“There is very little good news lately, and most of it is due to the Senate becoming this hellish place where government goes to die.”

Woo hoo!  The multi-decade Republican/Conservative plan to destroy America and turn us into a Third-World hell hole strikes again!

The nation’s Founding Fathers, who we no longer bother to put in our history books (thanks Texas!) would be so very proud to see that all their efforts have been turned to shit.  And Abraham Lincoln, the first, and nearly the last good Republican POTUS, would be thrilled to know the political philosophy and stunted morality he defeated in the Civil War has triumphed at last! 

It’s truly a magnificent moment for all Americans…

I don’t care if I get flamed by purity trolls for saying this, but it’s absolutely true that the Congress and the Administration have done more for this country in the past two years than any other Congress and Presidency since the Great Society, even despite all the setbacks.

Great news. I can now serve in the military. Yay.
Sorry, I just can’t get excited by anything our government does after these last two weeks. With the passing of the Bush(and now Obama!) tax cuts for the super rich, I have lost hope and faith in our government and our country’s future. I feel powerless and see no possibility for changing our deeply corrupt political system that benefits the super rich and their corporations.
I guess its nice to know that I can finally die for my country even as I descend deeper and deeper into poverty, continue to lack healthcare, still can not marry and, in many places, in this country lack protection against employment discrimination…
Ugh… sorry. Yay.

This may be the one decent thing Mark Kirk does as my senator.

Over at Americablog you can thank the troops who made today’s DADT victory possible:
http://www.americablog.com/2010/12/take-action-please-join-us-in-thanking.html

I posted this on my Facebook page, so I’m just waiting to pounce on any of the right-wing trolls from my high school who may have a hateful agenda.

But in the meantime, please join me in a chorus of “Ding dong the witch is dead. Which old witch? The wicked witch!”

This is the most important important step forward for LGBT rights since Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. Employment discrimination? The military is the single largest employer in the country. Marriage? Watch the last few opponents of marriage equality try to deny benefits to the spouse of a uniformed hero or heroine.

Importantly, this was a legislative success, even though a judicial success was on the horizon. The tide has turned when an important measure like this garners supermajority support at the national level.  It’s also a vindication of President Obama’s strategy - without his leadership, we would have had to wait at least two more years for this.  An Executive Order was an option, but it was the wrong option, and now we have a true and lasting victory to show for it.

Congratulations to everyone who has fought so hard for this for so many years. This old soldier couldn’t have wished for a nicer Christmas present from Washington. For me, this is the culmination of a 10-year project. I need to find a new hobby!

An Executive Order was an option, but it was the wrong option, and now we have a true and lasting victory to show for it.

You may be right, but how do you know?  It wasn’t tried.  An Executive Order would have pissed off the teabaggers, sure.  But did the President bipartisan his enemies into calm sanity by restraining himself?  I don’t think so.

Anyway, three cheers for the deathbed of DADT ... and I agree that the arrival of marriage equality has been hastened.

*I don’t care if I get flamed by purity trolls for saying this, but it’s absolutely true that the Congress and the Administration have done more for this country in the past two years than any other Congress and Presidency since the Great Society, even despite all the setbacks. *

I’ll give you that, but you have to admit that its only because the bar is set so low. They could have spent the last 2 years doing nothing but Jello shots and they’d STILL have succeeded there.

I’m about 99% certain that any attempt at rules changes at the start of the next session that would make it harder to impossible for Republicans to kill basically any and all legislation of any importance will fail pretty quickly.

...which is downright fucking inexcusable. The Democrats will have one and only one opportunity to limit the abusive power of the filibuster during the 112th Congress, and that opportunity will be on January 5, 2011 when they convene for the first time.

On January 5th, rules changes can be implemented by a simple 51 vote majority (and VP Biden can be the 51st vote if necessary), and the Democrats will begin that session with 51 party members and 2 independents who caucus with them (really only one, because Lieberman can’t be trusted for shit).

