If they vote to change the rules with a simple majority, I don’t see the Supreme Court doing anything about it. If they want to change the rules, they will, but they’ll rue the day when the gate swings the other way.

….the GOP Senate must aggressively stand up against this…now

IMO the GOP fight against this one has to happen and it can’t be half way. The Dems have broken the law for the entire last two years and the GOP has been less than cream puffs (on purpose.)

The GOP must fight any cloture on this piece of #$%^ bill and filibuster against it (they still can now) even if it temporarily puts half of them in the hospital from exhaustion from speaking.

No compromise on this. The way I see it, this is a hill to take at all costs, now. There is no room to wait until 2012 and then get back changing the rules again. It will take too long and it won’t work even with the change.

Fight now!! This will be the cornerstone to any forward movement in any of the other critical areas that need to be fought..now. The Dems know this and that is why they want to continue to break the law. They know their legislation is garbage and illegal otherwise they wouldn’t have to attempt this.

GOP Senate, don’t you think it is about time you fought HARD for something other than keeping your earmarks and attacking the Tea Parties (IE the American people) ??? Start your fight against the DemComms for once, and start it now!

Why not use it to protect it?

…the scary “nuclear option” when the GOP briefly considered it a few years ago?
Why is it okay for Dems to do it, but not for Republicans(he asked rhetorically)?

Then were the secession of states constitutional as they rescinded their “permanent membership” in the United States ?
Under the doctrine stated in this article…secession of states from the union is completely constitutional.

Regardless of some nonsense in the American Prospect, the main proposals being discussed by Udall and Merkley do not involve killing the filibuster.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/Senate%20Procedures%20Reform%20Memo.pdf

Some of these proposals seem a little abstruse. However, what is eminently reasonable is requiring continuous debate in order to continue a filibuster. That is not a trampling of American traditions. Far from it. It’s a return to what was true before the changes Democrats made to the rules in the 70s. I wonder if those changes were made with a simple majority?

We should return to the Senate rules of past years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/opinion/10martin.html?_r=1

“Progressives” would resort to skulduggery to effect a rules change?; That they would LIE about something to create an impression that they actually have the authority to do whatever it is they wish to do?; That they would do this here in America? and so soon after Christmas?

Next I suppose you’ll be telling us that there actually is neither a Santa Claus nor a Tooth Fairy.

We’ll have the House to check whatever legislation comes out of there for the next years at least. I don’t see us winning more than the 13 seats needed to gain a supermajority in 2012 to undo Obamacare or do the things we want, like privatize social security or possibly get a flat or fair tax through. So in 2012 we could have the House, the Presidency, and a Senate without having to have supermajorities to get through our agenda.

What am I missing? Didn’t we want this when we had simple majorities and the Dems were filibustering us?

Put an end to the filibuster. It has always struck me as wrong and misleading, and I hoped when Republicans were in power that they would do away with it.

In my mind the filibuster is like setting your clock ahead by a few minutes. Just because your clock is set ahead 10 minutes doesn’t change the actual time. The filibuster has caused us all to be programmed to think that just because we have 40 + 1 R’s that we are safe from the left’s bad legislation. But did that help us in the 111th congress? No. Did it help us in the 110th Congress? No. You can argue that it helped kill cap and trade, but the EPA is moving forward with that regardless, and if they had passed it more Senate Dems would have lost their seats last Nov.

If right-leaning Americans were programmed to think of the Senate as a body that acts like the House, requiring only a simple majority to pass legislation, perhaps more attention would have been paid to the close Senate races that we lost. Instead, we are still in the minority but we seem to think that is a good thing because of the filibuster. The filibuster helps neither party, except in the rare case of Mr. Smith who defeated the Public Works bill in 1939.

“The Nation” what a name for a far left liar haven of distorted facts, even their TV ads admit “Bias” Bias is leaving out relevant information so “liberal bias” is less reliable but this woman doesn’t care about the constitution.

Its all about power and lack of consensus in voting. Dems want to bum rush bills through without debate so they can snob their noses at the people far faster than before. But will they like the 50 vote rule when they are the minority?

Stephen Cohen is Katina’s husband, he’s a well known communist at Columbia University. They lived in Russia and decided to come home try to push people around. That is who Katrina is……….a communist posing as a liberal. She and many others are at fault for pushing aside the Blue Dogs and moderate dems in favor of moving the party further left which is also Nasty Pelosi’s plan because they all conspire together. You can watch the media movements in sync with such rabid ideas.

Pay attention to job titles by Da Nation employees, all are called Editors, not Journalists. Editors edit aka opinion and a lack of integrity for journalistic facts. She just got debunked with this article on filibuster. I’m sure Fecal Media Matters will defend her with lies to protect the communists. The October 2nd rally showed the nation just how many communists and socialists are out there.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/3/7/175055.shtml
Here’s the reason liberal has become a dirty word. Because Communists, fellow-travelers, pro-terrorists and terrorist sympathizers have hijacked the word liberal and because organs like the New York Times have abetted them, using “liberal” to describe anti-American radicals and even totalitarian radicals like Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Michael Moore, the organizers of the anti-Iraq and pro-Saddam “peace” movement, and Katrina vanden Heuvel and The Nation.

I hope everyone won’t think me a turncoat for signing this petition! I would not sign the vast majority of petitions offered by the below site, but this shouldn’t be a very partisan issue.

h ttp://campaigns.dailykos.com/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=17

I distinctly remember the editorial boards of the WaPo, the NYT, etc. shrieking that getting rid of the filibuster (note: the GOP proposal was to get rid of the filibuster strictly for judicial and executive branch nominations and leave it intact for legislation) would result in the destruction of the republic.

Now? Crickets.

