Just When You Thought Republicans Couldn’t Get More Hypocritical
Back before 2006, Republicans reacted so strongly to Democrats’ using the filibuster to stop the nominations of Bush nominees that they nearly “went nuclear,” to use their phrase. Now, Republicans had allowed only 81% of Clinton’s court nominees to be confirmed in his first four years, whereas Democrats let in 95% of Bush nominees in the same time period; Democrats were far less obstructionist with Bush than any Congress had been with a president for a while. But that kind of stuff doesn’t matter when you vent fake outrage; Republicans became outwardly furious with Democrats, and called their method of blocking extremist judges–the filibuster–“unfair” and even “unconstitutional,” insisting that a straight, up-or-down vote with a 50%+ majority deciding was the only honest and American way of doing things. The filibuster represented “tyranny by the minority,” Bill Frist said, which must be “thwarted.”
All that changed, of course, when they lost power; suddenly, they abandoned all their angry rhetoric about the filibuster and instantly fell in love with the procedure. With Democrats in power, Republicans started using the filibuster constantly, setting historical records with its use, doubling the number of times it had ever been used in a session of Congress. They were using the cloture vote as a political cudgel, using it early and often; it was their new best friend.
So, it would be hard for Republicans to get more hypocritical than that, right?
Well, never underestimate the Republican propensity for outdoing themselves.
Chuck Grassley, the Senator who recently made waves after Obama praised him as looking for real solutions, promptly went nuts and starting riffing on the “Death Panel” theme. And now he’s saying that the “straight up-or-down” 50%+ majority vote that his party, just a few years ago, claimed was the only “fair” and “constitutional” way to go, is not enough; he’s saying that even the 60% super-majority using the filibuster is not enough. No, now he’s saying that if Democrats want to pass health care reform, they should have to produce an 80% super-duper-majority:
The final healthcare reform bill to make its way out of the Senate should have as many as 80 members voting for passage, one of the lead Republican negotiators of the health package said Wednesday.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said it’s his preference to see the vast majority of his colleagues on board with a final healthcare bill.
“It ought to be from 80 people in the center of the Senate, I would think,” Grassley said during a news conference with Iowa reporters.
Nor was that a misstatement; Grassley repeated the exact same sentiment to the Washington Post, and Orrin Hatch chimed in to agree. (Both Hatch and Grassley previously hailed Republican bills passing with fewer than 60 votes as “bipartisan.”) He even is coupling this talk with calls for “bipartisanship.” Apparently, Republicans have departed from their ugly definition of “bipartisanship” meaning “when we are in power, you do whatever we say,” and now define the term as, “you do whatever we say all the time, no exceptions.”
Anyone from the right want to up the crazy from that?
Next advancement will be – “as long as we are in power” 😛
So I take it he has not actually read the constitution, or he would know that it doesn’t say “majority can be whatever you feel like at the time and changed at a whim” and actually lays out the 1/2 and 2/3’s requirements.
Stuart:
Actually, surprisingly, the Constitution does not say a single word about a majority vote deciding the passage of a bill. While it lays out the rules of a 2/3 supermajority in certain cases, it says not one thing about a simple majority. I know, surprised me, too.
I can only guess that the simple majority rule was assumed. But in terms of what is expressly noted, the only relevant passage I can find is:
“Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings…”
Which, it seems to me, says that they can do whatever the heck they want. There has been a lot of debate on this issue, of course, but the Constitution leaves the matter somewhat unclear. Conservatives, when advocating the “nuclear option,” made the argument that because the Constitution clearly lays out situations which require a supermajority and did not specify the filibuster as among them, this means that they intended not to have any supermajority allowed aside from those they specified. You might call this the “strict constructionist” argument. It falls apart when (a) you realize that a majority vote itself is not specified either, (b) the Constitution never said that strict constructionism was a means of determining unwritten rules, and (c) each house was specifically allowed to make their own rules as I noted above, which goes against the strict constructionist argument.
And even if you do hold the assumed simple-majority rule as sacrosanct, that only applies to final votes on bills. It does not apply to proceedings before those final votes, at which times bills may be killed in a variety of ways, such as in committee. The filibuster, or more specifically the “cloture” vote, may be considered simply a procedural step before that final simple-majority vote, and therefore not replacing, supplanting, or perverting it–by the rules.
What the Constitution does seem to allow for is for the Senate to change the rules as they like–to have or not have a filibuster is purely up to them.
No, where Grassley is going astray is by setting such a high bar for Democratic bills to pass when he and other Republicans previously set a far lower bar for themselves. Thus the hypocrisy.
Hm, that is interesting, but surely they meant simple majority or there would be no point of the portion that describes the vice-president as not being able to vote except for tie-breaking votes. That implies simple majority. And since there is language describing the need for two-thirds if the President sends it back, there was certainly no intention that it would have needed *more* votes (4/5) earlier in the cycle.