“Democracy Works No More”: Irrational And Insane Republican Filibuster Kills Background-Check Compromise
Almost exactly four months after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, the Senate took up a bipartisan compromise on firearm background checks — the heart of the larger effort to reduce gun violence. It was a watered-down compromise written by two conservative senators, but it enjoyed the support of a majority of the Senate and the overwhelming support of the American public.
And yet, this afternoon, it died at the hands of a Republican filibuster anyway.
As the dust settled, a 54-member majority supported the Manchin/Toomey amendment, while 46 opposed it. Because of Republican obstructionist tactics, proponents needed a 60-vote supermajority and came up far short. (Technically, it would have been 55-45, but Majority Leader Harry Reid had to switch his vote for procedural reasons.)
A woman in the Senate gallery shouted “shame on you” at the members below, but she, like the Newtown families, Gabrielle Giffords, and 90% of the country were ignored.
The vote fell largely along partisan lines, but not completely. Four Republicans — Sens. Collins, Kirk, McCain, and Toomey — broke ranks and supported expanded background checks, while four red-state Democrats — Sens. Baucus, Begich, Heitkamp, and Pryor — sided with the NRA. Three of the four Dems face challenging re-election campaigns in 2014.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), one of Congress’ staunchest supporters of gun-safety measures, has been absent from the Senate for several weeks with a serious ailment, but made it to the floor today anyway, in case his vote was needed. Indeed, Lautenberg cast a vote from a wheelchair this afternoon.
Given the numbers, the Democratic defections give the opposition a bipartisan veneer, but they were ultimately inconsequential — even if every member of the Democratic caucus voted together, the background-checks measure still would have lost given the scope of the opposition from the Republican minority.
There is a larger indictment to keep in mind. A filibuster killed a popular and worthwhile proposal today, but that’s not all that happened.
Watching the vote, I was reminded of something President Obama recently said while traveling the country to generate support for his gun-safety agenda.
“Ninety percent of Americans support universal background checks. Think about that. How often do 90 percent of Americans agree on anything? … And yet, there is only one thing that can stand in the way of change that just about everybody agrees on, and that’s politics in Washington. You would think that with those numbers Congress would rush to make this happen. That’s what you would think. If our democracy is working the way it’s supposed to, and 90 percent of the American people agree on something, in the wake of a tragedy you’d think this would not be a heavy lift.
“And yet, some folks back in Washington are already floating the idea that they may use political stunts to prevent votes on any of these reforms. Think about that. They’re not just saying they’ll vote ‘no’ on ideas that almost all Americans support. They’re saying they’ll do everything they can to even prevent any votes on these provisions. They’re saying your opinion doesn’t matter. And that’s not right.”
That’s true; it’s not right. But thanks to the way our political system currently works, it happened anyway.
Think about this: everything was in place for success. This one simple idea — close the gun-show loophole and apply background checks to online sales — had all of the pieces lined up in its favor. The White House invested considerable energy in giving the proposal the best possible chance to prevail; the American mainstream strongly endorsed it; the memory of national tragedy still weighed heavily on everyone’s minds; and the only meaningful organization lobbying against it has become a national laughingstock.
“If our democracy is working the way it’s supposed to,” the bipartisan compromise should have passed while barely breaking a sweat.
Is it not time, then, to look anew at whether our democracy has stopped working the way it’s supposed to?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 17, 2013
“A Defeat For The NRA”: Despite Threats, Filibuster Broken And Gun Debate Begins
The Senate has voted 68-31 to open a debate on compromise gun legislation that expands background checks. The bill will be based on a compromise between senators Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), both of whom currently have an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA) gun lobby.
The NRA threatened to “score” Thursday’s vote against lawmakers’ ratings, hoping to kill the bill before it was even written. But 17 Republicans joined all the Democrats in the Senate except Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Mark Begich (D-AK) for cloture to prevent a filibuster from derailing the debate. The Washington Post‘s Ed O’Keefe points out that 21 of the “aye” votes came from senators with NRA ratings A- or higher.
Several family members of those killed in the Newtown massacre four months ago were on hand to witness the vote in the Senate chamber.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-NV) took to the floor after the vote.
“The hard work starts now,” he said.
“There are powerful feelings about each of these proposals — both strong support and strong opposition,” Reid said. “But whichever side you are on, we ought to be able to agree to engage in a thoughtful debate about these measures.”
He added that he hopes ”a few senators don’t spoil everything,” referencing the threat by 14 senators including Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) to filibuster the bill.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is one of those senators. On Thursday he said, ”This bill is a clear overreach that will predominantly punish and harass our neighbors, friends, and family.”
The debate is expected to last for weeks, with the NRA continuing to score even procedural votes.
