The lame-duck session produced a long list of accomplishments, but it’s nothing compared to what didn’t get done by the last Congress, mostly as a result of a logjam in the Senate.
The Senate did not adopt a budget, and government spending keeps getting extended in short-term chunks. More than 125 executive department nominees have not been considered, nearly two years into the start of the Obama administration. Nearly 50 U.S. District Court seats are vacant around the country as a result of the Senate’s failure to take action on their nominations.
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Dozens of bills passed by the House languish on the Senate calendar, never to be debated.
The problem is the Senate’s arcane rules, which are being used in ways never before attempted to slow down the process and prevent the people’s business from getting done.
Filibusters are used not only as a minority veto to stop controversial legislation but also as a tactic to delay all action, controversial or not.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has called for more filibusters in the last two years than were held in the 1950s and ’60s combined.
Bills that end up passing 97-0, like an extension of unemployment benefits last year, are subjected to cloture votes. Reasonable appointments to commissions are held up by a single senator who may have no interest in that agency but wants leverage for some unrelated piece of legislative business.
Debates end up being about procedure instead of substance, and bills get slammed together into packages that no one completely understands so they can get pushed through before time runs out.
The time to change that is today, the first day for the new Congress.
But since we’re talking about the Senate, members have the ability to make this “day” last for as long as they want. That means this will be the beginning of the discussion and not the end of it. Since both Democrats and Republicans are worried about who would gain advantage if the rules change, there is likely to be pressure on all sides to take some time on this.
Sen. Jeff Merkeley, D-Ore., has put together a thoughtful collection of ideas on how new rules might work and it could be the framework of a bipartisan approach to filibuster reform. The idea is not to extinguish the minority’s ability to slow down or even stop the process, but to limit the ways it can do it.
Filibusters could be held only to end debate, for instance, and not, as has been happenning, to prevent a debate from starting.
Another idea would be requiring filibustering senators to keep talking on the floor, like Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” instead of being allowed to quietly announce their intention to filibuster and then go home for a good night’s sleep.
And if the rules make it easier for a bill to come up for debate, they should also guarantee that members of the minority will be allowed to introduce amendments that would be voted on.
Imagine if that process had been in place last year when the health care bill was pushed through on a straight party-line vote.
Members of the Senate should pay attention to the positive response they got for their work in the lame-duck session.
People may not have liked everything that they passed, or may have wished they had gotten even more done. But most people were happy to see a Congress able to accomplish anything at all, and would like to see more of it.
The Senate should be a place where deliberation and debate are used to improve legislation, not just prevent debate from happening.
We encourage Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to get involved in a bipartisan effort to change the rules to get the legislative process working again.
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