There are up to 54 people who can vote for a filibuster rule change. The Democrats don’t need a single Republican senator’s vote to implement the change, and they can even afford to lose up to three votes from their own caucus… Lieberman, Nelson, and Landrieu perhaps?

The baseless notion that the filibuster is some sort of sacred element of our national identity needs to die, quickly. The Founders, who some of the filibuster’s biggest fans like to cite, made no comment about the filibuster in any of our founding documents. While the rule is not explicitly unconstitutional, it isn’t tacitly endorsed by the U.S. Constitution, either.

I get the arguments about the dangers of weakening or eliminating the filibuster, and with all due respect, I call bullshit. The filibuster didn’t protect us from the Patriot Act, it didn’t protect us from the Bush tax cuts the first time they passed, and it didn’t protect us from a whole host of legislation that sailed smoothly when Trent Lott was the Majority Leader of a GOP-controlled Senate.

This notion that we need to have a rule in place that gives 41 U.S. senators who may represent as little as 11.24% of the entire U.S. population the power to block 59 U.S. senators who may represent as much as 88.76% of the country’s population is bullshit. And yes, I did the math - the 41 senators from the 21 least populous states represent less than 1/8th of the entire U.S. population. Preventing the tyranny of the majority is a noble stance, but the legislative representatives of 34 million Americans should never have the power to obstruct the goals of the legislative representatives of the other 272 million Americans.

This isn’t about killing a canonical element of our nation’s highest legislative body, it’s about not stacking the deck in Idaho’s (or Oklahoma’s, or Wyoming’s, etc.) favor anymore than it already is. As it stands, GOP Senators Mike Enzi and John Barrasso of Wyoming already have an equal amount of say as Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California. The former pair represents 544,000 constituents and the latter pair represent 36,962,000 constituents, but their legislative votes are all equal. Every Boxer “Yea” vote can be immediately neutralized by a Barasso “Nay” vote, which happens often.

The very nature of the U.S. Senate already gives less populous states a disproportionate amount of power, so the filibuster really isn’t necessary to prevent the so-called “tyranny of the majority”. Even without the filibuster, 51 senators who may represent as few as 55 million Americans can still overrule the other 49 senators representing 250 million Americans. That is more than enough to protect this country from the tyranny of the majority, which is why our Founders created the U.S. Senate in the first place.

Sadly, this won’t happen, as I’m sure Harry Reid won’t allow it to even be debated when Congress reconvenes in January. And as long as it is never brought up, it can’t be voted on, and the chickenshit Democratic senators who secretly want the filibuster to stick around to provide them political cover will never be forced to publicly take a stance of opposition to the filibuster.

Considering how effective the Republicans were at watering down legislation when the Democrats controlled 59 (and briefly 60) seats, I can’t wait to see how much more useless the Democratic senators will be with only 53 members in their caucus.

Joy.

The filibuster doesn’t exist to fend off a tyrannical majority, it exists to give the spineless and corrupt majority a convenient excuse when they fail to get truly progressive legislation passed. The public option in HCR didn’t die because it was just barely short of the total votes needed, it died because most of the Democratic Caucus wanted it to die, and they used the convenient excuse of the filibuster to explain why it had to go. Once the filibuster rule was changed to eliminate the requirement for an actual floor filibuster, a lot of senators were relieved to know they could now serve their corporate masters without ever having to publicly expose themselves as obstructionist assholes.

Don’t rush to change the Senate rules yet.  Look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_2012

There are 10 Republicans trying to get back there, but there are 21 Democrats and Sanders and Lieberman going up for an election.  Some are sure things, but I’m guessing the Senate is going to turn over to Republican control unless things get a lot better and the turnout by Democrats is huge.  The GOP will not be demoralized quite as much as they were in 2008 even if unemployment falls to 6%, Iraq becomes peaceful, Iran falls to a pop singer, oils costs $25 a barrel, and Rush Limbaugh is caught with a boy prostitute.  It’s just not going to be easy to hang on even if Obama runs the best campaign ever.

