Fillibusters.

[tricky]

not many people besides xian will enjoy this i think......

author brings up some interesting points....

enjoy
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Nuclear Brinksmanship

by Gene Healy

Gene Healy is senior editor at the Cato Institute.



The fight over judicial nominations is moving past the posturing stage. On Friday, Vice President Dick Cheney removed any remaining doubt about whether he'd help G.O.P. senators use the so-called nuclear option in their quest to end judicial filibusters. With the nominations of Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen ready to come to the floor of the Senate, and Democrats determined to block them yet again, the Senate Republicans, with Cheney's help, have threatened to end judicial filibusters by a mere 51 votes, instead of 60 votes.

There are two possible outcomes to this game of nuclear brinksmanship. One sounds like fun. The other should give limited government advocates pause. The first outcome has Democrats retaliating by refusing cooperation on most of the ordinary business of the Senate. As former Democratic leader Tom Daschle explained to the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin recently, "The Senate runs on 'unanimous consent'...It takes unanimous consent to stop the reading of bills, the reading of every amendment. On any given day, there are fifteen or twenty nominations and a half-dozen bills that have been signed off for unanimous consent. The vast work of the Senate is done that way. But any individual senator can insist that every bill be read, every vote be taken, and bring the whole place to a stop."

Bringing the Senate to a crashing halt will hardly scare those of us who believe that no man's property is safe while Congress is in session. In fact, there would be something perversely entertaining about C-SPAN programming dominated by the monotonous recitation of 700-page agriculture bills. If only the senators could be forced to sit and listen. The Intelligence Reform Bill of 2004 is 236 pages long, and it's a safe bet few senators read it in its entirety. McCain-Feingold clocked in at a mere 36 pages, yet in February 2003 The New York Times reported that the Democratic and Republican party organizations had to hire high-priced lawyers and consultants to run seminars teaching senators and congressmen about the requirements of the law they had just passed. "I didn't realize what all was in it," Rep. Robert Matsui (D-Calif.) said. A breakdown in Senate cooperation would lead to a period of blissful inactivity, and could help educate the public about the increasingly incomprehensible statutes Congress calls "laws."

But the second possible endgame to the filibuster battle should worry you, unless you think too little legislation is a major problem in American life. There's a chance that the G.O.P.'s nuclear gambit could eventually lead to the death of the filibuster as a whole.

That would be disastrous. The theory underlying the Constitution is that, in political life as opposed to economic, transaction costs are good. As James Madison explained in Federalist 62, the Senate itself was designed in part to curb "the facility and excess of lawmaking." The filibuster isn't part of the Constitution, but it helps augment some of the Constitution's checks on promiscuous legislating. Since many of the constitutional checks on legislative overreach have eroded over the years, the filibuster is even more important today.

As the minority party in the first two years of the Clinton administration, Republicans used filibuster threats to hold up a porkbarrel economic stimulus package, campaign finance restrictions, health care "reform," and a bill banning permanent replacements for striking workers. The historical record in that period and others shows that the filibuster is an essentially conservative instrument.

Smart liberals in the commentariat, like Slate's Tim Noah and The American Prospect's Matt Yglesias, are starting to recognize this. As Yglesias noted in a recent column for the Prospect, Americans are congenitally suspicious of new "'big government' schemes,"

but once such schemes are put into place, they prove quite popular... The liberal difficulty is what it always has been—getting new stuff passed into law... it's very hard to think of any major conservative legislation that's ever been stopped by a filibuster.

It is, by contrast, very easy to think of liberal initiatives that filibusters have blocked. Indeed, as conservative activist Jim Boulet Jr. has wisely argued in a memo to his comrades, the filibuster is crucial to conservatism. By his account, without it, majorities would exist to raise the minimum wage; reform labor law to make new union organizing easier; ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment; reduce greenhouse-gas emissions; and close the "gun-show loophole."

(The Boulet memo can be found here.)

To Yglesias and Noah, the answer is obvious: ditch the legislative filibuster. Doing so might lead to some short-term victories for conservatives, but the long-term game favors liberals, who, without the filibuster, will be far better positioned to pass measures like universal health care.

During the judicial nomination fights of the George W. Bush administration, Republicans have floated convenient constitutional theories with the creativity of a Ninth Circuit liberal, such as the theory that giving a Catholic nominee a hard time for his views on abortion amounts to an unconstitutional "religious test for office."

But at least one of the GOP's constitutional arguments is quite strong. That's the "dead hand" argument against current Senate rules, which require a two-thirds majority to change the filibuster rules. That requirement entrenches the preferences of a past Senate and denies the present Senate its constitutional authority to make its own rules. But note that the argument against filibuster entrenchment applies to legislative filibusters as well as judicial ones. By invoking the "dead hand" argument, a future Democratic majority might be able to get rid of the legislative filibuster through a procedural gambit similar to what the Republicans like to call their "constitutional option."

