As we all know at this time, the junior Senator from Minnesota refused to agree to granting Sen. Joe Lieberman, JoeForJoe-Conn., an additional minute or two beyond the ten he’d been recognized:
Now, it’s a minor moment, one that those who aren’t familiar with the arcana of parliamentary procedure would see as…well, kind of weak. But this is exactly the sort of thing that we need more of from the Democrats.
Look, first off, Lieberman wasn’t being cut off maliciously — Franken cut him off because, frankly, Democrats are trying to get the health care bill done, and they’re drawing a firm line that when you have ten minutes to speak, you have ten minutes to speak. This does end one of the old rules about the comity of the Senate — that members could speak a bit more if they needed to — but it does so in response to a breakdown in comity regarding cloture, which used to be used only once in a great while, but now is used routinely.
One of the frustrations that I share with my progressive friends is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has been running the Senate as if it’s still 1990, and the general rules of comity hadn’t broken down. They have. And, to be blunt, it’s not the Republicans’ fault that the breakdown in the “gentleman’s agreement” over cloture has happened. Yes, I think they’re being irresponsible, but from their perspective, they’re doing what they have to do to stop a bill they oppose, and they’re using the tricks allowed by parliamentary procedure to slow things down, and hopefully stop them.
When your opponents begin using parliamentary procedure against you, you can do three things. First, you can give up on what you’re trying to do, at least for now — not smart, but on a minor issue, maybe the best course of action. You can pretend it isn’t happening — which has been Reid’s stance thus far. Or you can start pulling out your own arcane, weird rules that allow you to make trouble for the minority.
It’s that last one that Reid needs to do. At this point, starting over with reconcilliation is probably not going to work (though fixing the bill that gets through via reconcilliation can and should be on the table). But back in June or July, that was very much a possibility and very much something that Reid could have pushed through. And he should have pushed things through via a muscular definition of reconcilliation that went above and beyond the spirit, and if necessary, the letter of the rules. As the Republicans noted during the debate over the nuclear option, a ruling from the chair on a point of order requires only a simple majority to uphold, and all that needs to happen to let a bill through that is non-conforming to Senate rules is for the chair to rule it doesn’t violate the rules, and a majority of Senators to agree with him or her.
Reid threatening to make reconcilliation essentially allow for everything might be enough to crack the Republicans on cloture — because the loss of the filibuster would be a disaster for the minority. And once reconcilliation’s established meaning was “whatever the majority says it is,” that would doom the filibuster once and for all. It’s easy to imagine Republicans agreeing to be more agreeable on cloture motions in exchange for the ability to use it when it really, really mattered.
My criticism of Reid is not that he’s unable to make Joe Lieberman less of a douche, or Ben Nelson less of a Republican. Those are problems that would have bedeviled Lyndon Baines Johnson at the height of his powers. No, my problem is that Reid doesn’t seem to understand that parliamentary procedure can be wielded as a weapon by the majority as well as the minority. He seems to be perfectly content with the rules of the Senate as they are, and completely unwilling to look to the places where they can be bent. And that’s a shame. Because one of the key jobs of the Majority Leader is to find ways in the rules to get the majority’s will enacted. And it’s a place where Reid has simply proven to be incompetent.
All I can say is that both sides need to remember that what goes around comes around.
Although I must say that when you give the gavel to someone who is virtually literally a clown the last thing you should expect is courtesy and respect. Sen. Lieberman has been around the Senate a while and I expect he’ll be around a while longer. In fact, I’ll wager that Sen. Lieberman will be around longer than Sen. Reid. Sen. Franken will get his down the line – I’d bet on it.
So you’re proposing that one of the highest and most powerful officials in the land lie and suborn his colleagues to lie in order to achieve an end? This is quite explictly an “ends justify the means” argument.
I don’t think it’s lying, Ron, I think it’s more like RPG rules: the GM’s/VP’s decisions override the written rules.
I could be wrong, but my impression is that Franken acted at Reid’s behest. Maybe the little gnome is more on the ball than you think.
I’ve never played a role playing game, but the Senate is real life, not a game. People there are bound by things like actual oaths and rules that elected officials made and agreed to. It is a foundational principle of this country that public officials are bound by the rules, not the other way around.
Senate rules are a little different, Ron. They are an agreement among the Senators, with no legal force; they are, in fact, much like the “house rules” found in any informal poker game. They can be changed at any time, so long as the players/Senators agree.
Except, RonF, they aren’t, not really. For example, the Senate rules allow any Senator to pull any bill out of any committee at any time, and bring it directly to the floor. Obviously handy when, say, a bill is bottled up in Max Baucus’ committee. So how often is that rule invoked? Never. Indeed, the only time it ever comes up is as a threat of a retaliatory maneuver in response to a “nuclear option”-style maneuver, such as the GOP’s attempt to end-run the filibuster on judicial nominations. Democrats threatened to pull bills out of committee and force votes on them, a move that would have effectively ground the Senate to a halt.
All sorts of Senate rules are ignored or set aside for the purposes of comity. Indeed, most Senate (and most House) business takes place absent the presence of a quorum — a situation in which it should not, by rule, be able to be conducted. And yet the Schiavo legislation passed by unanimous consent — with exactly two senators in the room — because no Democrats felt moved to object to either the bill or the absence of a quorum, either one of which would have delayed passage. Passage of the bill was “against the rules,” as Senate rules require the presence of a quorum for business to be conducted. But it was accepted, because to force the Senate to have a quorum present to conduct non-controversial business would, again, grind the body to a halt.
In short, parliamentary rules aren’t laws. They’re rules. They’re subject to interpretation. They can be bent, and sometimes broken, because the fundamental rule of a parliamentary body is that the rules are what the chair rules them to be, subject to agreement by the majority. Now, for obvious reasons, it isn’t a great idea to run roughshod over the minority when you’re in the majority, because the pendulum always swings. But just as the GOP slowly whittled away the adherence to rules that had allowed Democrats to keep judicial nominations bottled up in committee, forcing them to filibuster, so Democrats can whittle away at rules that have made the filibuster change from a seldom-used roadblock to the de facto state of play.