See Majority Leader Schumer's recent comments on Senator Collins and the 2009 stimulus for the evidence of changing mindsets among the Democratic caucus.


Every liberal agrees that (downward) redistribution of resources is one of the core functions of and justifications for the state, but I recently saw a pithier formulation: There is no argument for the government not taking money from the rich to give to the poor.

Also, we might try to operationalize social management of private wealth in analogy to atomic orbitals. There's a ground state and there are energetic states, the latter of which rapidly decay back to the ground state, with ever-greater energies required to excite and maintain the electron at successive higher orbitals. A problem with modern wealth is that it is itself gravitational rather than subject to nucleic forces, so to speak.


Quote Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name View Post
Bruh, google is your friend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Januar...nment_shutdown
It would have been better had you merely forgotten the timing of the shutdown. Any suggestion that a shutdown that lasted all of two days (the Clinton, Obama, and Trump shutdowns all lasted weeks), and had zero detectable influence over tracking polling of Trump's approval or the generic ballot, could have hurt Republicans in elections almost a year later, doesn't survive scrutiny.

Moving back to the talking filibuster is the removal of the two-track system. The procedural or 'silent' filibuster is the two-track system, there is no incorrect conflation here cause it is the same thing. They call it the two track system because the bill itself gets moved onto a separate track from the floor as a whole, but a talking filibuster cannot have a two-track system because the talking takes up the floors agenda.
Alright, so to the limit of my interest in checking whether I've missed anything, I spent some time looking into the granular Senate procedures and how they interact with the filibuster, starting with Rules 19-22 of the Senate rules. I couldn't make any conclusive findings.
https://www.rules.senate.gov/rules-of-the-senate
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/98-780
Consideration, Question of

I still don't know more than that in the early 70s, the system was changed to allow two items of legislation to be under consideration at the same time, when previously only one had been accepted. And moreover that a successful invocation of cloture continued to require that the matter "shall be the unfinished business to the exclusion of all other business until disposed of."

The only scenario I can envision is if, prior to the rule change, a proposal on the floor had to remain the sole unfinished business of the Senate until it was either resolved through voting or formally withdrawn - and there existed a sentiment against having to nominally withdraw legislation that was effectively defeated before a vote. That is, this hypothetical motivation behind the rule change would have been to allow the sponsors and supporters of bills stymied by filibuster to pretend that the legislation hadn't actually been successfully neutralized (by formally removing it from the calendar or whatever). When the physical operation of a filibuster is to indefinitely delay a vote through continuous debate, the old system's requirement that one party capitulate - the debater can't stop or the vote proceeds - to the other would be covered with a fig leaf.

I have no idea if this is the truth of the matter, but I can't invent another alternative to my preconception.

Which remains responsive to the context of disruptive filibusters in then-recent years. If Senate Democrats modified the rules so that one piece of legislation could come under consideration while another was being filibustered - the procedural/shadow/ghost filibuster not yet being in in practice - then an intelligent presumption would be that what they had in mind was that one bill might be brought to the table while the other was being blocked by filibuster in the old manner. If the old filibuster used to hinder other business from being taken up, what would be the point of this "two-track" system if it doesn't actually affect that very issue - if a continuing talking filibuster would still prevent other business from being taken up on account of the Senator speaking?!

Unless the postulate is, incredibly, that Democrats consciously redesigned the rules to make it easier to filibuster in a novel way (without actually filibustering) even as they claimed the opposite.

I leave the question to someone with more interest or knowledge in the Senate rules and history than I ; what's really at issue here is your unfounded opinion that obliging Republicans to talk at a bill until it dies would damage their standing with their base.

No more both sides crap, people will ask why the Senate is not doing anything and people can point out it is because Senator shithead is still reading Dr. Seuss on the floor to block some minor appointment no one cares about.
The fundamental problem this theory runs into, besides that it has never worked out that way before, is that we already know that partisans are fine with the procedural tactics of their copartisans but dislike the tactics of their opposition.

Democrats noticing that Republicans filibuster - and disliking them for it - is not an electorally-significant phenomenon. They're already Democrats.

Lol, a filibuster by definition is a delay or prevention of the consideration of a bill through defined Senate rules however they define them. If I speak for 35 minutes on a bill that has 20 hours of debate allotted is that a filibuster? What difference does it make if he spoke for 5 minutes, 35 minutes, or 15 hours if the speech fit within the existing timeline for debate. This is just wrong.
...what?

a filibuster by definition is a delay or prevention of the consideration of a bill through defined Senate rules however they define them.
Which is what

What the heck are you talking about?

What difference does it make if he spoke for 5 minutes, 35 minutes, or 15 hours if the speech fit within the existing timeline for debate.


It was not within the existing timeline. That is why the Republicans changed the rules on SCOTUS nominations. I do not understand why you would believe that Mitch McConnell allotted Jeff Merkley 15 hours to debate Gorsuch's nomination - which Democrats had explicitly announced they were going to filibuster ahead of time - only to change the rules the very next day preventing Merkley from continuing?

Don't make a boner.

Shifting goalpost, but ok.
The goalpost was that Republicans did not suffer electoral consequences for obstruction, which you contend they did and will again - against evidence.

https://www.latimes.com/nation/polit...007-story.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1OQ1FA
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...c3e_story.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voter...tdown_n_842769
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/11/68430...ngest-in-histo
https://millercenter.org/1995-96-government-shutdown
https://www.langerresearch.com/wp-co...vtShutdown.pdf
Would you like to make an attempt at elucidating a causal mechanism whereby half the country blaming Republicans for a negative development would undermine Republican electoral performance among Republican voters? Including why we haven't seen it before and why we would expect to see it now

I'm not making fun of you here. If I were, I would ask you who should be picked to primary Senator Manchin from the left.