And that move will be far easier to sell politically if Republicans get rid of the judicial filibuster by a simple majority vote. Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and other supporters of the rules change make much of the claim that they are only aiming to end the filibuster for judicial nominations, not legislation. But a principled distinction—if there is one—between judicial and legislative filibusters will be mighty hard for the GOP to articulate when faced with the soundbite "you did it first."

What ought to happen instead is a return to real filibusters. The Jimmy Stewart–style filibuster became a rarity in the 1970s when then–majority leader Mike Mansfield ushered in a two-track system whereby the Senate could move on to other business when a credible threat to filibuster was presented. In the modern era, real filibusters only occur when the majority sees political advantage in the spectacle. In 1988, for example, in the midst of a filibuster fight over campaign-finance legislation, then–majority leader Robert Byrd ordered the arrest of Republican senators boycotting a quorum vote. Three Capitol policemen forced their way into Sen. Bob Packwood's office, grabbed Packwood by his ankles and both arms, and carried him feet first onto the Senate floor. "The knock on the door and the forced entry smack of Nazi Germany, smack of communist Russia," wailed Senator Arlen Specter. "I rather enjoyed it," said Packwood.

Washington needs more of this sort of thing. If the Democrats really think Janice Rogers Brown is a threat to the Republic, they ought to be willing to get hoarse-voiced and incoherent keeping her off the D.C. Circuit. And if Republicans are committed to these judges, they ought to be willing to sleep on cots in cloakrooms. For their salaries, perks, and power, the least they can do is give us a show.

This article originally appeared on Reason.com on April 27, 2005

[tricky]

i know what it is xian, i can read
this article is from Cato...cant be THAT bad....


ninja post like woah

good stuff.....I mostly agree.... I don't think the rule should be changed.... I also think the DNC is behaving very badly.....they'll get the same in response when there is a Dem in the oval office..... stupid stupid precedent to set

[tricky]

Originally Posted by xiannaix

good stuff.....I mostly agree.... I don't think the rule shoudl be changed.... I also think the DNC is behaving very badly

DNC is behaving badly....


replace DNC with GOVERNMENT and i'd agree

Originally Posted by tricky

DNC is behaving badly....


replace DNC with GOVERNMENT and i'd agree

The GOP is perhaps about to..... then I'd agree with you

[tricky]

Originally Posted by xiannaix

The GOP is perhaps about to..... then I'd agree with you

i dont hold the gop in high esteem....nor the dnc.

but you already knew that

Originally Posted by tricky

i dont hold the gop in high esteem....nor the dnc.

but you already knew that

yeah - I did

[tricky]

what do you think of this xian?

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3711

Executive Summary

President Bush signed a $417.5 billion defense appropriations bill for fiscal year 2005 on August 5,2004. With the addition of an $82 billion supplemental for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, in real terms U.S. military spending will be at a level exceeded only by that of the waning years of World War II and the height of the Korean War. The Defense Department had requested $401.7 billion, which was a 7 percent increase over the FY04 defense budget. The recently submitted FY06 Pentagon budget is $419.3 billion (notincluding funds for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan). The administration argues that increased military spending is a necessary part of the war on terrorism.

Those budgets assumed that the war on terrorism is primarily a military war to be fought by the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. The reality is that large conventional military operations will be the exception rather than the rule in the war on terrorism. Although President Bush claims Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, the truth is that ridding the world of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime did not eliminate an Al Qaeda sanctuary or a primary source of support for the terrorist group.

The military's role in the war on terrorism will mainly involve special operations forces in discrete missions against specific targets, not conventional warfare aimed at overthrowing entire regimes. The rest of the war aimed at dismantling and degrading the Al Qaeda terrorist network will require unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, not expensive new planes, helicopters, and warships.

Therefore, an increasingly large defense budget (DoD projects that the budget will grow to more than $487 billion by FY09) is not necessary to fight the war on terrorism. Nor is it necessary to protect America from traditional nation-state military threats—the United States is in a unique geostrategic position; it has no military rivals and is relatively secure from conventional military attack because of vast oceans on its flanks and friendly neighbors to the north and south.

In fact, U.S. security would be better served by adopting a less interventionist policy abroad and pulling back from the Cold War–era extended security perimeter, which necessitates forward-deployed military forces around the world. If the United States adopted a balancer-of-last-resort strategy (allowing other countries to manage the security of their own regions), most overseas U.S. military deployments could be eliminated and the defense budget could be substantially reduced.

Originally Posted by tricky

what do you think of this xian?

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3711

Executive Summary

President Bush signed a $417.5 billion defense appropriations bill for fiscal year 2005 on August 5,2004. With the addition of an $82 billion supplemental for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, in real terms U.S. military spending will be at a level exceeded only by that of the waning years of World War II and the height of the Korean War. The Defense Department had requested $401.7 billion, which was a 7 percent increase over the FY04 defense budget. The recently submitted FY06 Pentagon budget is $419.3 billion (notincluding funds for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan). The administration argues that increased military spending is a necessary part of the war on terrorism.

