pudge's Journal: Corrections

On McLaughlin Group this week, within the span of a minute or two, two gross misinterpretations were offered by liberals, and no serious correction was offered. So I'll offer them now.

First, they showed a clip of Senator Kennedy saying, if the 'nuclear option' passes, "the Senate majority will always be able to get its way, and the Senate our Founders created will no longer exist."

When asked by the moderator if the Democrats would defend the right to filibuster if they were in control, Bill Press followed up saying, "Democrats were in charge for over 40 years, they did not get rid of the filibuster."

The problem is, Senator Kennedy 10 years ago voted for a bill abolishing the filibuster (for, in his own words today, abolishing "the Senate our Founders created"), because, in the words of the bill's sponsor, "the filibuster is nothing short of legislative piracy." Yes, they did not get rid of it, but Kennedy -- the one who sparked this discussion -- tried to.

And, of course, as noted in my last journal entry, this slippery slope claim (limiting the filibuster in one way constitutes a destruction of the filibuster) is baseless anyway.

Then, Eleanor Clift defended the filibuster, saying, "if under the current rules we got a Clarence Thomas and we got an Antonin Scalia, what are we gonna get if we don't have to get 60 votes? Sixty votes force some sort of consensus."

The problem is, Thomas didn't get 60 votes, he got 52. The rules that Thomas got confirmed under are the same rules as the ones the Republicans want now. (In contrast, Scalia would have been confirmed under any set of rules, since he was confirmed 98-0, but this was pre-Bork.)

This also brings me to something else that's been in my craw about all this: the idea that there is some Constitutional right, or even intent, to provide a partisan balance in the Senate is nonsense. You hear this all the time from the Democrats, and it is incorrect. The Constitution couldn't care less about one party controlling the Senate. It cares about the Senate representing the wills of the respective states, not of parties.

Similarly, the purpose of unlimited debate in the Senate was never to allow a minority to prevent the Senate from acting, but to ensure that bills were not passed without everyone getting to say what they thought needed to be said. This purpose was exploited decades later to prevent the Senate from taking action. To imply that the filibuster -- the ability of a minority to prevent the Senate from acting through exploitation of a procedural side-effect -- is integral to the intent of the Founders is simply incorrect.

Data.

[Talinom]

I found the PRG's presidential data site [semo.edu] recently. It has TONS of databases and raw data you can download that contains congressional statistics.

People are always bitching and moaning about not having proof. It looks like it is out there and in raw form. I have just finished translating the information from it's Oracle output to MySQL, although I am debating the quality of the translation because I had to learn MySQL (and the fact that the command strings they gave were actually in Oracle format) in the

constitution

[thing12]

All the Constitution says is that each house has the power to set the rules of its proceedings. Nothing more... the debate has nothing to do with the Constitution. I didn't see the interview, I don't know if the Constitution was brought up. Nor do I know when the Senate first enacted the rules that allowed for unlimited debate. All it looks like they're saying is that the Senate won't be that of the founding fathers, where the unlimited debate was possible in all cases... as you've pointed out, this is

Re:constitution

[pudge]

There's nothing that says once rules are enacted that they must be followed forever. Why don't the Senate and House vote on a new set of rules at the start of each congress? Instead of working under arcane rules, they could adopt a set that fits the needs of their particular session. Tradition be damned. And hey, if it doesn't work out, it's not as though they couldn't vote to reinstate the old rules.

Another specious Democratic argument is that "you can't change the rules in the middle of the game." But