Liberty and Justice for All!

Nobody has used the filibuster as much as the GOP has this year. The GOP are even filibustering bills that they would support of they were in power just to hand Obama political defeats. To them, political victories are more important than passing policy (even if the policy is one that they would agree with).

That being said, there are liberals who are saying that you only need a majority to eliminate the 60 vote cloture requirement. Senator Tom Udall believes that it can be done at the beginning of each Congress when they “set the rules”. He is calling it the “constitutional” option.

The Constitution is clear. It allows the Senate to make its own rules. Any rule that the Senate makes must then be deemed constitutional (unless it violates a specific requirement placed on Congress listed in the Constitution). The Constitution does not require the rules to be rewritten every term.

You and I both know that had the GOP actually used parliamentary trickery to eliminate the filibuster when they had control, that the Democrats would have cried foul. Had they actually used the “nuclear option”, they would have been the target of harsh campaign ads.

Democrats, we all want to point out that the GOP is being a bunch of hypocrites for campaigning against the stimulus while using the funds in the stimulus to bolster their political careers. However, when making that argument we need to do so with clean hands. If we start acting like Republicans in trying to eliminate the filibuster by doing it outside of a simple rules change as defined in the Senate rules, we will look like hypocrites (well, you will… because I do not agree with parliamentary trickery and am firmly stating so here).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under filibuster, Republican Hypocricy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.