Lawrence O’Donnell writes for The Huffington Post that Republicans don’t have to filibuster any bill to stop Obama’s entire agenda. He explains;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The way you "filibuster" a bill that you want to kill is offer an endless stream of reasonable sounding amendments that have to be debated and voted on. It's easy to come up with one amendment per page of legislation. That's why the Republicans offered hundreds of amendments during the Senate committees' debates on the bill. When the majority leader brings up a two thousand page bill, the minority would normally come up with at least five hundred amendments that could drag out the debate for several months.
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That's what the Republicans did in 1994 when they killed the Clinton health care reform bill on the Senate floor. No filibuster, no forcing the Democrats to clear 60-vote procedural hurdles, no forcing a reading to the bill, just an endless stream of reasonable sounding amendments -- so reasonable that some of them passed with votes of 100 to 0. And the Democrats, seeing this could go on forever, surrendered. Fifty-seven Democrats were defeated by forty-three determined Republicans.
Because the Republicans are hell-bent on defeating any serious action on climate change, and even 80 Democratic senators would not be able to stop them, our children and grandchildren will not have much of a future worth having. Yes, because Republicans don’t, or won’t, understand the science and threat of climate change, all hell will eventually break loose on our planet.
I, for one, refuse to suffer this inevitability with malicious accusations. I will fundamentally refuse to blame anyone for any of this. I will resort to a truth I’ve know for at least the last two decades, and of whose important am increasingly becoming aware. What truth is this?
One of the basic premises upon which we have created our society is the belief that we humans have the power to freely choose who we will become and what we will thereafter do. This belief is, however as false as the literal belief in an Adam and Eve, and a Garden of Eden, or the belief in a flat Earth.
It's unfortunate that so much of politics is predicated upon an aspect of our world that science fully understands (except, of course, those scientists whose religious or philosophical beliefs over-ride their scientific background and reasoning), and the rest of us are almost completely ignorant of.
This is, or course, not the Democrats, or the Republicans, or anyone else's fault. I'm not sure we can even rightly say its God's or the universe's fault. It is just the way our world has come to be at this point in time.
By the way, if you'd like to read a good book that explains in clear scientific terms how it is actually unconscious processes that are responsible for EVERY choice we make, you might consider Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner's 2002, The Illusion of Conscious Will.
cross-posted at MyDD