Wednesday, July 18, 2007


It seems to me like the focus for the all-night Senate thing has been on "ending the war", but in my opinion they should be really up-front about the fact that Republicans have an explicit policy to call filibuster on everything and prevent any Democratic legislation from passing without 60 votes.

That's such a threat to Democracy in the first place, to use the filibuster like that. It affects everything else the Senate could hope to do, like passing bills that were part of the House's 100-day agenda and passed easily there, but can't get out of the Senate because of the Republicans.

They need to make it loud and clear and simple, "The Republicans are trying to block ANYthing we are doing, including ending the war and making prescription drugs more affordable etc, and if they want to filibuster these bills they need to stand up on the floor and do it."

If I understand what happened last night correctly, it's not really a filibuster, it's just some kind of procedural thing to enforce debate, but they're still going to do (or have already done, I'm not sure) the "cloture vote" which needs 60 votes to allow an up-or-down vote on the bill. It's confusing.

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