Despite all our differences on Health Care, the real problem is the new 60 vote or nothing framework. This new Super Majority or nothing dilemma must be addressed if we ever want to govern. Needing 60 votes to do anything is impossible mainly because it results in only two outcomes:
1. It stops legislation.
2. It only allows weakened legislation to pass.
Basically, it gives us two choice – Dead or neutered. Krugman lays it out, complete with history lesson.
After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.
Talk about power in the hands of the few. Power that’s being abused by both sides of the aisle.
Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.
The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.
70 percent. That’s incredible. It’s also what the Republicans now call governing, and, given their agenda, it’s highly effective. Then again, Republicans have always loved the word “no.” Just say no – to drugs, to sex… to any and all things proposed by the Democrats. And this tactic serves them well by raising the bar to the fictional “must have” number of 60. And it’s frustrating how every talking head drones on for hours about the need for 60 votes while ignoring the reason for that need.
I have mixed emotions when it comes to the filibuster, but something needs to change. 70 percent of threatened or actual filibusters is abusive. It’s also a highly effective tool for the minority party to turn losing into winning – no matter what the majority of Amercans voted for. Basically, it overturns an election.