Will the Republicans change the rules if they take over?  Maybe, maybe not.  Chances are the numbers will still be close enough to make them wary of changing too much.  Some modest changes are a good idea, but the filibuster will remain.  The Senate wasn’t designed to be a quick majority rule institution, but before changing the rules it’s good to remember that the shoe being on the other foot can kick just as hard.

And it’s not as if there’s going to be a big rush to get the stuff coming out of the new House passed as quickly as possible.  Reform the filibuster for judicial appointments and other confirmation hearings, sure.  But for legislative acts?  Let’s keep those speedbumps in place for a while.  We just might want them in two or four years.

Employment discrimination? The military is the single largest employer in the country.

Not quite… the federal government, excluding the U.S. Postal Service, is the nation’s largest employer, with about 2 million civilian employees. The U.S. Armed Forces currently has around 1.5 million active duty personnel. If you include all reserve members, the total is around 2.5 million, though reservists generally rely on separate full-time civilian jobs as their primary source of income.

I though about leaving the filibuster in place just in case the Republicans take back the Senate, too, but I’ve changed my mind on it. If you look a how the filibuster has been used in history, its #1 use was to block civil rights for black people. It’s not worth keeping.

I don’t know if that’s entirely true with other democracies, Chet—I remember BlackBloc saying for example that Harper in Canada can do something similar to the filibuster (I forget exactly what it is, though.

If majority rule was the goal of the Senate, the Senators would be apportioned as they are in the House.  But they aren’t, it wasn’t, and it’s not like things are going to be changed anyhow.  Two dorks from the state of Ethanol have as much power there as two representatives from the most populous state in the country and as much as two people from the least populous and two from the poorest, two from the smallest, two from the most uneducated, and two from the richest states.  It wasn’t meant to be about majority but about consensus.  It’s conservative (not right wing, but truly conservative) by design.

It frustrates me, too.  But changing it to be a majority-rules rubber stamp?  We already have one of those.

Man, did I need some good news amid so much gloom.

If majority rule was the goal of the Senate, the Senators would be apportioned as they are in the House.

That is a singularly stupid statement. The Senate is not apportioned the way the House is, but that doesn’t mean that the operations of the Senate were not subject to the same majoritarian rules. If it had been the intention of the framers to make actions in the Senate require more than the majority, they would almost surely have written something to that effect into the Constitution. As for your other points, not abolishing a horrible, retrograde practice that makes governance nigh-impossible because you hope to one day take advantage of it yourself is a terrible plan.

And it’s not as if there’s going to be a big rush to get the stuff coming out of the new House passed as quickly as possible.  Reform the filibuster for judicial appointments and other confirmation hearings, sure.  But for legislative acts?  Let’s keep those speedbumps in place for a while.  We just might want them in two or four years.

Disagree. I don’t necessarily think the filibuster should be destroyed altogether, but I think some measure needs to be taken to make it a much more difficult tactic to implement. At the very least, we should roll back the 1975 rule change which allowed for procedural filibusters to be invoked without requiring an actual floor filibuster.

The data is on my side. The use of the filibuster in the 111th Congress shattered all previous records, and the only thing that might reduce it in the upcoming Congress is the fact that the new Republican House will probably cause enough gridlock that there won’t be as much legislation sent to the Senate to be filibustered.

The representatives of 1/8th of the entire U.S. population should never have the power to stop the representatives of the other 7/8ths of the country without even having to make a strong case for their opposition on the floor of the Senate chamber. And the fact that a future GOP-controlled U.S. Senate would be more empowered isn’t a good enough excuse to justify the status quo, namely because when the Democrats are in the minority, they don’t implement the filibuster anywhere near as much as Republicans do when they are in the minority.

Do you really think there is any way in hell that a bill that is as ideologically far to the left as PATRIOT was to the right would pass without a filibuster even in the current U.S. Senate with 59 Democratic caucus members? PATRIOT passed 98-1-1 in a U.S. Senate with 51 members who caucused as Democrats. Russ Feingold was the ONLY Democrat to vote “Nay” on that bill in October 2001, a bill that is widely considered one of the most authoritarian, civil liberty infringing, reactionary piece of crap legislation to ever get passed into law. There has been no legislation as far to the left as PATRIOT was to the right that has passed into law in my lifetime, much less gotten anywhere 98 votes.

