Busting The Busted Buster

I share Rachel's concern, as should we all. To require sixty-percent majority for all important legislation is to turn democracy on its head. It's to subvert and pervert the Constitution, and to make governance virtually impossible. It's to paralyze us while our competitors around the world are sprinting. It's to give to the most hidebound, the most ideological, the least open to new ideas, the power to stop everything. And it's to institutionalize the rankest of hypocrisy, as those whose mantra just political moments ago was "Up or down vote, up or down vote, up or down vote" do the opposite of everything they claimed was important. For the people.

This is much more than the final nail, for that has already been driven in. This is lowering the coffin into the ground, covering it with dirt, and walking away, leaving the grave unmarked and without a map back.

But soft! Our nation's foremost Constitutional scholar, Dan Quayle, has weighed in; he's said the founding fathers didn't have in mind the idea that things could pass with a majority of votes. (Funny they didn't say so or put it in, y'know, writing.) Not 51 votes in the House, not 51 votes in the Senate, he potatoed. He was half right, though.

For something as undeniably critical as this, I hate to end on a facetious note. So let's hear from Tom Harkin, who has that thing so hated by the RWS™: knowledge. And credibility. Who began calling for change when he was in the minority, like the current abusers (but unlike them in consistency and integrity and commitment to the common good):

... I'm going to reintroduce that again in January. And people are going to say I only worry about this because I'm in the majority. But I come with clean hands! I started when I was in the minority!

The idea is to give some time for extended debate but eventually allow a majority to work its will. I do believe there's some reason to have extended debate. If a group of senators filibusters a bill, you want to take their worries seriously. Make sure you're not missing something. My proposal will do that. It says that on the first vote, you need 60. Then you have to wait two days, and on the third day, you need 57 votes. And then you need to wait two days, and on the third day, it's 54 votes. And then you'd wait another two days, and on the third day, it would be 51 votes.

Makes sense to me. And if not, then let's get back to this. (Well, in that clip it's the good guy who's filibustering, an entirely foreign concept, these days.) Let's make the bastards talk round the clock, till they're too hoarse to be heard. Let's let the public watch the spectacle and know who is really doing what. And to whom.