Those budgets assumed that the war on terrorism is primarily a military war to be fought by the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. The reality is that large conventional military operations will be the exception rather than the rule in the war on terrorism. Although President Bush claims Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, the truth is that ridding the world of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime did not eliminate an Al Qaeda sanctuary or a primary source of support for the terrorist group.

The military's role in the war on terrorism will mainly involve special operations forces in discrete missions against specific targets, not conventional warfare aimed at overthrowing entire regimes. The rest of the war aimed at dismantling and degrading the Al Qaeda terrorist network will require unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, not expensive new planes, helicopters, and warships.

Therefore, an increasingly large defense budget (DoD projects that the budget will grow to more than $487 billion by FY09) is not necessary to fight the war on terrorism. Nor is it necessary to protect America from traditional nation-state military threats—the United States is in a unique geostrategic position; it has no military rivals and is relatively secure from conventional military attack because of vast oceans on its flanks and friendly neighbors to the north and south.

In fact, U.S. security would be better served by adopting a less interventionist policy abroad and pulling back from the Cold War–era extended security perimeter, which necessitates forward-deployed military forces around the world. If the United States adopted a balancer-of-last-resort strategy (allowing other countries to manage the security of their own regions), most overseas U.S. military deployments could be eliminated and the defense budget could be substantially reduced.

I think I'd need a lot of that broken down....

but you know that as a strong general rule I'm fiercely nationalist and conservative on foreign policy = I'm often will to accept large chunks spent on the military...... of course, reserving ire for waste and pork....

[tricky]

Originally Posted by xiannaix

I think I'd need a lot of that broken down....

but you know that as a strong general rule I'm fiercely nationalist and conservative on foreign policy = I'm often will to accept large chunks spent on the military...... of course, reserving ire for waste and pork....

i understand conservative strong military policy, but come on...troops in germany & japan. is that not waste and pork?

"404.9 billion/2003...that amound exceeded the combined defense expenditures of the next 13 countries and was more than double the combined defense spending of the remaining 158 countries in the world"

Russia has 'Observer Status' in NATO. The paradigm is shifting. The Cold War has ended and we need to change our system. We conquered both Iraq and Afghanistan without having any forces already in the region (6000 airforce in SA were denied to conduct military operations)

that policy analysis really breaks it down quite nicely. good stuff

Originally Posted by tricky

i understand conservative strong military policy, but come on...troops in germany & japan. is that not waste and pork?

"404.9 billion/2003...that amound exceeded the combined defense expenditures of the next 13 countries and was more than double the combined defense spending of the remaining 158 countries in the world"

Russia has 'Observer Status' in NATO. The paradigm is shifting. The Cold War has ended and we need to change our system. We conquered both Iraq and Afghanistan without having any forces already in the region (6000 airforce in SA were denied to conduct military operations)

that policy analysis really breaks it down quite nicely. good stuff

like I said, I'd want a lot of it broken down to really be able to give spefic thumbs up or down opinion....

regarding NATO

I'm of mixed opinion....largely I suspect because I just a half informed outsider but it seems to me we pay shitloads to essentially run it (NATO) for the influence it buys us in Europe.....wich begs the questions, do we get our money's worth? Is it close? What is the alternative? Is that better or worse?

More questions than answers... as usual.....

[tricky]

how bout this new f-22 fighter when the countries in the 'axis of evil' cant even keep up with a f-15

Originally Posted by tricky

how bout this new f-22 fighter when the countries in the 'axis of evil' cant even keep up with a f-15

Is that the generation 2 stealth fighter-bomber?

My general attitude towards our equipment is to buy small numbers for training purposes and keep worknig the technology forward....invest in improvements not new hardware.

We can always gear up factories to build very quickly if we need to but we can't necessarily do that with technological advances....

I'd prefer a leaner professional military (incidentally - what, as I understood it, Rumsfeld was supposed to do) He was to gut the old beast, and clear out the old school cats who'd prepared our military for large scale ground/tank warfare in central/eastern Europe.... news flash to those guys .... we aren't going to war with Russia

[tricky]

Originally Posted by xiannaix

Is that the generation 2 stealth fighter-bomber?

My general attitude towards our equipment is to buy small numbers for training purposes and keep worknig the technology forward....invest in improvements not new hardware.

We can always gear up factories to build very quickly if we need to but we can't necessarily do that with technological advances....

I'd prefer a leaner professional military (incidentally - what, as I understood it, Rumsfeld was supposed to do) He was to gut the old beast, and clear out the old school cats who'd prepared our military for large scale ground/tank warfare in central/eastern Europe.... news flash to those guys .... we aren't going to war with Russia

that's what the analysis suggests....


read it why dont ya....

Originally Posted by tricky

that's what the analysis suggests....


read it why dont ya....

lol - I'm working you crazy fucker - that's why - I can only read 2 or three things at once


lol - how about I just say I think you are generally right and that I agree in principal....