Weakening the filibuster may provide a GOP-controlled Senate in the future a little more power than they previously have had, but it would provide a Democratic-controlled Senate a ton more power than they currently have. Furthermore, it would make senators take firm public stances when they wish to obstruct the majority, and it hold them accountable for their obstructionism. If a senator’s principled beliefs sincerely tell them that they are justified in blocking the majority from moving legislation forward, fine, but I want them to have to advocate their position for hours on end on the Senate floor to defend their obstructionism.

The filibuster has not yielded anywhere near the same amount of benefits for progressives as it has for reactionary rightwing assholes. I’m OK with taking my chances on a future GOP-controlled Senate gaining a little more power if it means that a Democratic Senate will actually be able to get things done without always needing to obtain a ridiculous 3/5 majority.

Employment discrimination? The military is the single largest employer in the country.
Comment 6—BABH

Conventional wisdom says integrating the military put a ginormous dent in overt discrimination in the civilian realm; I hope allowing gays to serve openly in the military, if that happens, has a similar effect.

Once the filibuster rule was changed to eliminate the requirement for an actual floor filibuster, a lot of senators were relieved to know they could now serve their corporate masters without ever having to publicly expose themselves as obstructionist assholes.
Comment 9—roscoe3680

I would be satisfied with restoring the floor filibuster requirement. You really hate a bill, Senator? Go to the mat for it. Presumably you have a reason, tell us.

I’m with roscoe—in practice, the filibuster is a conservative bludgeon.

I want to second Chet’s point that it is easier for Republicans to use the fillibuster because the status quo is in Conservatives favor. Additionally, Democrats don’t have the coherence of the Republican caucus and would never stand together to use it the way the Republicans do. The fillibuster definitely needs reform if not outright elimination.

If majority rule was the goal of the Senate, the Senators would be apportioned as they are in the House.  But they aren’t, it wasn’t, and it’s not like things are going to be changed anyhow.  Two dorks from the state of Ethanol have as much power there as two representatives from the most populous state in the country and as much as two people from the least populous and two from the poorest, two from the smallest, two from the most uneducated, and two from the richest states.  It wasn’t meant to be about majority but about consensus.  It’s conservative (not right wing, but truly conservative) by design.

You just made the best possible argument for why the filibuster is horrible in the first place.

Even without the filibuster, the Senate still gives a dsiproportionate amount of power to the minority. 51 U.S. Senators who represent roughly 1/6th of all Americans still have the power to shoot down legislation, even without the filibuster.

What the filibuster does is empower the vocal minority even more than they were already empowered by the very nature of the Senate. Under the filibuster, 41 U.S. Senators who represent less than 12% of the entire U.S. population have the power to block 59 U.S. Senators who represent the other 88% of the country.

That’s not only extremely undemocratic, it is virtually the antithesis of democracy. Do you have any idea how relatively inexpensive it is to buy the votes of 41 U.S. senators who are only answerable to about 35 million constituents out of which only 12 million actually cast votes? Just slightly more than 6 million voters in states like Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, Kansas, Utah, and Oklahoma are able to put just enough senators in office to absolutely crush any and all progressive legislation that they don’t like, even if it is overwhelmingly supported by 90% of the rest of the population.

The Founders created the U.S. Senate to serve as a check on the U.S. House by giving less populous states equal clout with more populous states. 51 U.S. Senators can act on behalf of the minority to defend the country from the tyrannical majority of 49 U.S. Senators if a piece of legislation is truly worthy of being squashed by a group of legislators who represent the minority.

