Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and President Obama have now decided that one-man rule should govern Obamas' fundamentally-changed America.
The move to limit filibusters was originally a Republican idea.
However it is the Democrats, frustrated by playing by the Senate rules, who actually changed the rules.
The filibuster was always informally contained in the Senate rules, as each member was allowed to speak on any subject as long as he wanted to.
The idea of unlimited access to the floor was formally modified by Senate rules in 1917, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was having trouble with his war agenda.
Things, decision-makers said then, had to get done, so the Senate enacted the cloture rule, which would allow a super-majority of the Senate to shut off any given speaker.
In four decades, four cloture votes were taken.
Over a hundred were invoked in each of the last two Administrations (Bush and Obama).
In 1957, as postwar politics heated up, Richard Nixon (as President pro tempore of the Senate) offered the idea that his office entitled him to offer a rule change.
Rule changes aren’t subject to filibustering; they pass on a majority vote.
Forty-six years later, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) proposed a similar “nuclear option,” which languished until 2005, when Bill Frist (R-TN) stirred the pot.
Democrats and Republicans got together and agreed to stop filibustering Bushs' judicial appointments and the logjam was cleared without formally stopping the filibuster.
In 2005, Democrats Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and Harry Reid, among others, were joined by freshman senator Barack Obama in decrying the proposed move as a fatal attack on all that was good and holy in the Senate.
They warned that if Bill Frist and Vice President Cheney were able to steamroll this rule change, that the Republic would quickly devolve into one-man rule, the very essence of tyranny.
But now the shoe is on the other foot.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/talking-sense/2013/nov/24/senate-republicans-have-one-last-option/#ixzz2laatj6cW
The move to limit filibusters was originally a Republican idea.
However it is the Democrats, frustrated by playing by the Senate rules, who actually changed the rules.
The filibuster was always informally contained in the Senate rules, as each member was allowed to speak on any subject as long as he wanted to.
The idea of unlimited access to the floor was formally modified by Senate rules in 1917, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was having trouble with his war agenda.
Things, decision-makers said then, had to get done, so the Senate enacted the cloture rule, which would allow a super-majority of the Senate to shut off any given speaker.
In four decades, four cloture votes were taken.
Over a hundred were invoked in each of the last two Administrations (Bush and Obama).
In 1957, as postwar politics heated up, Richard Nixon (as President pro tempore of the Senate) offered the idea that his office entitled him to offer a rule change.
Rule changes aren’t subject to filibustering; they pass on a majority vote.
Forty-six years later, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) proposed a similar “nuclear option,” which languished until 2005, when Bill Frist (R-TN) stirred the pot.
Democrats and Republicans got together and agreed to stop filibustering Bushs' judicial appointments and the logjam was cleared without formally stopping the filibuster.
In 2005, Democrats Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and Harry Reid, among others, were joined by freshman senator Barack Obama in decrying the proposed move as a fatal attack on all that was good and holy in the Senate.
They warned that if Bill Frist and Vice President Cheney were able to steamroll this rule change, that the Republic would quickly devolve into one-man rule, the very essence of tyranny.
But now the shoe is on the other foot.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/talking-sense/2013/nov/24/senate-republicans-have-one-last-option/#ixzz2laatj6cW