I walked into the office this morning to find several coworkers discussing last night’s Senate vote. They were a little unclear on what last night’s vote actually meant.
There are some other procedural steps that have to happen before the actual vote on the health care reform bill takes place but last night’s vote (taken at 1 a.m. Eastern Time) was a vote on whether or not the US Senate should actually vote on the health care reform bill. Last night’s vote was not a vote on the actual bill – which could still fail – but a vote on whether or not that vote should happen.
And last night, every single Republican in the Senate voted against allowing a vote on health care reform legislation. Every last one. After spending years whining about how the filibuster was being used unfairly and demanding that everything should get an up or down vote in the Senate, Republicans now have filibusters in place on 70% of the bills in the Senate and dont’ want to let legislation get an up or down vote.
The phrase you are looking for is “What a bunch of hypocrites!”
#1 by Richard Warnick on December 21, 2009 - 10:30 am
If only I could remember Senate Democrats filibustering the USA PATRIOT Act, or the Iraq AUMF, or the Military Commissions Act…
#2 by brewski on December 21, 2009 - 11:26 am
Glenden,
You are the hypocrite. You are now whining about fillibusters and delays but cheered it on when the Dems were doing it not to block legislation, but were using it for confirmations.
People who live in glass houses…..
#3 by Glenden Brown on December 21, 2009 - 11:36 am
brewski – There you go! You can’t actually defend what the Republicans are doing so you’ve invented an attack on me! Typical conservative tactics from another conservative hack.
#4 by brewski on December 21, 2009 - 3:58 pm
Except I used facts about you.
By the way, I have made a couple of more detailed analysis as to why the health care bill sucks and those posts seem to be disappeared.
#5 by Glenden Brown on December 21, 2009 - 4:03 pm
brewski – you are still continuing your invented attack – by pretending that calling me a hypocrite was factual when it was nothing more than a rhetorical smear, a dishonest attempt to derail discussion. Be a man, fess up, it’s okay – sometimes we get carried away in discussion.
I haven’t been watching the spam filter very much today so I’ll check and see if your comments are hung up there – it’s been an active day, when I logged in this a.m. there were over 70 spam comments.
#6 by brewski on December 21, 2009 - 7:55 pm
If person A is for X and against Y and person B is against X and for Y, then person A is against X and for Y, and person B is for X and against Y, and then person A calls person B a hypocrite when just as conclusively person A is just as much of a hypocrite.
#7 by Dwight Sheldon Adams on December 22, 2009 - 1:38 pm
Hypocrisy is the name of the game in Washington. We should expect nothing less at this point. When Repubs hold the majority again, they’ll continue to whine about filibusters. Maybe at that time we’ll have 90% of all laws being filibustered, and they’ll finally get the clue. But one thing remains pretty true–Democrats have done at least a little to try to get rid of filibusters, and many liberals are at present arguing that they should be more limited.
This blog discusses what Rachel Maddow talked about last night: that over the last 60 years, filibusters have jumped from being used on an average 6% of laws to 60%. Is it just me, or are filibusters stratifying law faster than our economy is stratifying income?
Maybe, just maybe, we need better Senate rules. The rules we have now enable Senators to carry on the hypocrisy-nobility-hypocrisy-nobility flip-flop election cycle after election cycle. This isn’t just true for procedure or the principles of democracy, either–this same cycle occurs on ideological grounds all of the time. Still, there’s something to be said for a majority that’s willing to actually support a reduced filibustering power: they must think they’ll be in power forever, be willing to do anything to win in the short term, or (and this is a stretch) they’re risking their own future power for the sake of principles and the nation. Which is being done now?
Dwight Sheldon Adams
#8 by brewski on December 22, 2009 - 1:42 pm
I agree Dwight. The problem is that on planet Glenden, only Repiblicans are hypocrites, not Democrats.
#9 by Kevin Owens on December 22, 2009 - 2:56 pm
This is just an example of realpolitik in action. No politician complains about filibusters on principle, he complains about them because they’re being used to block his pet legislation. We can expect our congressmen to use any and all tactics available to them to get results.
If filibusters are allowed, they will be used. We should expect no less.
#10 by Glenden Brown on December 22, 2009 - 3:39 pm
brewski – Maybe you ought to demonstrate reading skills before agreeing with Dwight – since what he wrote isn’t actually what you claim to agree with.
#11 by Dwight Sheldon Adams on December 23, 2009 - 12:29 pm
I would just say that this is a self-referential perspective–the unwillingness of individuals to stand up for their ideological will is frequently defended by their insistence that no such will does or can exist. Put more simply, the hypocrite excuses his hypocrisy by saying that everyone else is doing it, too.
I think you know better, so the above analysis can be reserved for others who would make the same verbal argument, but with their own nuances. I will, however, assert that your own dependence on pragmatic principles in your argumentation (whether they are equally applied to your life choices, I somewhat doubt) tends to bend your statements and attitudes towards pragmatic absolutism. I believe that you expect that no politician makes ideological decisions in these situations because your conceptual vision of people in their position won’t allow for it. It’s my experience that both your conceptual visions of people and my own, when so greatly restricted in their categories, tend to be false.
Let me throw an alternative perspective at you, by real-world example: consider the politicians who were in control of the Executive over the last two Presidential terms. Now, I could easily attribute their actions to the realpolitik, but maybe there’s another interpretation.
Maybe when Bush quoted Churchill (quote here), he was revealing his own pragmatism–the tactics of the presidency. Or, as I have frequently considered, maybe he was amongst those people who felt that the ideological values he was protecting were so precious that the breaking of certain rules was necessary. If so, such actions were not realpolitik; they were the very essence of idealism, i.e. they sought the ideal at any and every cost.
While I still disagree with his positions, you can see the way that idealism or realpolitik can accomplish the same ultimate ends, even with identical means. In a strictly quantitative sense, the mechanisms of either government operation are identical. The qualitative value, however, in that it possesses the distilled intent of the actions taken, is significantly better–possibly even respectable.
In the present situation–the context of the Senate filibuster and vote–the same variability in intent and perspective exists. It’s easy to ascribe actions which carry identical traits but variable, unknowable motives to whichever motive best fits or serves your perspective. Consider, however, that the “wheeling and dealing,” while unsavory and far from ideal, may be the only way that grand idealists in the Senate perceive to accomplish a goal they consider so important as to challenge their own popularity and the future power of their party. Democratic reforms of the last century have had a tendency to be somewhat more intelligible in the long-term than the short, and this lends itself more fully to an ideological interpretation. Furthermore, this fact decreases the likelihood that a body that is poised to give its popularity to the dogs in a massive gamble is doing so simply for tactical reasons, with no mind for future effects.
None of this can be known for sure, of course. But while your interpretation, which includes language like “This is just. . .”, “No politician. . .” (emphasis mine), “any and all”, and “If. . .they will. . .” (emphasis mine), is possible, it’s highly unlikely that there exists not a single soul amongst that 100 that has an ideological stance regarding the filibuster, for which he will stand above and beyond the call of mere pragmatism. If you feel that you, in their position, would do as you’ve described, then your judgment is harsh because your own ideological positioning is worthy of it–you should seek exceptions to the rule you’ve created before internally verifying it, if this is the case. If you feel that you would not behave in that way, then you already have an internal denial of the absolutism you’ve proposed. Unless, of course, you fall into the trap of believing that politicians have to entirely sell their soul to a set of debaucheries you have defined in order to obtain positions of power. I think the inadequacy of that position, however, is self-evident.
Dwight Sheldon Adams