Though about one-third of the Senate voted against even having a debate, polls show that around 90 percent of Americans support expanding background checks.
“Those two leaders stepping up is a very good way to start,” said Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who is seeking re-election next year in red state Louisiana. “How it ends, I don’t know.”
This morning, Congressman Peter King (R-NY) told The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent that he thought the bill had a chance of passing the House of Representatives if it makes it out of the Senate.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, April 11, 2013
“McConnell Hardball”: The Scope Of Mitch McConnell’s Anxiety Is Still Coming Into Focus
I’ve long believed we can learn a lot about politicians by how they conduct their campaigns. Candidates who are honest and above board before the election tend to be honest and above board after the votes are tallied. Those who choose to be dishonest and sleazy during the race are often less than forthright once in office.
And if this adage is true, we’re learning some unsettling things about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
For months, McConnell has made no real effort to hide his anxiety about his re-election. Despite his power and leadership role, and despite representing a “red” state, McConnell is not at all popular in the Bluegrass State. He’s sitting on an $8.6 million campaign war chest, which he’s already been forced to tap into — McConnell was the first incumbent to launch television ads in this cycle, 20 months before Election Day.
Is the panic justified? Probably — new results from Public Policy Polling shows McConnell with a 36% approval rating from his own constituents. Though his party affiliation is enough to lift him above likely Democratic challengers, PPP found his advantage over Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes at only four points, 45% to 41%.
The scope of McConnell’s anxiety is still coming into focus. Mother Jones‘ David Corn has obtained another secret recording and published this report this morning.
On February 2, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, opened up his 2014 reelection campaign headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, and in front of several dozen supporters vowed to “point out” the weaknesses of any opponent fielded by the Democrats. “They want to fight? We’re ready,” he declared. McConnell was serious: Later that day, he was huddling with aides in a private meeting to discuss how to attack his possible Democratic foes, including actor/activist Ashley Judd, who was then contemplating challenging the minority leader.
During this strategy session — a recording of which was obtained by Mother Jones — McConnell and his aides considered assaulting Judd for her past struggles with depression and for her religious views.
Even by contemporary GOP standards, some of the planned lines of attack were unusually ugly.
For example, during their strategy session, one McConnell aide argued that Judd is “emotionally unbalanced,” pointing to her “suicidal tendencies.”
Judd wrote in her autobiography about her struggles with depression, including having considered suicide as a sixth-grader.
But what kind of campaign looks at that as a legitimate area for a political attack?
On religion, Judd had described herself this way: “I still choose the God of my understanding as the God of my childhood. I have to expand my God concept from time to time, and you know particularly I enjoy native faith practices, and have a very nature-based God concept. I’d like to think I’m like St. Francis in that way. Brother Donkey, Sister Bird.”
Apparently, Team McConnell found this hilarious. Corn reported:
Laughter erupted again, with one guy in the meeting exclaiming, “Brother Donkey, Sister Bird!” The group didn’t seem to realize that Judd was referring to well-known stories about St. Francis, who once preached a sermon to birds—”my little sisters”—and who referred to his own body as the “Brother Donkey.” (In her book, Judd identifies herself as a Christian and often refers to church and prayer.)
With his comrades laughing about Judd’s reference to donkeys and birds, the chief presenter remarked, “That’s my favorite line so far. Absolute favorite one so far.”
Obviously, with Judd no longer considering the race, the specific lines of attack are a moot point. There’s no point in a senator attacking the personal life of a movie star just for the sake of doing so.
But the fact that this is where McConnell and his team were prepared to go doesn’t speak highly of the Senate Minority Leader’s values.
Postscript: The Republican senator hasn’t commented on the substance of David Corn’s report, but McConnell’s campaign wants an FBI investigation to determine how Corn obtained the recording. McConnell’s campaign manager Jesse Benton accused “the Left” of “Watergate-style tactics,” and believes “a criminal investigation” is warranted.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 9, 2013
“An Undemocratic Body Becoming Even More Undemocratic”: Gun Debate Highlights Everything Awful About The U.S. Senate
The Washington Post reported yesterday evening that “senators might be on the cusp of a breakthrough” on gun legislation, after weeks of “stalled negotiations” leading to many observers pronouncing gun control doomed. (Though as Dave Weigel points out, the “all gun legislation is in deep trouble” idea arose mostly because Congress hasn’t been in session and hence no work has been done on any legislation.) The savior: Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, who is now negotiating with Democrat Joe Manchin, after it was determined that Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn was not worth wasting any additional time on. Toomey, you see, needs to win reelection in Pennsylvania, so he is going to be more reasonable than someone who won’t have to work very hard at all to win reelection in Oklahoma.
