(Quin Hillyer, Liberty Headlines) Donald Trump upset traditionalists and leftists alike when he began the new workweek with a Tweet saying the Senate should completely eliminate its rule allowing for a “filibuster” – the celebrated practice by which a 40-plus percent minority can block a final vote on legislation (or nominations) supported by a clear, but less than 60 percent, majority.
But Trump also pleased another subset of conservatives and liberals, thus showing just how the issue of filibusters crosses ordinary ideological lines.
Within hours, hard-line conservative U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who is running for the Senate in a special election this summer, released a statement supporting Trump’s call to disallow filibusters. So did Jim Hagedorn, a Republican candidate running for Congress for the third time in Minnesota.
But liberal Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent was quick to Tweet out (implicit) approval from the other side, writing that “nuking the filibuster on legislation is probably better for liberals than it is for conservatives.”
The anti-filibuster fervor follows the successful move by Republican senators earlier this year to outlaw permanent filibusters against Supreme Court nominees – a rules change that itself was an extension of, and reaction to, Senate Democrats’ actions in 2013 to kill filibusters against all presidential nominations except for ones to the Supreme Court.
Trump’s Tweet-proposal would do the same thing to filibusters of ordinary legislation, not just nominations. In other words, any legislation could pass the Senate with a simple majority vote, without clearing a 60-percent supermajority procedural hurdle….
[Later in the article]…. Even Trump’s more hypothetical earlier statements against the filibuster, though, had been met with disdain by senators of his own Republican Party. Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky insisted, quite strongly, that changing the rules to eliminate filibusters “will not happen…. There is an overwhelming majority on a bipartisan basis not interested in changing the way the Senate operates on the legislative calendar.”…
[The full article is at this link.]
