A hapless fund raiser from the DSCC just called me, and I lit into her about this (via Americablog):
“It won’t happen,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said she would “probably not” support an effort to lower the number of votes needed to cut off filibusters from 60 to 55 or lower.
Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) echoed Feinstein: “I think we should retain the same policies that we have instead of lowering it.
“I think it has been working,” he said.
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) said he recognizes his colleagues are frustrated over the failure to pass measures such as the Disclose Act, campaign legislation that fell three votes short of overcoming a Republican filibuster Tuesday.
“I think as torturous as this place can be, the cloture rule and the filibuster is important to protect the rights of the minority,” he said. “My inclination is no.”
Sen. Jon Tester, a freshman Democrat from Montana, disagrees with some of his classmates from more liberal states.
“I think the bigger problem is getting people to work together,” he said. “It’s been 60 for a long, long time. I think we need to look to ourselves more than changing the rules.”
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who is up for reelection in 2012, also said he would like the votes needed for cloture to remain the same.
“I’m not one who think it needs to be changed,” he said.
I’ve said it before that the only vote that will matter next year, if it ever takes place, is the vote to change the filibuster rules. Apparently the Democrats in the Senate put Senatorial privilege in our House of Lords above the public good. We will be condemned to live in a country that slides ever farther to the right (while we slowly get basted as the world warms) because a few Democrats can’t see their way clear to letting the majority rule, the way our sainted Founders intended. What’s truly galling is that the majority does rule when the Republicans are in charge; it’s only the Democrats that let the filibuster stand in their way.
The DSCC gets no money from me so long as a dime of it goes to any of the above, or their ilk. And if, or I should say when, they fail to reform the filibuster, then I will give up on them totally. There are probably only 40 Democrats in the country that think the filibuster is a good thing, and every one of them is in the Senate.
UPDATE: A commenter asks where Blumenthal is on this issue. I was at a meet and greet at which he was asked this question by someone who beat me to it. He said he wanted to see the issue addressed, though he didn’t say exactly what he favored. I might point out that it would be just like the Democrats, with a reduced majority, for settling on reducing the 60 vote requirement to some other number that everyone knows they can never reach.
One Comment