This is basically the way eminent Washington political elites like to pretend that the Senate is supposed to work, and the way they imagine it worked in the idealized past: A very conservative Democrat (from a tiny state) finding common ground with a Republican colleague. The fact that these careful negotiations are required when there are almost certainly already 51 votes for comprehensive background checks isn’t considered particularly distressing or embarrassing. (Negotiations previously seemed on the verge of collapse because no agreement could be brokered between Chuck Schumer, a senator representing 19.5 million people, and Tom Coburn, a senator representing 3.8 million people.) A supermajority must be courted if the senators representing the will of the regular majority of Americans hope to get their way.
There is a villain in the easy narrative, too: Extremists! Specifically, Rand Paul and a band of conservatives, who have promised to filibuster. Oddly, despite most senators — especially Republican senators — agreeing that filibusters are a Cherished Senate Tradition, this promise has received a bit of criticism.
John McCain said yesterday that he doesn’t understand a threat to filibuster any gun control legislation that comes up for a vote. While many of us don’t understand why John McCain, a senator with no leadership position or major national following, is constantly on Sunday news chat shows, we can perhaps help him to figure out what this filibuster thing is about.
Here’s what McCain said on CBS’ “Face the Nation”:
“I don’t understand it. The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand.”
Well. That’s certainly one way of looking at the purpose of the United States Senate, though it’s not a very popular interpretation among senators themselves.
McCain is one of the few senators who can boast of having defeated attempts to kill the filibuster twice, once when he was a member of the 2005 “Gang of 14″ that preserved the filibuster while also allowing for the confirmation of a number of Bush judges, and once at the beginning of this year, when the effectively meaningless “filibuster reform” proposal he crafted with Carl Levin became the apparent blueprint of the “compromise” Harry Reid agreed to in January. The compromise preserved — strengthened, probably — the 60 vote threshold that now subjects all senate business to the approval of the minority party and, often, the whims of the biggest cranks in that party. McCain then joined the filibuster of Caitlin Halligan, whom President Obama had nominated to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Her nomination was withdrawn, and the court remains free of Democratic appointees. Before this, McCain filibustered Obama’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Goodwin Liu. McCain also filibustered Chuck Hagel, a filibuster done primarily to set the precedent that Republicans can filibuster even Defense Secretary nominees, and he filibustered Richard Cordray, Obama’s choice to head an agency Republicans are hoping to filibuster into nonexistence or irrelevance. Those aren’t the showy, talky sorts of filibusters, though, so they do not offend McCain’s sense of decency, like Rand Paul does when he speaks to the chamber instead of quietly voting “no” on cloture motions.
But if the purpose of the senate is to debate and to vote, and filibusters interfere with that purpose, McCain has a bit of explaining to do. (Maybe he will explain next Sunday on one of those awful shows. If someone bothers to ask him about it.)
Still, it is easy to figure out why Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and various nonentities who wish to be associated with Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have preemptively promised to filibuster any gun control legislation: Because people like John McCain have worked quite hard to protect their rights to halt any legislation they please whenever they want for any reason. People like John McCain have done everything they could to make an already undemocratic body even more undemocratic, because doing so helps people like John McCain pretend they are power-brokers and statesmen instead of members of organized political parties representing various interests, elected by people who assume that the party label next to the name is a reliable indicator of how that person will vote once in office.
Senators aren’t the only people committed to the ideal of a Senate full of independent, moderate mavericks. Bad pundits basically eat that shit up. And on the subject of What is Wrong With the Senate, bad pundit Chris Cillizza has written the most inane political column in the history of political columns. It is utterly ahistorical, full of lazy banalities, wholly devoid of insight and it could’ve been written at any point in the last twenty years. If IBM told the development team behind Watson to build an AI capable of writing centrist political analysis columns, that machine would almost certainly write a more interesting and informative column than this one.
This is the dullest imitation Broderism — things used to be better, when grand old moderate men who respected other grand old moderate men ran everything, before the damned liberals and conservatives showed up — I can recall reading in some time. So, the Senate sucks now, because it is more like the House, apparently. (The House of Representatives is America’s more democratic legislative body — though it still grants more power to rural than urban areas — and Beltway elite types hate it because it is loud and full of idiots, like America.)
Things were better before!
The Senate was once regarded as the home of the great political orators of the time — not to mention the body where true dealmaking actually took place. Its members prided themselves on their cool approach to legislating, in contrast with the more brawling nature of the House. Senators, generally, liked one another — no matter their party — and weren’t afraid to show it, either personally or politically.
For years, the Senate was also known as where civil rights and anti-lynching bills go to die, because some of those great political orators devoted their oratory to protecting white supremacy, backed up by violence, at any cost. Many of those racists were much-liked by their fellow senators, of course.
