Homework Assignment for Democratic Senators during the August Recess.

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Tuesday July 24, 2007 · 3:41 PM PDT

2007/07/24 · 15:41

In 2005, Senator Bill Frist and his minions in the Senate, as well as their Republican superiors in the White House, considered the employment of the "Nuclear Option." Oh, excuse me, they called it something different. Like with their oxymoronic programs and policies, i.e., Clean Skies and Healthy Forests, they called the Nuclear Option the "Constitutional Option."

As you can guess, there was nothing constitutional about the Constitutional Nuclear Option. Such a manuever would have eliminated debate on Bills before the Senate so as to guarantee that each Bill received an upperdown vote.

Now that the Republicans are in the minority, they have embraced the filibuster and care not whether Bills ever receive the previously precious upperdown vote.

Indeed, their embrace of the filibuster is historic. Senate2008Guru over at MyDD recently chronicled their record breaking obstruction:

Senate Republican "Leader" Mitch McConnell is looking to institute a permanent filibuster on all things Iraq. In fact, it is looking like Mitch McConnell will be the most obstructionist Senate minority Party Leader in history, and by a wide margin, according to McClatchy:

...

Nearly 1 in 6 roll-call votes in the Senate this year have been cloture votes. If this pace of blocking legislation continues, this 110th Congress will be on track to roughly triple the previous record number of cloture votes -- 58 each in the two Congresses from 1999-2002, according to the Senate Historical Office.

If the Republicans want to set records, I propose we give them a helping hand.

Senator Reid, Senator Durbin, and every single Democratic Senator in our caucus, excluding Joe "I kissed Bush" Lieberman, here is your homework assignment for your August Recess:

Explain to me why we cannot and/or should not force the Republicans to stand in the well of the Senate indefinitely and really filibuster that which they oppose. I say, if the Republicans love the filibuster, let us help them embrace it. Let them stand there, on live television, for hours, railing against stem cell research, against the minimum wage, against ending the Iraq War, against worker's rights, against healthcare for all Americans and against protecting our troops.

I will give a hint as to the answer I am looking for: there is no reason why we should not and cannot force them to filibuster. Don't believe me. Here is some Senate history from your very own website:

Using the filibuster to delay or block legislative action has a long history. The term filibuster -- from a Dutch word meaning "pirate" -- became popular in the 1850s, when it was applied to efforts to hold the Senate floor in order to prevent a vote on a bill.

In the early years of Congress, representatives as well as senators could filibuster. As the House of Representatives grew in numbers, however, revisions to the House rules limited debate. In the smaller Senate, unlimited debate continued on the grounds that any senator should have the right to speak as long as necessary on any issue.

In 1841, when the Democratic minority hoped to block a bank bill promoted by Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, he threatened to change Senate rules to allow the majority to close debate. Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton rebuked Clay for trying to stifle the Senate's right to unlimited debate.

Three quarters of a century later, in 1917, senators adopted a rule (Rule 22), at the urging President Woodrow Wilson, that allowed the Senate to end a debate with a two-thirds majority vote, a device known as "cloture." The new Senate rule was first put to the test in 1919, when the Senate invoked cloture to end a filibuster against the Treaty of Versailles. Even with the new cloture rule, filibusters remained an effective means to block legislation, since a two-thirds vote is difficult to obtain. Over the next five decades, the Senate occasionally tried to invoke cloture, but usually failed to gain the necessary two-thirds vote. Filibusters were particularly useful to Southern senators who sought to block civil rights legislation, including anti-lynching legislation, until cloture was invoked after a fifty-seven day filibuster against the Civil Right Act of 1964. In 1975, the Senate reduced the number of votes required for cloture from two-thirds to three-fifths, or sixty of the current one hundred senators.

Many Americans are familiar with the filibuster conducted by Jimmy Stewart, playing Senator Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra's film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but there have been some famous filibusters in the real-life Senate as well. During the 1930s, Senator Huey P. Long effectively used the filibuster against bills that he thought favored the rich over the poor. The Louisiana senator frustrated his colleagues while entertaining spectators with his recitations of Shakespeare and his reading of recipes for "pot-likkers." Long once held the Senate floor for fifteen hours. The record for the longest individual speech goes to South Carolina's J. Strom Thurmond who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Waive Rule 22 Senators. If we are not going to get to 60 votes on Iraq or any issue, then what is the point in holding session? Nothing will be accomplished anyway. By waiving Rule 22 providing for the cloture vote, we can force the Republicans to legitimately filibuster popular legislation for all to see.

So, that is your assignment, Senators.

I will await your answers in September.

Oh, yes, and Impeach that bastard half wit Bush family consigliere pretending to be Attorney General of the United States.

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