The Temper Tantrum Rule

Broken is the word used most often these days to describe the United States Senate.  The greatest deliberative body in the world can’t get anything done because of obscure rules and traditions, including the filibuster, which can be invoked at any time by any Senator to stymie movement of bills and appointments to a vote, either in committee or on the floor.

Every five minutes or so the grim visage of the Senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, appears on my television screen because he, along with his Arizona sidekick Krysten Sinema, won’t agree to relax the filibuster rule to get the two voting rights bills that have been passed by the House and are pending in the Senate. 

Here’s a good one for you.  You would think that changing a rule requiring 60 votes to move legislation forward to a vote would require 60 votes to pass, but you would be wrong.  The Senate rule on the filibuster, by which any Senator can hold up a vote on a bill on the floor because he or she objects to “unanimous consent” on the bill, can be changed with a simple majority vote.  But if Democrats don’t have Manchin and Sinema, they don’t have that majority.

But it’s even worse than you think.  Senator Ted Cruz of Texas held up votes on dozens of Joe Biden’s nominees for State Department positions and ambassadors for nearly a year until an agreement was reached in December to allow a vote Cruz was demanding on sanctions against a Russian pipeline that will deliver natural gas to Germany.  In 2013, Democrats in the Senate relaxed the filibuster rule on most presidential appointments, including those for federal judgeships and most executive branch appointments including the Cabinet.  Four years later, Republicans changed the filibuster rule to include Supreme Court nominees.  So technically, Cruz shouldn’t have been able to block the State Department appointments.

That’s not the way the Senate works, however.  You could call the filibuster the Temper Tantrum Rule.  By Cruz withholding consent, votes on each nominee would have taken hours of Senate floor time, thus blocking movement on other legislation.  Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas joined Cruz in throwing his bowl of peas from his highchair in the fall by blocking votes on U.S. Attorney nominations in Democratic states until Senator Durbin apologized for interrupting him at a hearing for a Department of Justice nominee back in March.  Senator Rand Paul pounded his little fists on the floor over the nomination of Dilawar Syed to be deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration.  If confirmed, Syed would have been the highest-ranking Muslim in history ever to serve in a cabinet position in the government. But not without the permission of Baby Rand.

President Joe Biden traveled to Atlanta today to give a speech announcing his support for a so-called “carve-out” to the filibuster rule for voting rights bills so the bills pending in the Senate would get a chance for a vote.  In the past, Republicans voted almost unanimously to reauthorize the voting rights laws that were passed in 1965.  But after the Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, Republican support suddenly dried up. 

Here’s the deal.  If Manchin or Sinema or any other Democrat doesn’t think that Mitch McConnell will invoke the so-called “nuclear option” and kill the filibuster the day Republicans re-take control of the Senate, they’ve been smoking funny cigarettes in the cloak room.  As majority leader, McConnell will be about as principled as a rabid wolverine.  He will declare that he is returning “democracy” to the Senate, and then he’ll go about the business of overturning every law passed by Democrats in the last 50 years beginning with Obamacare and going right through improvements in the areas of immigration, voting rights, campaign finance…anything with Democratic fingerprints on it...and he’ll do it with a smile plastered on his face.  If Republicans manage to return He Who Shall Not Be Named to the White House, or elect one of the Pretenders to his Throne of Darkness, he’ll have a loon with a Sharpie to sign anything he passes.

It’s a dilemma, isn’t it, democracy?  In this iteration of the greatest form of government the world has ever known, there are all these great rights and traditions and norms and rules and freedoms until there aren’t.