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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJohn Legend drops fact-bombs on Kyrsten Sinema -- after she defended the filibuster at his house
https://www.rawstory.com/john-legend-kyrsten-sinema-filibuster/Entertainer and activist John Legend listed multiple reasons to eliminate the filibuster during an interview by MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, which is scheduled to air during his Sunday evening show. "John, I have to ask, if you could have a conversation one-on-one with either Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, what would you say to them?" Hasan asked.
"It's funny, because I actually spoke to Kyrsten Sinema," Legend replied. "I did a fundraiser at our house in Los Angeles for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee this was years ago, two or three years ago and she at the time was vociferously standing up for the filibuster," he explained.
In addition to being an EGOT winner for his Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards, Legend has also been a longtime political activist. "And I just can't state more clearly how wrong I think she is on this issue," he explained. "The filibuster is not in the Constitution, that's a fact."
"And the history and tradition of the rule has been to exclude black people from our democracy, that has been the principle use of the filibuster over the years," he noted. "It's time to get rid of it," Legend argued. "It's allowing 40 senators, at any time, to derail the the will of the majority."
Link to tweet
JohnSJ
(91,937 posts)In It to Win It
(8,139 posts)JohnSJ
(91,937 posts)SmittyWerben
(823 posts)As soon as the repubs take a simple majority in the senate and the presidency they will throw out the filibuster blaming the dems for wanting to do it first, just like they did with the Supreme Court 60 rule. These dems are just throttling Biden's agenda and will establish his first 4 years as essentially lame duck. So fucking frustrating to watch this bullshit.
Celerity
(42,636 posts)https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/filibuster-hurts-only-senate-democrats-mitch-mcconnell-knows-n1255787
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Cutting off debate in the Senate so legislation can be voted on is done through a procedure called "cloture," which requires three-fifths of the Senate or 60 votes to pass. I went through the Senate's cloture votes for the last dozen years from the 109th Congress until now, tracking how many of them failed because they didn't hit 60 votes. It's not a perfect method of tracking filibusters, but it's as close as we can get. It's clear that Republicans have been much more willing and able to tangle up the Senate's proceedings than Democrats. More important, the filibuster was almost no impediment to Republican goals in the Senate during the Trump administration. Until 2007, the number of cloture votes taken every year was relatively low, as the Senate's use of unanimous consent agreements skipped the need to round up supporters. While a lot of the cloture motions did fail, it was still rare to jump that hurdle at all and even then, a lot of the motions were still agreed to through unanimous consent. That changed when Democrats took control of Congress in 2007 and McConnell first became minority leader. The number of cloture motions filed doubled compared to the previous year, from 68 to 139.
Things only got more dire as the Obama administration kicked off in 2009, with Democrats in control of the House, the Senate and the White House. Of the 91 cloture votes taken during the first two years of President Barack Obama's first term, 28 or 30 percent failed. All but three failed despite having majority support. The next Congress was much worse after the GOP took control of the House: McConnell's minority blocked 43 percent of all cloture votes taken from passing. Things were looking to be on the same course at the start of Obama's second term. By November 2013, 27 percent of cloture votes had failed even though they had majority support. After months of simmering outrage over blocked nominees grew, Senate Democrats triggered the so-called nuclear option, dropping the number of votes needed for cloture to a majority for most presidential nominees, including Cabinet positions and judgeships. The next year, Republicans took over the Senate with Obama still in office. By pure numbers, the use of the filibuster rules skyrocketed under the Democratic minority: 63 of 123 cloture votes failed, or 51 percent. But there's a catch: Nothing that was being voted on was covered by the new filibuster rules. McConnell had almost entirely stopped bringing Obama's judicial nominees to the floor, including Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.
McConnell defended the filibuster on the Senate floor last week, reminding his counterparts of their dependence on it during President Donald Trump's term. "Democrats used it constantly, as they had every right to," he said. "They were happy to insist on a 60-vote threshold for practically every measure or bill I took up." Except, if anything, use of the filibuster plummeted those four years. There are two main reasons: First, and foremost, the amount of in-party squabbling during the Trump years prevented any sort of coordinated legislative push from materializing. Second, there wasn't actually all that much the Republicans wanted that needed to get past the filibuster in its reduced state after the 2013 rule change. McConnell's strategy of withholding federal judgeships from Obama nominees paid off in spades, letting him spend four years stuffing the courts with conservatives. And when Trump's first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, was filibustered, McConnell didn't hesitate to change the rules again. Trump's more controversial nominees also sailed to confirmation without any Democratic votes. Legislatively, there were only two things Republicans really wanted: tax cuts and repeal of Obamacare. The Trump tax cuts they managed through budget reconciliation, a process that allows budget bills to pass through the Senate with just a majority vote.
