Harry Reid, along with several 2020 candidates support ending the filibuster. While this is very appealing while we have control of the House and hope to flip the senate and get a Democratic president, and have pressing true national emergencies to deal with (climate change, gun violence, healthcare, ...) but what about when that tide inevitably changes?? Can you imagine the damage that Trump and the Republican congress could have done if they were not stopped by a democratic filibuster, starting with repealing and not replacing Obamacare!
Seems to me that the filibuster plays an important role in steadying the ship of state. Without it, there may be wild swings in policy every 4-8 years.
What I could support is lowering the filibuster threshold to say 55 rather than 60. No one seems to be talking about that, no doubt because we don't have a prayer of getting 55 senate seats next year. So perhaps there's no point, but it still seem like a wise policy.
What do you think??
Barry
Harry Reid: The Filibuster Is Suffocating the Will of the American People
To save our country’s future, Democrats must abolish this arcane Senate rule.
By Harry Reid
Mr. Reid is a former Senate majority leader from Nevada.
Aug. 12, 2019
I am not an expert on all of government, but I do know something about the United States Senate. As the former majority leader, I know how tough it is to get anything through the chamber, which was designed to serve as the slower, more deliberative body of the United States Congress.
But what is happening today is a far cry from what the framers intended. They created the Senate as a majority-rule body, where both sides could have their say at length — but at the end of the day, bills would pass or fail on a simple majority vote. In their vision, debate was supposed to inform and enrich the process, not be exploited as a mechanism to grind it to a halt.
The Senate today, after years of abusing an arcane procedural rule known as the filibuster, has become an unworkable legislative graveyard. Not part of the framers’ original vision, the modern filibuster was created in 1917. The recent use of the filibuster — an attempt by a minority of lawmakers to delay or block a vote on a bill or confirmation — has exploited this rule, forcing virtually all Senate business to require 60 of the 100 senators’ votes to proceed. This means a simple majority is not enough to advance even the most bipartisan legislation.
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