Comment by gopalv
3 years ago
> minority rule, in the Senate
If you look away from the senators and consider the people the senators represent, it was intended to be even without the filibuster.
But what should be truly opposed is the cowardly way in which the filibuster is done today.
You should make 41 people vote against the bill, on record with their names, then go back to their constituents and explain why they did it in a town hall sometime soon.
Right now a senator can rely on the fact that their re-election is five years away when killing a bill which is supported by their constituents.
41 of them cannot assume they have years for the public to forget their vote on this particular thing (like hurting small businesses by inaction too).
The senate was never meant to represent people. It was meant to represent the interested of the states as sovereign entities. The house was supposed to be the populist dumpster fire.
But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.
>But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.
this was done because the election process via the state assemblies was so corrupt that Americans regularly made fun of the Senate for this fact.
Sure, but so was everything else the states did at the time and they did eventually clean up their act. It's hard to say whether direct electing the senate was good or bad because it's not like there's a control country we can compare to. It certainly gave the states as entities less influence which is probably not great.
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Lol. That was done to placate the slave owners.
Just like modern reactionary politics isn’t good for people or popular, the biggest fear of slave owners was that free whites would figure out that slaves gutted the value of their labors.
It doesn’t take a “genius” to figure out that having state legislatures select federal legislators is foolish. Anyone suggesting that the US Senate as constituted for the last century is a populist institution may require institutional help of another kind.
While I agree that oligarchy has been the order of the day for some time, perhaps always, it is not self evident that having hierarchical elections is somehow worse than direct votes for people we see talk briefly on TV. I would actually prefer that I always get to choose between people I actually know face to face, that in turn select diminishing numbers of people. When we vote for sound bites it is simply a matter of who can comvince us they believe our own hastily formed opinions predicated on subpar government, economics, and history education combined with a complete lack of relevant work experience are in fact correct. If I select between my neighbors, it would be based on my perception of their character, and the ability to spot both expertise and bs.
> Lol. That was done to placate the slave owners.
The 17th amendment was passed ~50yr after the civil war, a point in time when the overwhelming majority of the electorate had no memory of overt slavery and the people who did or who's parents did were even less influential than before due to immigration waves and industrialization (which concentrated population money and power in the northeast and Midwest generally speaking). Please f right off with your revisionist history.
>Anyone suggesting that the US Senate as constituted for the last century is a populist institution may require institutional help of another kind.
This is rich coming from the guy that just said an amendment passed in the 1900s was done to placate slave owners.
Regardless of the intent of the amendment, only a complete fool would claim that making appointed positions directly elected doesn't make the body formed by those positions more subject to populist sentiments than it previously was.
I'm not entirely sold on the idea that direct electing the senate is a bad thing but it doesn't take a genius to look at the situation before and after and see that there are pros and cons to both. Like you can literally pick up a history book and look at the influences the senate was beholden to and strongly pushed around by before and after the change.
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>>some geniuses A super majority of both the house and senate with 3/4 of all state legislatures in accordance with the intention of the original founders that people update things as the times change?
That's an interesting take, to call democracy a dumpster fire. Some people I suppose would have rather kept their parties with tea.
The one person performing a filibuster is presumably doing so very much on record, complete with soundbites.
That's not the kind anyone means anymore, at least when it comes up in relation to the US Senate. They generally don't actually filibuster, they place a procedural hold that requires 60 members to agree to override it.
This is where the insanity really started. It used to require 8-20 senators to physically filibuster to actually kill a bill. On a major bill, the small number of senators also risked reputational harm from the sound bites of them reading their phone books.
Now anyone can start a filibuster, it largely goes unrecorded - and pressure for party unity prevents it from being killed.
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No, fillibusters are a matter of procedure now. Nobody's standing up there talking to perform a fillibuster anymore.
From https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/filibustering-in-the-mod...
"When a Senator signals the intent to filibuster, an informal cloture process starts to determine if 60 votes exist to move a measure forward in two ways. One cloture vote is to approve a motion to consider a measure; the second vote is on the actual measure. If either cloture vote fails, the measure remains in limbo. "
If you want to see a real filibuster in action, go to Nebraska!
Machaela Cavanaugh has been filibustering the legislature for weeks! 12+ hours a day, weeks on end. She has monumentally impressive resolve.
Actually, I think you missed it. The Nebraska legislature finally passed a bill today.
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Not since 1972. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/filibuster-joe-biden...
You don't deserve to be downvoted for just not knowing that this isn't how the filibuster works anymore. All the well known pop culture treatments of it - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The West Wing, etc. - show this form of it.
Yes but you have that be the person in the safest seat.