PostPartisan - Not your father's filibuster (or your mother's)

PostPartisan - Not your father's filibuster (or your mother's)

I’m glad to see that my recent columns on the dysfunctional Senate and the wall of Republican obstruction there are stirring up comment, both from a reader whose letter The Post published on Monday and from Colby King, a colleague I admire and usually agree with. We need to put the dysfunction of the Senate front-and-center in our political discussion, and the more debate, the better.

...

And, in fact, most of Bush’s nominations were not blocked by the filibuster. At the point the earlier column was written, as I noted, the Senate had approved 22 of Bush’s Circuit Court nominees and 101 nominations to district courts. I was hardly calling for the promiscuous use of filibusters, and it was not being used promiscuously.

That was then. Now, Republicans in the Senate have decided to use the filibuster on just about everything, even the recent defense appropriations bill, which, when all the delay was over, passed with overwhelming Republican support. In his excellent column on the filibuster earlier this week, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman cited important research by Congressional scholar Barbara Sinclair of UCLA on the fact that we are confronting something very new:

In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Look at those numbers again: The filibuster used to be unusual – 8 percent in the 1960s. Now it’s routine – 70 percent in recent years. The filibuster has become a standard part of the way the Senate does business. That is wrong, and it creates dysfunction.

Here what Sinclair herself writes in “The New World of U. S. Senators,” her essay in Congress Reconsidered:

The last few years, and especially 2007-2008, have seen the Senate closer than ever to true gridlock. The minority party seems to perceive less danger to its reputation in almost constant obstructionism, perhaps because attentive citizens are so split along coinciding ideological and partisan lines….This is not a situation conducing to major policy accomplishments . . . .a legislative body that cannot respond to the problems that concern the people eventually loses legitimacy.

And that is what’s happening now.