Voter suppression laws, overzealous filibuster use, you name it - the Republicans use every tactic they can to stop our democracy from actually selecting the person with the most support.
It seems as though there are Members in this body who want to filibuster just about everything we try to do, whether it is stopping judicial nominations, the Energy bill, or this Medicare bill.
The power of the silent filibuster to distort Senate politics is now accepted on Capitol Hill and by the press as normal and not worth mentioning. Let me be the skunk at this political garden party and say this stinks. Representative government was not designed to work this way by the Founding Fathers.
If the choice is between universal health care or fixing our broken immigration system or upholding a 60-vote filibuster rule that is nowhere in the Constitution, I'm going to choose actually making progress for the American people.
No one likes the Electoral College, expect perhaps those who were elected because of it. No one likes gerrymandering, except those doing the gerrymandering. No one likes the filibuster, except those doing the filibustering.
When George W. Bush tried to roll back taxpayer exposure to a housing crash via Fannie and Freddie, guess what two senators joined a filibuster of the Bush initiative? Yep... those saviors of the working class, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They went to bat for the housing industry and voted to allow taxpayer exposure to escalate.
If I have to filibuster on the Senate floor, I'll even read the King James Bible until the wall is funded.
In theory, the filibuster helps whichever party is in the minority in the Senate. In practice, it is the Republicans who have disproportionately used it to engage in cynical and anti-democratic obstructionism whenever they find themselves in the minority.
President Obama had two Supreme Court nominees in his first term. There was no filibuster against them.
We have promised to do better, and no Republican concern should ever be enough to filibuster our own bill.
