You need 51 votes to pass a law in the Senate, not 60

But you wouldn't know it from the way this NYT article is presented:

Obama’s Jobs Bill Fails in Senate in First Legislative Test

By ROBERT PEAR

The vote of 50 to 49 to open debate on the measure was shy of the 60 needed to overcome procedural objections, forcing the White House to consider breaking up the package.

When is the Washington establishment going to realize that you can't govern with supermajority requirements in the legislature, and that this way of doing business in the Senate is a radical departure from the past?

The Senate needs to abolish the filibuster, or neither party will be able to make headway with the gigantic structural problems the country faces.

The broken Senate

Via Yglesias, a nice chart that demonstrates that the current abuse of the filibuster is historically unprecedented:



Though today's Republicans are really taking it to the next level, I'd say that the use of the filibuster has been problematic since the 1990s. Not coincidentally, there has not been any major tax increase or entitlement reforms (with the possible exception of Clinton's welfare reform) since that time. Those are the politically difficult laws to pass that will simply never get through the Senate so long as the minority party can block it with a mere 41 votes.

We're effed

Well: health care reform is dead. Coakley's loss means that the Democrats have one vote short of a filibuster-proof majority, which is giving centrist Democrats an excuse to run for cover. Democratic support for the bill is caving as speak, as Jim Webb volunteers that there will be no more votes on heath care until Scott Brown is seated, and no less a Massachusettes liberal than Barney Frank rules out this possibility as well. Senator Evan Bayh is already acknowledging the election as a rebuke to the Democratic agenda.

But this whole experience proves something more than a failed attempt by Democrats to reform health care insurance: it shows that the United States government is incapable of passing major legislation that will solve our biggest problems. Health care needs to be reformed, one way or another: its costs are spiraling out of control, and the ranks of the uninsured keep growing. If costs continue growing apace, the federal government will go broke paying for Medicare in the next fifty years.

Of course, broadening health care insurance isn't the only way to solve the looming budget problem; you could go the Republican route, and cut entitlements. The problem is: no Republicans are seriously advocating this. Scott Brown ran on a platform of not reducing a penny of Medicare spending, and he supports Massachusettes' own universal health care program. Indeed, the fact that the Dem's reform package would have resulted in Medicare spending cuts was used by Republicans as a talking point against the legislation. And of course, it was a Republican President and Congress that last decade passed Medicare Part D, the largest expansion of entitlements since the passage of Medicare itself--all of it funded with deficit spending (which is to say, none of it was funded at all).

Now, ultimately this failure is attributable to the rules of the Senate--specifically, the recently adopted practice of requiring a 60 vote supermajority to pass any legislation whatsoever. If a simple majority was all that was needed to get something through, the legislation would have passed in the middle of last year. But so long as this supermajority requirement remains, it will be impossible for either party to pass any legislation that is capable of solving our nation's biggest problems. I think it would behoove the leadership in both parties to agree to abolish the filibuster in a set period of time from now (6 years, say, when it is unknown which party will be in power). Otherwise crucial legislation--whether it is coming from the left or the right--will continue to crash on the shoals of arcane procedural votes in the Senate.

Fallows on the brokenness of the Senate

Again, it all really just boils down to the Senate:

When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.

The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes.) “The Senate is full of ‘rotten boroughs,’” said James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, referring to the underpopulated constituencies in Parliament before the British reforms of 1832. “We’d be better off with a House of Lords."

Of course, the present-day version of the filibuster--where a supermajority of 60 votes is required to get any routine thing passed--is a relatively recent development, emerging only within the last 15 years or so. Still, though, the Senate is almost single-handedly responsible for America's inability to tackle any of its major, long-term problems.

Why politics is boring

It's a recurring theme for him, but Ezra Klein once again does a good job of summarizing what is wrong with the American political system: the Senate. It's broken. And you can have a million pundits write a million articles and posts and do a million interviews about this or that tactic or strategy or poll or gaffe, and it's all noise, because the simple, boring, underlying reason that we're in the position we're in is because it takes sixty--sixty--goddamn votes in the Senate to pass a law.

As the refrain goes: We're all Californians now.

Divine Right of Kennedys

Caroline Kennedy--who has never run for public office, has led a life largely in seclusion from the public eye, and who basically is a nobody with a not-nobody family--has decided that she will deign to be appointed Senator for the state of New York as Hillary Clinton's replacement.

I have no idea what kind of Senator Caroline Kennedy would be. But the idea of this person having such a sense of entitlement that she seriously thinks she deserves to be appointed to a seat in the Senate because the blood of the Kennedys flows through her veins is just too much. If Caroline Kennedy wants to start a career in politics, that's just fine--but she'll have to do it the old-fashioned way: by making a name for herself, and winning an election.

The right move

Lieberman stays in the Democratic caucus, keeps his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but is stripped of a subcommittee chair on the Environment and Public Works Committee--a symbolic retributive gesture.

This is a good outcome. First, it gets this distracting, inside-the-beltway melodrama overwith and out of the news well before Obama takes office; second, it gives Democrats a shot at nabbing a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority in the Senate; and third, it all but guarantees that Lieberman will be 100% on board with Obama's ambitious domestic agenda (although I think this would have more or less been the case no matter what).

Ah, conciliation! It gets legislation passed. And that's the only thing that matters.

The Senate race stays hot

It looks as though there will be a run-off in the Senate race in Georgia, which could get crazy if the Democrats can muster 59 seats:

If Franken holds on, if Jeff Merkley in Oregon can win (Multnomah is the big Portland Democratic engine and is largely outstanding), then it is increasingly likely that the Dems will converge on Georgia for the next four weeks to try to win the 60th Senate seat.

A lot has been made of the fact that two of the "Democrats" in that would-be filibuster-proof 60-seat majority would be Independents, and one of those Independents--Joe Lieberman--actively campaigned for the Republican side. However, despite his move rightward, Lieberman remains a centrist Democrat on domestic issues. Thus, I think we could count on him to block a filibuster on something like a big energy or healthcare bill.