The minority doesn’t need any more power than that which is already given to them by the fundamental nature of the U.S. Senate in which the vote of John Barrasso (R-WY) is equal to the vote of Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

I’m completely with Chet on this one. The filibuster is fundamentally favorable to conservative ideology, and is rarely beneficial to progressive ideology. It’s precisely why 51 Republican Senators are able to do for their constituents what 59 Democratic Senators cannot do for theirs. The Senate itself is the Founders’ check on a tyrranical majority rule, and that check didn’t really need to be compounded by the filibuster, which is probably why there is no mention of the filibuster anywhere in our founding documents.

Is there any other democracy where the legislature votes on whether to have votes?  I’m fairly sure this is one of those stupid things - like no universal health care and price tags that don’t actually tell you what you’re going to pay - that only America does.  But hey, we’re “exceptional,” right?

On a happier note, I think I just read one of the strangest tweets I’ll ever see…

From the often frustrating 71 year old Democratic Senate Majority Leader to his new BFF, the 24 year old pop icon and gay rights advocate who once performed in a dress that was literally made of raw beef:

@ladygaga We did it! #DADT is a thing of the past.

Jeevmon:  Cloture is, technically, a vote to put a limit on debate, something the Senate does not have.  The House actually sets rules on time allowed for debate. 

Of course, while liberals were seriously complaining about the filibuster these last two years, you weren’t so terribly disappointed with the rule when Senate Democrats used it to block some of President Bush’s judicial nominations.  And with ten Republicans and something like 26 Democrats up for re-election in 2012, there’s a fairly decent chance that the Republicans will take over the Senate two years from now.  You might like it even more if that happens, especially if President Obama loses.

The filibuster needs to go. It serves no practically purpose besides making it really hard to pass liberal legislation. The only time it serves the purposes of liberals and moderates is when it can be used to keep really unqualified conservatives out of federal judgeships.

  Jeevmon: Sometimes American exceptionalism is a good thing. It most other democracies, the legislature just passes what the Prime Minister and Cabinet sends to them without much debate and modification. Our Congress is more active in legislating on their own initiative or modifying bills sent by the executive.

This may be the one decent thing Mark Kirk does as my senator.

And I wonder if the rabid homobigots in Illinois who kept insisting he’s gay are going to go apeshit over this.

Just caught this…

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) the 2008 Republican presidential candidate and one of the stronger opponents of the repeal, called the vote a “sad day” for the military, warning that supporters don’t fully grasp the “great damage” the change will cause.

What a fucking sad little man John McCain has become. I was never much of a fan, but I remember thinking back in 2000 that if a Republican was going to become POTUS that year that I would have preferred him to Dubya.  But ever since he got spanked by the younger, brighter, and more admired African-American candidate two years ago, the guy has been on a two year whinefest about those damn kids on his lawn. He really has been reduced to nothing more than an obnoxiously entitled grumpy and bitter old man these days. The funny thing is that the teabaggers still despise him even though he’s basically fully aligned himself with their ideology. He desperately wants the approval of people like Limbaugh and Coulter (neither of whom can stand him), and because he’s never gonna get it he just turns into a bigger asshole curmudgeon everyday.

I bet Christmas dinner is gonna be awkward in whichever one of his wife’s eight houses they gather at, what with his daughter Meghan standing firmly opposed to him on DADT in her media appearances over the past few months.

He really is quite pathetic.

The filibuster needs to go. It serves no practically purpose besides making it really hard to pass liberal legislation. The only time it serves the purposes of liberals and moderates is when it can be used to keep really unqualified conservatives out of federal judgeships.

And even with the current filibuster rules (which have been in place for the past 35 years), Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito were all able to get confirmed pretty smoothly.

Why do people seem to think that if we don’t do away with the filibuster, somehow the Republicans aren’t going to change the rules on us?

They did it before, they’ll do it again.

@Lee - sure, and then the voters can vote on what the party in power actually did and whether they liked it.  Right now, we have a system where the minority can obstruct and the majority pays the price. 

