Vice President Joe Biden

Re:  Think Progress » White House Signals That It Will Fight Back Against GOP Abuse Of Filibuster, 01/24/10

…The number of Senate cloture votes, which require a supermajority of 60, “more than doubled — from 54 to 112 — from the 109th Congress (2005-2006) to the 110th (2007-2008), according to the Senate historical office.”

It is hard to imagine that people are just now starting to talk about how to fix the filibuster. How long has it been since the Republicans became the party of “no” and began this campaign to kill everything introduced by the Democrats? 2006?

This is a nice graphic illustrating the right-wing abuse of the filibuster since they lost so bad in 2006: 

Cloture Voting, U.S. Senate 1947 to 2008

I know it is amazing, but there has actually been an itty bitty peep of support from the White House on fixing the filibuster. Vice President Joe Biden recently said, “No democracy has survived needing a supermajority.”

Biden’s communication director, Jay Carney weighed in by saying that the filibuster abuse has festered to the point that it is use has doubled in 20 years, tripled in 30. He states, “…it raises a legitimate question about whether this power is being used to protect the minority or merely to obstruct action and progress.” No duh. It sounds like he was born yesterday.

TV One’s Roland Martin also weighed in the fray by remarking about how there needs to be transparency in the cloture process – that Republicans need to be “called out” and made to explain to the people what they are doing and why. My sentiments exactly.

“The Republican strategy in the Senate is to turn 50 into 60, in other words no longer do you need a majority to carry the day in the Senate. You need 60 votes for everything because the Republicans are filibustering every single bill,” he said. “We need to call that out, and they need to explain to the American people whether throwing a wrench into everything at a time of national emergency is the appropriate policy. They want to win and election and take us back to the policies that got us into this mess in the first place.”

I am happy that the White House and others are finally seeing what we’ve seen all along, that the Republicans are laughing at us behind our backs because of our timidity and our insistence on bringing a knife to every gunfight we encounter. The right-wing’s bad behavior is off the charts and it is high time we acted.

I propose that we use the Nuclear Option to declare all the right-wing filibusters unconstitutional on the grounds that they are invoking the maneuver promote their ideology and gain political advantage in Washington.

Nuclear Option explained:

In U.S. politics, the “nuclear option” is an attempt by a majority of the United States Senate to end a filibuster by invoking a point of order to essentially declare the filibuster unconstitutional which can be decided by a simple majority, rather than seeking formal cloture with a supermajority of 60 senators. Although it is not provided for in the formal rules of the Senate, the procedure is the subject of a 1957 parliamentary opinion and has been used on several occasions since. The term was coined by Senator Trent Lott (Republican of Mississippi) in 2005.

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