To no one's surprise, Fox News comes right out of the gate lying about Senate rules reform efforts. Check out this headline:
A Dem Win on Filibuster Rules Could Mean Defeat on Eliminating Secret Holds
Now, I could quote you the entire article right here, but it wouldn't do you any good if you were trying to find actual support in it for that headline. Nowhere -- and I mean nowhere -- in the piece does anyone actually say why a Dem win on filibuster rules could mean defeat on eliminating secret holds.
And the reason it doesn't say that anywhere is that the claim is both made up and as far from true as can possibly be.
Holds, secret or otherwise, get their power entirely from the threat of the filibuster:
[H]olds are essentially just placeholders for a threat to filibuster. Instead of actually filibustering a motion to proceed to start debate on some measure and wasting everybody's time, you politely inform your colleagues that if they were to try to bring that measure up by unanimous consent, you'd object, and if they were to try to get a vote on it, you'd filibuster. Then, everybody decides whether it's important enough to them to waste a few days going through the cloture process. If yes, that's exactly what they do. In no, then the measure is "held," or politely put aside for some later date.
That's all the hold is. So as long as Senators have the power to threaten to waste everyone's time for several days at a stretch -- that is, the power to filibuster -- then the hold remains a viable tool, whether it's secret or not.
So yeah, the Fox headline is just a straight-up lie, designed to give a drive-by impression of the exact opposite of the truth.
That's about how I expect most hyperpartisan Republican reaction to go. They'll insist that the Udall/Harkin/Merkley proposal will somehow both entirely "outlaw" filibuster (which it very pointedly does not), further restrict the minority's right to offer amendments (which it actually goes more than out of its way to guarantee), and that it makes the problem of secret holds worse (even though it actually eliminates even their possibility).
Par for the course at Fox. And yet another slap in the face of informed Americans.
Not that it's the only one, naturally. The Orwellian backward-speak is already creeping out from under the woodwork.
Here's TNR's Jonathan Chait slapping down another example:
This is a shockingly bad report from Wall Street Journal news reporter Corey Boles:
If a few of Senate Democrats had their way, Jimmy Stewart’s character in the classic film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” would have had a harder time blocking a Senate vote.
In the 1939 movie, a Senate freshman spent all night talking in a classic filibuster, the decades-old right of any lawmaker to block legislation on the Senate floor.
But a group of Democrats believes Republicans have abused the practice. On Wednesday, they began debate on an effort to try to stamp out the filibuster.
Shockingly bad, indeed. Chait goes on to explain:
This echoes the hilariously incorrect attack made by Lamar Alexander the other day. It's not just wrong, it's a complete inversion of the truth.
[...]
What the Democrats propose to do is not to limit debate, or even to curtail the supermajority requirement. It's merely to force the minority party to actually debate. The minority would not be able to block a bill from being debated on the floor. If they wanted to require a supermajority to pass it, they would have to actually debate it.
In other words, Boles (and the Republicans) claim that Mr. Smith Goes To Washington-style filibusters currently exist and the reforms would stop them. In reality, such filibusters do not currently exist and the reform bill would create them.
And speaking of that Lamar Alexander speech, do check out Chait's write-up linked above. And for more, here's Media Matters on that one.
I'll just add one more Alexander tidbit, in case you weren't sure how far the backward-speak would go. Yesterday on the Senate floor, Sen. Alexander asked rhetorically, "What is a filibuster?" and went on to claim that when the Majority Leader filed for cloture, that was a filibuster.
Uh, yeah.
Of course, it's the exact opposite of a filibuster, but there you go.