I wonder sometimes why any House member would want to run for the Senate. I guess the pay might be a little better, and you're one of 100 instead of one of 435, so you're a somewhat bigger celebrity.
But the House, at least sometimes, actually passes a piece of legislation that would make a positive difference if signed into law. The Senate? Ha! Not with a rule in place that gives the minority a veto over the majority, and with the leaders of the Senate majority determined to protect said rule for whatever reason. It's almost as if Senate Republicans . . . really don't want to get anything done.
The number two House Republican leader made a fresh push Wednesday for Senate Republicans to change rules to make it easier to break filibusters of spending bills, echoing a similar call from President Donald Trump for the Senate to set aside long-held precedent that requires at least 60 votes for major legislation to pass.
Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy boasted that the House was on the verge of passing all 12 annual appropriations measures, something that hasn't happened since 2004.
"We will pass them with a majority in Congress. I believe the Senate should do the same, with a simple majority of the Senate," McCarthy told reporters. "The Senate should waive the 60 rule and pass it with a simple majority and take it to the President's desk."But McCarthy's proposal, which he called for also in 2015, was immediately rejected by the top GOP leaders in both the Senate and the House.
Let's step back just in case some of you aren't entirely up to speed on what we're talking about.
In the House, when a majority votes for a bill, the bill is passed. Simple as that.
In the Senate, nothing is simple. There is a thing called the filibuster, which supposedly means that a minority of 41 members or more can talk a bill to death by refusing to end debate on it, which means the rules won't allow for a vote. Without 60 votes to end debate, you can't vote on the bill itself and it can't pass. But the minority has to talk the bills to death only in theory. In practice, without 60 votes for a piece of legislation, it's simply assumed that the bill is the victim of a de facto filibuster, and no vote will be taken on passing the bill.
What this has given us is a reality in which you need 60 votes to pass just about anything in the Senate. The only exceptions are for narrowly defined procedures that qualify under "reconciliation" rules. This is mainly to get spending and tax bills passed, but even these are hard to qualify under reconciliation.
The ObamaCare repeal bill that failed to get even 50 votes in the Senate had to be significantly watered down to qualify under reconciliation rules, which is why it fell so far short of what many conservatives wanted to see in it.
So all this is frustrating, but here's the most frustrating part: A simple majority of the Senate could change these rules, and Republicans have a majority. They could do away with the filibuster today and start passing needed legislation on majority votes, just like the House does. But it's the Senate Republicans themselves who refuse to do so.
There are usually two justifications offered for this. One is that some day Republicans will be back in the minority and they will want the ability to block Democrat bills. The other, which tends to come from traditionalists like John McCain, is that requiring 60 votes forces you to reach across the aisle and develop "bipartisan solutions."
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Let's deal with that argument first, because it's the easiest one to destroy: If the fruit of the filibuster is "bipartisan solutions," where are they? When did Republican senators team up with the likes of Chuck Schumer and Al Franken to give us these wonderful bipartisan bills that solved all our problems? Never. It has not happened. There are no bipartisan solutions to be had and there is no interest in any such thing on the part of senators.
There are necessary bills that can pass with Republican votes, but because of the filibuster rules they don't pass and they won't pass. This is idiotic. The job of the Senate is to pass legislation, yet it's imposed rules on itself that make it essentially impossible to do the one thing it's supposed to do. The last time either party had 60 seats was the Democrats in 2009, and we know what that resulted in.
ObamaCare. Some bipartisan solution that was.
As for the warning that one day Democrats will have the majority, well, yes, they probably will. So here's what you do if you're a Republican:
Do a good enough job governing that voters don't hand the White House, the House and the Senate all to the Democrats. That's called checks and balances.
Pass good enough legislation when you have the majority that Democrats face peril repealing it and replacing it with bad legislation, because the public knows its working.
Learn how to win more elections so Democrat majorites are rare and short-lived.
Look, I don't want Democrats passing leftist bills either. But the fact of the matter is that we're living under a government today that's essentially ruled by left-wing legislation passed over the course of recent decades. What we need to do is repeal those laws and replace them with better ones, and we can't do it because of the filibuster - and because of an unwilling Republican majority that seems to care more about Senate traditions than about solving anything.
If we maintain these Senate rules forever, we'll essentially maintain the status quo forever. Trump is right. So is Kevin McCarthy. The filibuster needs to go - not just for budget bills, but for all legislation. John McCain won't like it. Too damn bad. Things John McCain doesn't like usually turn out to be pretty good ideas.