Republicans tried to do the same for health care in 2017 to avoid the filibuster, failing only during the final vote, when Sen. John McCain's "no" vote denied them a majority. The repeal wouldn't have gone through even if the filibuster had already been in the grave. As a result, the number of successful filibusters plummeted: Over the last four years, an average of 7 percent of all cloture motions failed. In the last Congress, 298 cloture votes were taken, a record. Only 26 failed. Almost all of the votes that passed were on nominees to the federal bench or the executive branch. In fact, if you stripped out the nominations considered in the first two years of Trump's term, the rate of failure would be closer to 15 percent but on only 70 total votes. There just wasn't all that much for Democrats to get in the way of with the filibuster, which is why we didn't hear much complaining from Republicans. Today's Democrats aren't in the same boat. Almost all of the big-ticket items President Joe Biden wants to move forward require both houses of Congress to agree. And given McConnell's previous success in smothering Obama's agenda for political gain, his warnings about the lack of "concern and comity" that Democrats are trying to usher in ring hollow. In actuality, his warnings of "wait until you're in the minority again" shouldn't inspire concern from Democrats. So long as it applies only to legislation, the filibuster is a Republicans-only weapon. There's nothing left, it seems, for the GOP to fear from it aside from its eventual demise.
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JohnSJ
(91,937 posts)the filibuster
monkeyman1
(5,109 posts)Gore1FL
(21,027 posts)It's not establishing 40 against as much as it is a burden in mustering 60 for.
If it has to exist in a roughly similar form to what it is now, It should be getting 40 to oppose, rather than 60 to support. But, it isn't.
SouthBayDem
(31,959 posts)I once watched him excoriate some Trump supporter on an (I think) Al Jazeera English show years ago. Bookmarking this clip to watch later.
Celerity
(42,636 posts)that was glorious
Trumps America: Great again or big failure? | Head to Head
In this episode of Head to Head, Mehdi Hasan asks Donald Trump's senior economic adviser Stephen Moore about "Trumponomics", the US presidents leadership style, and racism. Trump has made promises to more than double previous economic growth, revive industries like coal, and slash the debt and the deficit. But has he delivered? The national debt is now skyrocketing to levels not seen since World War II and the trade war with China has experts fearing a global recession.
"Trump makes grandiose promises," Moore told Hasan. "He exaggerates and sometimes I wish he wouldnt do that. But if you compare where the economy is today versus where it was when he entered office, its substantially stronger." Moore, a conservative commentator and economist at the Heritage Foundation, is also an adviser to the Trump 2020 re-election campaign.
He told Hasan he helped write immigration legislation, referring to a bill supported by President Trump and introduced by Republican senators. Moore, however, said he does not agree with some of the governments positions on immigration. When challenged on policies limiting legal immigration and the dire situation in migrant detention centres at the US-Mexico border, Moore said conditions in every centre he visited had been humane.
"But I do believe that until we get the border secure and we get that wall built, once we do that, we can increase our legal immigration." When pressed further on the numerous false statements Trump has made, like needing an ID to buy a box of cereal and suggesting that wind turbines cause cancer, Moore said, "Donald Trump would be better off to stop talking so much and let his record speak for itself". "What I'm saying is, what Americans care about is his performance, his results, not what he says and how he acts," he added. This is the first Head to Head episode with an audience recorded in the United States and marks the beginning of a new series. It takes place in front of an audience at the George Washington University in Washington DC.
We are joined by a panel of three experts:
- Tiffany Cross - liberal commentator, co-founder and managing editor of the US news outlet, The Beat DC
- Rick Wilson - former political strategist for the Republican Party, conservative critic of President Trump, and author of Everything Trump Touches Dies
- Jenna Ellis Rives - constitutional lawyer, member of the Trump 2020 Advisory Board, and author of The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution
wackadoo wabbit
(1,160 posts)I was going to watch only a couple of minutes of it, then go to bed. I wound up riveted to it for the entire almost 50 minutes. Thanks for posting it!
Mehdi Hasan is my new hero. He needs to be given a better time slot.