Amazingly, I still see people asking questions like "why do we need 60 votes for everything?" and "what happened to a simple majority?" as we discuss the gridlock in the Senate and why so much of the Obama Administration's agenda has been stalled and blocked.
It is an embarrassing question to see on a blog where I used to just assume everyone had a basic understanding of how Congress works.
I am old enough to have learned the answer to that question in Fifth Grade Civics, so as a public service I am going to write this up in diary form so I can link to it every time I see that question in the future.
One of the basic rules of the Senate allows for unlimited discussion and debate. As long as someone wants to talk, discussion on a bill must continue. No vote can be held on a bill until all discussion/debate is closed.
If even one person wants to keep talking, debate on a bill continues.
The only way to make that person stop talking is when 60 Senators vote to end debate. This is called a cloture vote (cloture is from a word meaning to close off or bring to an end).
Cloture used to require a two thirds majority. This was back in the days when filibusters were rare. The cloture requirement was reduced from two-thirds to three-fifths in 1975--a more manageable 60 votes.
Please read this next part carefully, because it is the answer to the question "what happened to a simple majority."
Since Obama took office, Republicons have been filibustering everything. But they do not do it by actually standing on the floor talking. They do it by announcing in advance that none of them will vote for cloture.
Even when a bill is supported by a majority of Senators and has enough votes to pass if an up or down vote were held on the bill itself, if you cannot get the 60 votes for cloture, to end discussion of the bill, you never get to vote on the bill itself!
During the brief time that we had 60 people in the Democratic caucus, we did not always have 60 votes for cloture, because of out and out turncoats like Joe LIEberman, and conservaDems like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln. And now there are only 58 Dems because of Scott Brown and Mark Kirk. This is why midterm elections and special elections are important, dammit!
So we are forced to waste a lot of time trying to court one or two "moderate" votes on the R side (especially the "Maine Twins" Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins). But because Republicons have better adherence to authoritarian discipline than we do (and also withhold NRC campaign funds from people who vote the wrong way), their 40 vote bloc stands firm.
So long as the Rs vote in lockstep to support their filibusters, we need 60 votes to accomplish anything, because we need 60 votes just to be able to bring a bill to the floor for a vote.
This has also led to some breathtaking Republicon hypocrisy, where Senators can claim to be in favor of the bill itself, but then vote against cloture claiming they "just want more discussion". Republicons get to look like they support key legislation in the minds of their ill-informed and under-educated Fakes News watching constituents, while still obeying R Party discipline with transparent prevarications like "I support the bill, I just have problems with procedure."
I've got a problem with procedure too, when 40 Senators who represent less than 40% of the population can impose their will on the majority party representing the majority of the population!!!
The need for these cloture votes is one of the basic differences between the House and the Senate. Both bodies started out with unlimited debate, but now all bills in the House have limited debate, which means bills in the House always come up for a vote eventually.
So if I see one more person praise Speaker Pelosi for getting things through the House I will tear out what is left of my hair. Pelosi has done a good job, but people need to realize how much she is helped by House rules where she only needs a simple majority for everything. Even if several Blue Dogs desert her she still has more than enough votes.
If all Harry Reid needed was a simple majority on actual bills, we would have had almost everything we wanted in the last two years! If Reid had rules in the Senate that allowed ALL bills to come up for a straight up or down vote, a LOT more positive legislation would have been passed in the last two years! Yet people blame Reid and Obama for rules that neither one of them put in place!
When the 112th Congress is sworn in on January 4th, 2011, on the very first day the Senate is in session, there will be an opportunity to change Senate rules with a SIMPLE MAJORITY VOTE.
I join Rachel Maddow in saying that this is the single most important thing we can do to change Washington next year.
That one change would make the final two years of Obama's first term totally different from the first two years, and make it possible for much more progressive legislation to get through Congress.
It would also lessen a lot of the vitriolic blaming of Harry Reid and President Obama around here over legislative rules they were not responsible for.
