Report: Support For Filbuster Elimination Growing Among Senate Dems

There is much evidence that the filibuster does work to bring about Consensus just listen to Richard S. Beth a Specialist on the Congress and Legislative Process who wrote “Filibusters and Cloture in the Senate”…

More generally, the possibility of filibusters creates a powerful incentive for Senators to strive for legislative consensus. The votes of only 51 Senators are needed to pass a bill on the floor. It can, however, require the votes of 60 Senators to invoke cloture on the bill in order to overcome a filibuster and enable the Senate to reach that vote on final passage. Knowing this, a bill’s supporters have good reason to write it in a way that will attract the support of at least three-fifths of all Senators. Since 1980, neither party has ever held 60% of all the seats in the Senate. Thus, as long as this situation persists, every bill that the Senate passes must enjoy at least a minimal degree of bipartisan acceptance.—Richard S. Beth

There is also a great interview over at NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=122945445 with Professor GREG KOGER (Political Science, University of Miami; Author, "Going to the Mattresses: The History of Filibustering in Congress") discussing the filibuster of today if you read it you may change you mind the filibuster…

GROSS: My guest is Greg Koger, author of the forthcoming book "Going to the Mattresses: The History of Filibustering in Congress." We're talking about some of the questions many people have about how the threat of a filibuster is used in the Senate. GROSS: You know, the Constitution says that in the Senate, it should take a simple majority to pass legislation. And nowadays, like right now, it seems to take 60 votes to pass any legislation instead of 51, because 60 is what you need for cloture. And some people are raising the question: Have we gotten to the point where the Senate is operating in a way that's unconstitutional, since the Senate says that unless it's a treaty, impeachment, expulsion from office or a constitutional amendment, it should be just a simple majority? So I wonder what you'd respond to on that, what you'd respond on that.

Prof. KOGER: Well, I think the key phrase of the Constitution is from Article 1. It says that each house may determine the rules of its proceedings. And the Senate has the rules that it has on some level because this is the way they want to do business. And so that makes it -to me, that makes it constitutional, and so it's hard to say that, you know, the Senate is unconstitutional.
I mean, but what you can say instead is that, you know, that because the combination of the Senate filibuster and, you know, the polarization of parties, that there is more stability in the legislative system than the authors of the Constitution ever intended there to be, that it's so much harder to get anything done than ever intended.

The average age of a Senator is 62 years old with an average of 15 years of Senate service, they’re old and have been working in the Senate a long time, and they don’t want to engage in filibusters if they can help it because they don’t want to spend long hours debating the legislation on the floor of the Senate. The threat of a filibuster can be the fastest way to bring about Consensus. But when partisan lines have been drawn in the sand like the Health Care Reform where one side is against Government run health care and the other is for mandatory government run health care the filibuster will come out to be played by the minority party, that’s politics.

Medicare, Medicaid are going bankrupt and until Congress can reduce overall corruption of fraud, waste and abuse it makes no sense to throw good money into a bad program. Then we have the ideologue wars about if it’s a constitutional right to have a government run health system for every body, the answer is no but we do it anyways with Medicare, Medicaid. The problems with Medicare, Medicaid are traceable to illegal aliens receiving free health care provided by the U.S. tax payer.

The border needs to be secured NOW we can no longer afford to provide benefits for Mexico’s exportable population. You said, “we need to stop demonizing human beings”. Were not, lay the blame on Mexico where it belongs. Mexico is by forcing their poor population out of their country and into America. Mexico is a failed socialist state, Art 27 of the Mexican Constitution guarantees redistribution of wealth, that hasn't turn out so well for the Mexicans has it? Mexico needs to step up and take care of their own people for a change and we need to enforce our own immigration laws and if Mexico doesn’t like it, too bad!

I hate the idea of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”, in fact my least favorite words are diversity and comprehensive, when government uses both—stand by some body is going to get screwed and it’s usually the American People. Illegal aliens should never, I mean never be given a path way to citizenship to vote, its bad enough they are voting in our elections without getting caught now.

Illegals should only be given permanent residency only as a form of amnesty and that is the only type of compromise conservatives would support!

I never understood how anyone that has gone through the process of coming here legally would support illegals receiving something for free they had to wait years in line for and paid thousands of dollars for the right to come here. So I don’t believe the majority of legal immigrants support CIR--SORRY!