The Answer to the Stalemate

I think so, too. The Senate should go to majority rule in all matters. Dick Morris, a political consultant, notes that the USA cannot pass a budget because of Senate rules. So we get one expensive continuing resolution after another.

 

I thought that the constitutional purpose of a republic was majority rule. I am sorry but I disagree with you 100%.

 

So a republic, because someone represents, does not have majority rule? The Indiana senate has majority rule. The US Senate sets their own rules, by majority rule I suppose, and they have abolished majority rule on cloture. All this does is deny majority rule in America. A gang of nuts thereby rules.

 

Where does it say in the Constition that it takes 3/5 to invoke cloture in Congress or did the Senate just make it up to protect the prerogatives of vested interests? Do they think that they are the House of Lords? The majority should rule and they could if McConnell would stand for something instead of falling for everything. Why should we have minority rule?

 

Agreed! That way things would get done, whether for good or for bad, depending on your pov. This would lay the success or failure directly at the feet of the senators and ultimately the voters. Then the voters would think twice about who they vote for and the consequences thereof when they see the results of their choices. After a few cycles clear minded folks would see what policies work and what policies don't.

 

I did look at the link but I do not think that it is authoritative because the Senate has made a rule that in essence calls for minority rule as it has played out in modern times. Now if you had an honest congress, perhaps you could continue to debate until everyone had had a say, but you now have a corrupt government of human beings. The US Senate is not the British House of Lords. They are merely a second chamber of a legislature. They differ from the House because their terms are longer and their numbers are two from each state. Somewhere along the line, they adopted a rule that it took 3/5 vote to stop a filibuster. But nowadays they seldom actually filibuster as they did in the past. Nevertheless, they now use the failure to invoke cloture not as a signal that debate continues but as a signal that the subject is dead and that debate has ended. So they have twisted their own rule.

The victims of this Senate arrogance are the American people who have their needs denied by their own representatives who only represent themselves. When Senators were appointed, perhaps they better represented the interests of their own states, but not Senators like Joe Donnelly of Indiana, whose family has a business in Mexico although he claims to be against such things but still cashes the checks for his share of the profits. Donnelly takes money from national sources and does not receive very much in donations from Indiana.

The American people vote for an agenda. The Senate regularly denies enactment of that agenda and the GOP is very complicit in this elite rule by saying to the voters, sorry, but we decided that you cannot even have a budget, only one continuing resolution after another, because not only are we extravagant with your money but we conspire with the Democrats to see that you don't get what you want because we could change the rules if we wanted to but we only care about our power and our prestige and your needs are the last things on our minds. We are the American House of Lords, self-appointed even though you common people do not grant nobility to us and call us Lord Donnelly, as you should.

I never argued that the Senate could not make their own rules. I merely argued that the US Senate is the only legislative body in the USA that I know of that does not operate by simple majority by their own design. If a republic means that the representatives generally enact the will of the majority, then the US Senate may fairly be characterized as part of a republic that never enacts the will of the majority.

 

No. We are a Constitutional Republic. The Senate was intended by the founders to be slow and deliberate. Not obstructionist, but slow and deliberate. It has become obstructionist.

 

The Senate is now elected--it was once appointed. So the intent of the Constitution has been muted by the amendment. There is no need for 3/5 majority to end debate when there is no debate in the first place. What the Senate is doing is saying that they want to vote on a bill. The leaders cannot get the 3/5 majority so the bill is dead, often before there is any debate. There is never any vote on the bill. The 3/5 majority rule is part of the apparatus of the swamp, as Trump calls it. Even Trump has called for majority rule. Federal law says that there has to be a budget but Congress just passes expensive and wasteful continuing resolutions because the Senate will never vote on a budget.

 

For 8 years the only stated objective of the Republican party was to block everything Obama tried to accomplish. They even refused to discuss his candidate for the Supreme Court, who was considered by most legal experts to be a great and fair choice, for 9 months. We're now in a tit for tat situation which must be changed if we are to survive as a Democratic Republic (let's don't go round and round on the naming). The American people need to stand up and tell our representatives we are tired of political games and we expect to see a bipartisan approach towards governing. Otherwise we need to vote everyone from both parties out who are unwilling to endorse that principle and elect some real representatives of the people.

 

They call this the Joe Biden rule. He argued that if the vacancy was close to an election, you let the voters decide who appoints his replacement. You'll have to take it up with him.

And Merrick Garland would have been a disaster, just like Sotomayor and Kagan.

I think I've heard you claim to be pro-life. If so, why are you not thanking God for the Biden rule? Did you want yet another pro-murder justice?

 

A Republic in general is a representative form of government. A true Democracy is a government in which every issuer id decided by a vote of the people (plebiscite). The Electoral College which elects our President and Vice-President is a strictly American invention to my knowledge. In general Republics don't use this method.