One of my right wing commenters (I always have one) posted a comment in response to my recommendation that we, one and all, sign Kos’s petition to end the filibuster.
The comment was to the effect that you need 67 votes to change the filibuster rule.
Kos isn’t stupid, and if he thought you needed that many votes to change the rule, he wouldn’t bother to press for it, since it’s pretty clear that you couldn’t get a single Republican vote to change it at this time. As is usual, our right wing friend is wrong.
But the fact is, you don’t need 67 votes to change the rule. You need 51 votes, provided you take the vote at the beginning of the session. We can thank Nelson Rockefeller for that. He was Vice-President in 1975. More importantly, he was president of the Senate at that time, and in that capacity he ruled that it took only a majority of votes to change the rules at the beginning of a session. The filibuster was in danger at that point, because it took 67 votes to break one, and his ruling could have spelled the end of the filibuster at that time. The Senate compromised, and passed a new rule requiring 60 votes to break a filibuster, but Rockefeller’s ruling stood, meaning that in January of 2011 the Senate could, be a mere majority of Senators, change its rules again.
I am beating this dead horse simply because it’s such an important issue, and everyone on our side should know the facts.
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