And @Dana - if we are talking judicial nominations, the Republicans have been far, far more obnoxious about gumming up Democratic administrations’ attempts to fill judicial vacancies than the other way around.  I may not have liked Bush’s judicial nominees, but he had the right to make them while he was President, leaving aside issues of whether he was “really” President.  And it’s funny how the drumbeat of people saying that the President has the right to make his appointments goes silent when Democrats take over.  Kind of like how there’s plenty of money in the banana stand to pay for two wars (one of them clearly initiated under false pretenses) and tax cuts disproportionately skewed to upper incomes when Republicans are in charge, but when the Democrats take over, oops the banana stand is on fire and now the deficit is Issue Numero Uno.

@ roscoe3680

IMHO the only reason McCain ever acted like a moderate was to get back at Bush for beating him in the primary. And the only reason he’s acting like a teabagger now is to get back at Obama for beating him in the general. His politics are entirely focused on getting revenge on whoever beat him.

Chet wrote:

Dana, didn’t I just say why this was a stupid argument?

So, from your comment here, shall I assume that if the Republican nominee defeats President Obama in two years and the GOP captures the majority in the Senate, you will still say:

When a party sweeps both houses of Congress and the White House they should get to enact their agenda, full stop.

One other way in which we are different from a parliamentary democracy is that party discipline is not enforced in the way it is in the UK and Israel and several other nations.  Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson and Ron Paul don’t have to vote the way the party leader tells them to vote, because they don’t represent their party, but their state or district.  Were this the UK, “Prime Minister” Obama would have written the health care plan the way he wanted, and his party MPs would have voted for it, right down the line.  You might think that a great outcome, but it would also have meant that the Democrats would have had no power at all from 2001-2007, and “Prime Minister” Bush would have gotten everything he wanted, right down the line.

Also, McCain is an old dude right now, and it has become pretty obvious that he’s stopped giving a crap about doing anything good and is in it for the payback and the power.

John McCain’s legacy will be that he will be the Trivial Pursuit answer to the question: “What insane total choad sought to prevent the first African-American man to receive a major Party nomination for the Presidency from winning?”  He was the figurehead for one of the most racist, evil institutional actions of the past ten years.  Once you’ve become that person, there’s no going back.  It’s either put on the black robe and bust out the Force Lightning or retire to a monastery and refuse contact with the outside world.

PM—

McCain makes one pine for the days of GOP Presidential losers like Bob Dole. At least he wasn’t a dick about losing. He just retired and made money doing Pepsi and MasterCard commercials, which is much better than being a bitter old jackass on the floor of the Senate every day.

Don’t forget viagra. Since I didn’t have real sex ed I basically had to peice it together from Bob Dole’s commercials and the Clinton scandals.

I think Unree above mentioned this: while Obama (apparently/maybe) could have used an EO to suspend DADT until it was repealed, would doing so have further mobilized opposition to its elimination?

I believe Obama’s infuriating pace may be that he’s just ‘WAYYYYyyyy better at timing than we are.  Sure it was agonizing, but the job got done, right?

Don’t forget viagra. Since I didn’t have real sex ed I basically had to peice it together from Bob Dole’s commercials and the Clinton scandals.

I’m of the same generation, and did pretty much the same thing.

You know, you could almost say if you wan to see the decline from the Greatest Generation to the Silent Generation, just look at Bob Dole vs. John McCain.

lol @41 and 43: so did I.

Gen Y ftw!

Also, Chet is on fire tonight.

The DREAM Act failed.  So it’s official now: Republicans hate baby Mexicans more than gays.

Chet:

Actually, you do hear it from Republicans. Among others, Pam Geller was calling to raise the voting age a couple weeks ago because the youth vote elected Obama.

The DREAM Act failed.  So it’s official now: Republicans hate baby Mexicans more than gays.

That sucks.

Have they made a final decision about whether or not they hate 9/11 first responders yet?

And yes, Republicans hate brown people more than gay people.  They have the whole time; they were just waiting for an opportunity to decouple the two.  The Teabaggers allowed it, oddly enough.  Teabaggers are not particularly institutionally antigay, and boy howdy are they racist.

