Today, Sen. Lieberman announced that, at least for now, he intends to uphold a GOP-lead filibuster on the Senate health care bill, claiming, absurdly, that the creation of an independent, non-taxpayer-supported, government-chartered non-profit available to less then 10% of the population and only in states that agree to it, amounts to an "unnecessary burden" that will cost too much to taxpayers.
For all we know, Lieberman may be bluffing. He may simply want to play "hard to get," earning face time on FOX and the other cable networks, while getting the White House and the Senate leadership to indulge him.
But if he chooses to filibuster, he'll be voting to block legislation. Funny, then, that Sen. Liebermanonce supported ending the very practice he's all too happy to endorse today.
In 1995, change was in the air. Republicans had just recaptured Congress and were vowing major reforms. Several leading Democrats decided to offer the GOP the chance to abolish the filibuster. It would be in the short-term interests of the GOP, but in the long-term interests of all parties. Everybody agreed that the legislative system had ground to a halt, with the filibuster playing no small role.
Sens. Harkin and Lieberman therefore put forth a rules-change proposal that would have effectively killed the filibuster.
Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which senators held passionate convictions, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, dooming any measure that cannot command the 60 required votes.
Mr. Harkin, along with Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, now proposes to make such obstruction harder. Mr. Harkin says reasonably that there must come a point in the process where the majority rules. This may not sit well with some of his Democratic colleagues. They are now perfectly positioned to exact revenge by frustrating the Republican agenda as efficiently as Republicans frustrated Democrats in 1994.
Admirably, Mr. Harkin says he does not want to do that. He proposes to change the rules so that if a vote for cloture fails to attract the necessary 60 votes, the number of votes needed to close off debate would be reduced by three in each subsequent vote. By the time the measure came to a fourth vote -- with votes occurring no more frequently than every second day -- cloture could be invoked with only a simple majority. Under the Harkin plan, minority members who feel passionately about a given measure could still hold it up, but not indefinitely.
Sadly, that proposal went down to defeat before the full Senate:
With hardly any debate, the proposal was tabled, effectively killing it, on a 76-to-19 vote. Twenty-three Democrats, including the minority leader, Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, joined all 53 Republicans in voting the measure down.
"If this is supposed to be the reform Congress," Mr. Harkin said later, "then I'm sorry to say that we started off with a thud instead of a bang." And he said that if Democrats now used the filibuster to delay Republican bills, "not one single Republican has a leg to stand on if they rise up to complain."
Perhaps Joe felt it was "reasonable" to go along with such a proposal because the Republicans were in charge.
Even so, it's difficult to square his current support for a health care reform filibuster with his views on the filibuster at the time. He was happy to repeat these views back during the 2003 debate over abolishing judicial filibusters (the so-called "nuclear option"), which Lieberman opposed, saying a better reform would be abolishing ALL filibusters.
In late 1994, I joined Senator Harkin in launching an effort to encourage Senate discussion of reforming the Senate’s cloture rule. Like Senator Harkin, I had become increasingly frustrated at the way the Senate’s cloture rule repeatedly allowed a minority of Members to prevent the Senate’s majority from enacting legislation. I felt – and continue to feel – that the Senate rules should be changed to prevent a small minority of Senators from bringing legislation to a halt simply by saying that they will never end debate.
This was not a partisan effort on our part. Indeed, Senator Harkin and I offered our proposal after the Democrats lost their majority status and at a time we therefore fully understood that our proposal would more often than not – in the short term, at least – inure to our party’s detriment. Let me say that again: our proposal was not an effort to push through our own agenda or help our own party. Nor was it a proposal aimed at carving out special rules for one type of legislation or Senate action in order to ease enactment or Senate approval of one particular agenda.
In early January 1995, we offered our proposal on the Senate floor. After a good debate, the Senate voted on it and, unfortunately, we lost by a landslide. 76-19. Among those voting against our proposal were every Member of this Committee who was in the Senate at the time, including the current Majority Leader, whose proposal the Committee is considering today. I considered that an unfortunate result then, and I continue to consider it so today. Despite the often troubling ways in which the current Majority has sought to run the Senate, I still believe the filibuster rule should be changed so that once Members have had an opportunity to fully debate and seek to amend measures, the majority can have its say.
But that is unfortunately not what the Majority Leader’s proposal seeks to do. Indeed, although I expect some will seek to characterize the proposal the Committee is considering as akin to the Harkin-Lieberman one, it most assuredly is not. Our proposal applied across the board – to legislation and nominations alike. As I already mentioned, it was the legislative gridlock that motivated us back then, and that continues to be the real problem caused by the cloture rules. But my Republican colleagues don’t want an across-the-board reform. As they would have no choice but to acknowledge, they don’t want to give up their own ability to filibuster legislation, even while they are in the Majority. That’s because, whether it’s the patients’ bill of rights, campaign finance reform or a plethora of other issues, they have launched their own filibusters while in the Majority, and they just don’t want to give up their ability to continue to do so. Majority rule apparently should only go so far in their view.
To be fair, Lieberman did qualify his criticism of filibusters:
We all must work with the rules we have and seek to apply them fairly and impartially. That’s why, as I said at the time I first made this proposal with Senator Harkin, even though I support filibuster reform, as long as the rules are what they are, I’m not going to be the only one to abandon them. I will continue, as a representative of the interests of the voters of my state, to live within them and support filibusters where I think it appropriate.
I can grant that unilateral disarmament makes little sense. But what that would justify would be upholding Democratic filibusters on Republican bills so long as Republicans uphold filibusters on Democratic bills. For Lieberman to support a Republican filibuster on a Democratic bill violates everything he claimed he supported when it came to filibusters and "majority rules."
One more thing: his claim that a limited public option on the exchange would be "too costly" and too much "big government" rings hollow, considering that in 2004 he proposed, in addition to a national exchange (which he called "MediChoice"), that everyone under 25 be covered in a universal, single-payer plan called "MediKids" which would have been a far larger government entitlement than an opt-out, level-playing field public option. What, again, are the grounds for a health care filibuster?
I guess that for Joe Lieberman, "majority rule apparently should only go so far."