be single party rule by the other party.
We now have an opportunity to test your hypothesis- for at least two years there will be single party rule by the other party.
The filibuster itself is not some sort of switch that gets flipped. The parties need to be careful how often they use it and for which reasons. It's just a part of the procedural possibilities and its effectiveness is not some sort of set-in-stone rule.
In our particular case right now, the reason the Senate does not allow us single-party rule is due to the makeup of the senators themselves. It only takes a few to not vote down the party line to negate single-party rule. We've seen this a few times already since the start of the new administration.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/20...
The current reason we care about a few senators is because we are looking at budget reconciliation where you only need 50 votes. Outside of that you need 60 votes or you get filibustered.
> Note that, in some cases, filibustered bills were eventually passed but with substantial concessions to the senators blocking the original bill.
We have clearly seen over the past many decades an evolution in the kinds of bills we pass, and I think it's quite easy to observe that controversial bills are front-loaded specifically to combat this. The negotiations have changed to meet the needs of the new battlefield.
Perhaps this is "naive," of me but the kinds of bills the Senate has passed recently have me surprised its use has only gone up 3x.
Your original point was that use of the fillibuster was judicious. The article goes on, at length, about exactly how the use of the fillibuster has only substantially increased over time.
And then here you plucked out a single sentence from the article used as a good-faith caveat before presenting data to say the article "proved your point."
Those two Senators are from more conservative states and they know if they don't toe the line their constituents will likely throw them out for GOP alternatives.
*In fact, the Senate was originally appointed by each state's legislators and the House was the only Congress elected by popular vote.
“Cleaning up the tax code” and “reducing the size of government" aren't really the same thing; the former could very easily serve the opposite purpose of the latter.
Or, not; alternatively, it would allow the IRS to be more responsive in its supportive activities and more effective in its enforcement activities.
Cutting staff is a separate decision from streamlining the rules; the IRS hasn't had staffing expanded to keep workload constant when we weren't simplifying, there is no inherent reason it would ha r to cut staff and keep workload constant if we were simplifying.
- Many of them will virtue signal on Twitter but are uninterested in actually challenging oppressive power structures as they exist.
- They have the slimmest of majorities, requiring either bipartisan support (lol) or the support of “moderate Democrats” whose positions are at best center-right. Republicans were in this position for the first two years of Trump, and they couldn’t get any signature legislative achievements but their tax bill passed. The same is likely to be true for Democrats this time around (a watered down stimulus bill passed through budget reconciliation).
- The American system of government is a vetocracy that leads to resentment over government’s inability to govern/keep promises made when campaigning.
- The complication of being beholden to corporate cash. Great ROI for Intuit and every other company that benefits from nothing substantially changing in America. Being beholden to corporate cash is the strongest form of bipartisanship in America.