@Eric_RoM:  That’s a hell of a counterfactual.  Here is what we know:

1) The Executive Order method wasn’t tried, and
2) Obama’s efforts were successful in a long but reasonable period of time.

So maybe he could have done better, but he did fundamentally succeed.  The $64k question is whether he planned to screw gay folks over the whole time but eventually thought better of it or whether this was the plan from Day One.  I don’t know the answer to that.

Anyways, this is a victory, but compared to Obama actually starting to dismantle Social Security as he has planned for a long time, I’m not thrilled.

Heh, you’re on, sacundim.  This was just a pretty pure illustration of just how much middle(upper)-classedness matters to how much salience an issue has with a set of politically hooked up base.  The Dream Act didn’t have that kind of juice.

The Dream Act was far more important than DADT.  More beneficial.  Rights more wrongs.  Yet we be happy here with DADT passing, more happy than sad with Dream Act fillibustered.  Don’t get me wrong, DADT was one of Clinton’s little monstrosities, and it is good that it is over at last, but you know?  It should have been dead easy to repeal this, like the ?Lily Ledbetter Act?  Except it was a trial, and some slimy Senator trying to burnish a liberal fig to cover his nasties *really* twists some arms and gets “liberal” republicans to come help him out.

It’s just so fucking bittersweet, and I don’t know whether I should savor or gag.

Why do I sometimes get the feeling that even if single payer healthcare together with a 90% top marginal rate on millionaires and a 70% estate tax were mad law tomorrow, certain people on the American left would be telling us that “well, it’s not THAT much of a big deal because of X and Y”?

Were this the UK, “Prime Minister” Obama would have written the health care plan the way he wanted, and his party MPs would have voted for it, right down the line.

Well, yes and no.  Whilst it is true that the party whip system keeps MPs in line in away unimagined by the US, there have been very significant rebellions over issues in the past, and no doubt will continue to be, where there are important points of principle at stake. 

If a party has a large majority in the House of Commons, a rebellion amongst MP’s can be immensely politically damaging, even if legislation still passes.  And if a party has a smaller majority, not only can a rebellion defeat government-sponsored legislation, it can also bring down governments.  A parliamentary system certainly does not lead inevitably to complete sycophancy within government.  But it does mean that the winner of a general election has a reasonable chance of enacting the legislative programme that the electorate apparently wanted, which is a pretty democratic thing to happen, is it not?

To my mind, from an outside perspective, the filibuster should go because it is wrong in principle, regardless of which party it happens to favour from time to time.  It seems to be one of those little-thought-about procedural whosits that has, through tactical shenanigans, become far more important and effective than it was ever meant to be.  When wielded with determination, it requires every single law not just to have a majority but a super-majority, which is blatantly (a) anti-democratic nonsense and (b) makes a country functionally ungovernable.

God, so true Ben. Can we celebrate for just one day people?

If what Ben D said was actually true, I would be celebrating in the streets.  I *was* actually unexpectedly elated when the compromised-up-the-wahoo bill got passed and signed.  I was so because it will really help *me*, along with so many other people.  If single-payer actually *was* signed?  Do you really, for goshsakes, think I *wouldn’t* be celebrating like a mad fuck?  Or that many people wouldn’t celebrate like kids on good coke?

I’m not especially happy because DADT, while it has real world impact, is mostly symbolic.  One thing I really don’t like about gay-rights activists is that they tend to be so hyped on symbolic stuff that really only helps a small number of not-especially-unpriviledged gay people.  I’m much more hip on concrete stuff like making sure that gay people can adopt kids without prejudice.  Nothing so ambiguous like “gay marriage”.  I don’t want “gay marriage”.  I want a sane reworking of civil unions laws that apply to *everyone* and stripped of patriarchal inclinations.  In other words, I could give a shit about “gay marriage”.  I want a world where anyone can marry anyone and have fair exchange of obligations and benefits between each other and the states.  In other words, I think “gay marriage” is just like “civil unions” in that people will try to feed us crap symbolism (and only real for upper class gays) in place of making sure that the state has a humane face towards an individual needs wrt, estates, living wills, insurance, taxes, visitation, the whole fucking works.  “Gay marriage” in the context of patriarchal construction of “marriage really fucking doesn’t work.