Then we get to the examples, to prove that things are bad now. First, there is now too much “partisanship,” which means party discipline. This happened in part because Republicans became much more disciplined, but also because after the Civil Rights Era conservatives became Republicans and liberals (and moderates) became Democrats, leaving fewer — and then no — random outlier liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats to grant meaningless “bipartisan” approval to liberal and conservative measures.
Second, the filibuster, sort of:
Then, the blockading. As The Post’s Juliet Eilperin noted in a Fix post last week, there are currently 15 judges nominated by President Obama awaiting votes by the full Senate. Thirteen of the 15 — or roughly 87 percent — of those nominees were approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee. And even those who get votes often have to wait forever for them. On March 11, for example, the Senate confirmed Richard Taranto for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit by a vote of 91 to 0, 484 days after the president nominated him — and he’s far from the only example of that trend.
Did you notice that Cillizza forgot to say “filibuster” in that paragraph?
Finally, the only point Cillizza actually cares about, “the nastiness.” Cillizza says the problem is that so many senators now come from the House, though he is forced to acknowledge that the nastiest new senators — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Mike Lee — did not come from the House.
Look, here are a bunch of charts about polarization that Cillizza could’ve checked out before he wrote this column in ten minutes. He might’ve learned some stuff! Like that the moderation of the post-war period was actually a weird anomaly. American politics have been otherwise highly polarized since the early days of the Republic. Cillizza also could’ve read this big Adam Liptak piece in the New York Times about the antidemocratic effect of the Senate’s inherent small-state bias and how the normalization of the filibuster has only made the problem worse. He could’ve checked out this editorial in his own newspaper, by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, pointing out that the “polarization” problem is primarily a problem of Republicans getting much, much more conservative.
These are all points that anyone who has been reading blogs and articles by any number of prominent historians and political scientists (and random smart bloggers!) over the last few years is already familiar with. Cillizza, obviously, has not been reading any political scientists or historians. He has maybe never read anything by any political scientists or historians? He has maybe only been watching Chuck Todd on MSNBC?
If gun control ends up failing, I guarantee that people like Cillizza will continue to long for the days of Civility and Moderation, and the role “moderates” play in enabling extremists will likely only be mentioned by left-wing blogger cranks whom no one takes seriously.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 8, 2013
“This Thinking Is Just Bizarre”: The Gun Debate GOP Senators Are Afraid To Have
Two weeks ago, a trio of right-wing senators — Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Mike Lee of Utah — released a statement explaining their intention to block a debate on any legislation that changes any federal gun law in any way. Soon after, the filibuster threat grew to five members, and over the weekend, the total reached 12.
Remember, these dozen GOP senators aren’t just saying they’re going to oppose legislation, and they’re not merely threatening to block final passage. Rather, these 12 senators are saying they’re not prepared to allow the Senate to even have a debate — even if the legislation would save lives, even if the ideas have bipartisan support, and even if the bill is entirely permissible under the Constitution.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and raised a fair point.
For those who can’t watch clips online, McCain said of Senate Republicans’ vow to filibuster the motion to proceed:
“I don’t understand it. The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand…. What are we afraid of? Why would we not want — if this issue is as important as all of us think it is, why not take it to the world’s greatest deliberative — that’s the greatest exaggeration in history, by the way — but why not take up an amendment and debate?”
I’m not generally inclined to agree with John McCain, but on this, he’s exactly right.
Let’s be clear about the nature of the threat: these 12 Republican senators are saying they’re unwilling to allow the Senate to debate gun legislation. It would be tough enough to craft a bill that can pass both chambers of Congress, but we now have a dozen Republicans who are so scared, they’re afraid of a discussion.
It’s rather bizarre. To reiterate a point from two weeks ago, from the far-right’s perspective, the worst case scenario is easy to imagine: the Senate might pass a bill that Republicans and the NRA don’t like. But even under these circumstances, the legislation would go to the Republican-led House, where progressive legislation has no credible chance of success.
So why go to so much effort to block an argument on the floor of the Senate?
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), not exactly a moderate in his caucus, has a compelling possible explanation (via Igor Volsky).
After Mr. Coburn was asked multiple times an identically worded question about whether he would join Mr. Paul’s effort to block gun legislation as he traveled around Oklahoma in recent days, Mr. Coburn bristled at the idea that Mr. Paul would threaten to filibuster a bill before its contents were made final.
“Is that about filibustering a bill to protect the Second Amendment, or is that about Rand Paul?” Mr. Coburn said at a town-hall meeting at the Oklahoma Sports Museum in Guthrie, Okla., on Wednesday.
What a good question.
As an additional bit of context, let’s also note that the Republican senators whose names are most frequently associated with national 2016 ambitions — Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz — are all part of the dozen who are desperate to block the debate.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 8, 2013
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