WhatFinger


With a big assist from John McCain

The latest shutdown showdown, or . . . how Mitch McConnell is letting Democrats continue to run the country



How, you ask, can we be at risk of a government shutdown? Republicans control the House, the Senate and the presidency. All the Republicans have to do is hold together and they can avert a shutdown, you reasonably assume. But it doesn't work that way. It should. And it could. But as it stands today, it doesn't. That's because Senate Republicans under the leadership of Mitch McConnell continue to tolerate the abuse of what was once a tool used only in extraordinary circumstances - the filibuster.
Much was made of the fact that Senate Republicans went to the "nuclear option" - the elimination of the filibuster for Supreme Court Justice confirmations, in order to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Court. But that was a very limited action. The filibuster remains for legislation, including most spending bills. It allows Democrats to block just about anything from passing in the Senate so long as there are not enough of them willing to give a bill 60 votes for cloture so as to allow a floor vote on actual passage of the bill. There is a procedure called reconciliation that exempts bills from filibusters. A lot of people think reconciliation can be used for all spending bills, and until this week I thought that too. But that's not true. The use of reconciliation is limited even on spending bills, so one party with a majority in both houses of Congress cannot necessarily pass a spending bill entirely on its own. Here's a brief explanation of how this works from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
The Congressional Budget Act permits using reconciliation for legislation that changes spending, revenues, and the federal debt limit. On the spending side, reconciliation can be used to address “mandatory” or entitlement spending — that is, programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, federal civilian and military retirement, SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), and farm programs — but not Social Security. Mandatory spending is determined by rules set in ongoing authorizing laws, so changing spending usually requires amending those laws. Reconciliation has not been used to change “discretionary” spending, which is spending controlled through the annual appropriations process.

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Since the mid-1980s, Senate rules have prohibited including provisions in reconciliation legislation that do not change the level of spending or revenues or the debt limit. To start the reconciliation process, the House and Senate must agree on a budget resolution that includes “reconciliation directives” for specified committees. Under the Congressional Budget Act, the House and Senate are supposed to adopt a budget resolution each year to establish an overall budget plan and set guidelines for action on spending and revenue. The Senate is not permitted to filibuster consideration of budget resolutions. Budget resolutions don’t go to the President for signature and don’t become law; reconciliation is a procedure for enacting parts of a budget resolution into law. In developing a budget resolution, Congress must decide whether to include reconciliation directives and, if so, whether to use them to implement all or just some of the proposed changes.
So you can only use reconciliation if you jump through a lot of hoops, and if the bill qualifies on a number of levels. Because of that, the spending bill Congress needs to avoid a shutdown this time around cannot be passed under reconciliation, and Democrats can and will filibuster it unless they get serious concessions from Republicans. But here's the really maddening part: A simple majority of the Senate could change these rules. Just as they got rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations, they could get rid of it for all budget resolutions. Or they could just get rid of it entirely.

So why won't McConnell get rid of the filibuster?

Not only have they refused to do so, but over the years they've made it easier than ever for the minority to use the filibuster to block just about anything. It used to be that a minority consisting of at least 40 senators could block a bill from being voted on by literally talking it to death - standing in the well of the Senate and giving long-winded speech after long-winded speech until the majority couldn't take it anymore and agreed to pull the bill. Without 60 senators willing to vote to shut off debate, the filibustering minority could talk forever. But at least they would have to talk. The majority could make them talk all night for days on end, rendering the execution of the filibuster a physically draining exercise. They could do it, but they would have to really work for it. Those requirements no longer exist. Now, you don't have to conduct an actual filibuster. It's simply understood that everything in the Senate requires 60 votes to pass, and the 40-or-more senators who want to stop a bill that has majority support don't have to do anything other than indicate their intention to stop it. It's hard enough to pass something in the Senate when you only have 52 seats out of 100. It's darn near impossible when you also have to get 8 Democrats to join you, and Democrats are made to pay no price whatsoever for blocking a bill that has majority support. So why won't McConnell get rid of the filibuster? This stems from a traditionalist view that says the filibuster must be saved because one day Republicans will be back in the minority and they will wish they had it. Old-school Republican senators like John McCain and Orrin Hatch join McConnell in believing it would be dark day in the Senate if the filibuster were eliminated. These people are insane. Yes, if Republicans ever found themselves out of the White House and in the minority in both the House and the Senate (as happened from 1993-1995 and again from 2009-2011), they would have a hard time stopping the liberal freight train from charging forward with aggressive left-wing legislation. Then again, Harry Reid abused reconciliation rules to pass ObamaCare in 2010, so a hell of a lot of good the filibuster did the Republicans then. But the traditionalist view makes it all but impossible to upset the status quo, which very much needs to be upset. What good does it do to protect against some future liberal legislation when we're awash in it now, and the very same rule makes it impossible to replace it with better legislation? Yes, some day if Democrats sweep an election and they want to pass a spending and taxing blowout, getting rid of the filibuster would make it easier for them to do so. But you know what? If they have the majority and they want to get rid of the filibuster on their own, there'd be nothing stopping them from doing so. They didn't do it in 1994 to pass HillaryCare, mainly because they knew it was a bad plan and a political loser. That doesn't mean they wouldn't do so in the future.

McCain is obsessed with preserving traditions of the institution, but those traditions are hurting the country. They should be retired

Old-guard types like McCain are worried that if the filibuster was gone, the Senate would become just like the House. Who cares? The House has its own problems as we've seen with the ObamaCare repeal-and-replace struggle, but at least the House can pass basic legislation that a majority of its members support. The Senate should become more like that. McCain is obsessed with preserving traditions of the institution, but those traditions are hurting the country. They should be retired. As should he. But I put this more on Mitch McConnell than I do on McCain, because McConnell is the Senate Majority Leader. He vowed after going nuclear to pass Gorsuch that he would never, ever eliminate the filibuster for legislation. That was a horrible position for him to take. This country has problems that urgently need to be fixed, and they can't be fixed because the party that lost last year's election doesn't want them to be fixed. And the party that won, which could take away the losing party's ability to prevent these solutions, refuses to even try to do so. Look, governing is hard even when you have the majority. But it's really hard when won't use the tools at your disposal to do it. Because Mitch McConnell doesn't want to change traditions or upset the status quo, Democrats are essentially still running this country - even though the voters made it very clear last year that they don't want them to. You want to know why problems don't get solved? This is why.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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