Keep it real.  Symbolism is good, but symbols are supposed to be a path to the real, like a battlefield soldier spotting the eagle standard and making his/her way to the place that means ultimate victory on the real battlefield.  Don’t get distracted by stuff that’s essentially “Here, have a snack, go be a nice boy and munch it there.” crap.  That’s what most of this DADT repeal event is intended to do, demobilize.

Lee @ 29. That is not actually the case in many bi-cameral parliamentary systems. In order to form government a party (or coalition of parties) must have the majority in the lower house but they are not required to have a majority in the upper house (Senate equivalent) in many legislatures. If you have a system where members are elected to the upper house (not always the case) then it is entirely possible for an upper house to be made up of members who oppose the government and therefore are able to prevent legislation from being passed or only to pass it once changes are made. In short, I don’t think you are exceptional in terms of having a Senate which debates, amends and refuses to pass the government’s legislation.

I understand the technical and legal reasons for the presumption of innocence. What I am pointing out is that if we believe in the presumption of innocence (until proven guilty), we must, BY DEFINITION believe that any criminal accusation against someone is false (until proven true).

If you are serving on the jury, that is true, but it doesn’t apply to anyone outside the courtroom.

Would you prefer that we go by the Napoleonic Code, where every defendant is presumed guilty until they are able to prove themselves innocent in court?

@BenD: Harper has suspended parliament twice, both times around the Xmas period, because the opposition parties were organising a coalition. Pretty much all the constitutional scholars have made comments in the press that this is unprecedented and that it’s a loophole that runs against the spirit of the constitution as it stands, but that the only reason why it was never a problem before is that there was a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ not to do so. The Conservatives however are like the GOP, in that what they do is the political equivalent of total war. They’re not there to make concessions, they run their government as though they had a majority.

Hooray to the senate for finally doing the right thing here. It’s easy to be flip about the right to get shot, but that’s not what the activists who’ve been pushing this think. And congratulations to them for sticking with their cause and making noise, especially when it was inconvienent for their political allies.

And good on the 11 Republican senators who voted yes. Even a non-zero number of Republican senators can see that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is stupid and unfair, that’s how stupid and unfair it is.

Is it a bit ironic to hijack a thread with filibuster talk?

Of course, while liberals were seriously complaining about the filibuster these last two years, you weren’t so terribly disappointed with the rule when Senate Democrats used it to block some of President Bush’s judicial nominations.  And with ten Republicans and something like 26 Democrats up for re-election in 2012, there’s a fairly decent chance that the Republicans will take over the Senate two years from now.  You might like it even more if that happens, especially if President Obama loses.

Matt Yglesias was on filibuster reform pre-2006 and I commented on his old blog agreeing with him.

And re-read your own answer, Dana. The Democrats didn’t use the filibuster to stop Bush’s tax cuts, the Iraq War or the Patriot Act. They used it to have slightly fewer wingnut judges. And they didn’t stop any of Bush’s supreme court nominees. Woo hoo. Social Security privatization was very, very unpopular even among conservatives and right-leaning moderates, you could argue that the filibuster helped stop that, but I don’t think Bush could have gotten 50 votes for it.

Practically, others have pointed out that liberals generally want to do things and conservatives generally want to stop us. Also practically, the current Democratic Party is much wider coalition than the Republicans. It’s likely to be harder to round 40 senate Dems willing to be hardcore than 40 senate Republicans for the foreseeable future.

We’d have gotten national healthcare in this country in the Truman Administration if it wasn’t for the filibuster. Several different flavors of civil rights legislation were stopped by filibusters. I’m not remembering any big liberal successes using the filibuster, but maybe I’ve forgotten some where the threat was used effectively to constrain a Republican president or house.