Worse, I remember a chorus of idiots assuring us unsophisticated rubes that McCain’s foolish “Gang of 14″ deal meant that Democrats could be counted to refrain when they had the opportunity.

Where are they now?

Two years is shorter than they think.
It’s not like the last Republican Senate came anywhere near blocking a judicial nominee. As I recall they all sailed right through with more than enough votes.
Wasn’t Sotomayor confirmed with 68 votes and Kagan with 63….?

All throughout this thread I see people saying that the dems will rue the day…they’ll regret it…it will come back to bite them on the you-know-what.

Horsehockey.

When it no longer suits them, THEY’LL CHANGE IT BACK!
It’s how they operate. It’s what they do.

And the republicans will roll over. It’s what THEY do.

If we believe what you say then 60 Senators can change cloture to a unanimous vote and that new rule could never be changed without unanimous consent.
My guess is the courts won’t and shouldn’t interfere with a rules change by majority vote.
BUT-I can’t see the more centrist Democrats going along with this as it will neuter them. This is just red meat to divert the Dail Kooks base from the Obama Tax Cuts For The Rich and possibly a deficit compromise based on the dreaded “Catfood Commision”.

Here’s hoping Warner, Webb, and the rest of the phony moderate Donkeys are paying attention. Snowe, Collins, and the rest of the RINOs for that matter.

http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”

Americans did NOT want our health care turned into a bureaucratic nightmare and made this as clear as could be – we were ignored. We begged for jobs and received TARP, tax & chain energy policies, then trillions in pork which benefitted virtually no one except the parasites while jobs continued to tank and millions lost their homes. So much for our efforts “to petition for redress of grievances.”

We repudiated this surreal socialist nonsense at the polls only to see sour grapes lame ducks jam more of the same foulness through a circumvented legislative process – and now this. So much for “the will of the people.”

If the soap box and the ballot box don’t work, we still have one last resort . . . and while I would be very sorry to see this happen, it begins to seem inevitable. Dingy hairball reid would do well to reflect on this historical date ere he find himself reprising the role of Major Pitcairn in its repetition.

worth. I do not pretend to understand all of the Senate and parlimentary rules. I am not a lawyer and “law speak” makes my head spin. But let us look at the people pushing to get rid of the filibuster. Can anyone say “socialists/progressives”? All they have done the past two years is subvert the Constitution and make shameless power grabs. Are we supposed to believe that all of the sudden they have grown a conscience and now are die-hard Constitutionlists? Only if you are a simpleton. I completely oppose getting rid of the filibuster. It is one of the most important checks and balances our forefathers put in place. We must fight this with all we have.

And then ram everything right up their @$$E$ after the 2012 election.

It’s quite another to ignore the damage they can do in these last two years while our country perches on the brink of financial collapse. They could effectively push it over the brink, or at least give it a good try, in that time.
They need to be vocally pointed out for the hypocrites, liars and anti-constitutionalists that they are. This needs to be stopped. We need our Senators to be able to influence legislation and have a say in what’s going on.
This is NOT a precedent that we should allow to be set.

It’s quite another to ignore the damage they can do in these last two years while our country perches on the brink of financial collapse. They could effectively push it over the brink, or at least give it a good try, in that time.
They need to be vocally pointed out for the hypocrites, liars and anti-constitutionalists that they are. This needs to be stopped. We need our Senators to be able to influence legislation and have a say in what’s going on.
This is NOT a precedent that we should allow to be set. It needs to be stopped!

I mean just think its more than just stopping things, its also takes away the ability to slow things down so that they can be read. I remember several occasions where Demint or others used filibusters or the threat of filibuster to slow down things so they could be looked at more closely or things could be changed. I don’t have a problem with a single Senator being able to hold up an entire bill. That is the whole point behind the senate, thats why there are only 100 of them, thats why they are different than the house. If this gets through they are pretty much just a 100 person house of reps. What is the point other than to advance an unpopular agenda.

Just read the Senate Rules. There is no 51 vote option. Rule 5 continues the Rules to the next Senate, and allows them to be changed by a super-majority.

Otherwise, why would ANY Senate bother with minority rights, if them could simply, on day 1 say that they have supreme power and and forget the minority?

But the thinking is consistent with the thinking of Progssives, who have over the years weakened the power of States to halt Federal expansion (17th amendment) and pushed for the cloture rules under Wilson.

Let us not destroy our democracy.

The filibuster has been used more in this Congress because of the extreme lurch to the left that the Obama, Reid, Pelosi troika put forth. Thank God the process worked and our Constitution provide a check and balance to what most Americans did not want in the first place.

Our very DEMOCRACY lies in the balance.

go along with “kill the filibuster” they know that their party will not always be in charge.

interesting comments on any topic, anywhere, with the fewest trolls and with 4 or 5 posters who seem to know a lot about whereof they speak. Thanks!!

however they can, whether it’s constitutional or not. We have more work to do to change the majority in the Senate in 2012. There are 21 Dem senators up for reelection and and three real RINOs being Lugar(IN), Snowe (ME) and Scott Brown (MA). Brown occasionally votes with the Dems, so we have to watch him. You can get a list of the senators in Wikipedia. Don’t know yet how many of those up will actually run again. Watch how these Dems and rinos vote in the next 2 yrs.

..let ‘em do this. Everything can be stopped in the House, and in 2012 conservatives will have control of the Senate and NO filibuster available to the Marxists.

How can that be bad?

Hello America,

If progressive senators are Hell bent on destroying themselves and their party from ever seeing power in most Americans lifetime, let them pull this underhanded piece of treachery. That will add another 22 seats to the GOP, followed by most of what is left of the ideology of treachery in 2014. Keep digging you ‘useful idiots’. Way to go ‘Dingey’ Harry. You are the shovel that is going to bury the libs deep and permanent.

The Turban Torpedo