Thread by @bethanylilly

All right. I've had a couple glasses of wine and it's been a really, really long week. So let's talk about the legislative filibuster.

The filibuster is the rule that the Senate has that certain things requires 60 votes rather than a simple 51 vote majority.

You may be confused by this because a lot of legislation has been considered lately that is only required 51 votes. The most prominent example of this would be the 2017 health care fight over the repeal of Obamacare.

Technically, that legislation was a type of legislation called a budget reconciliation which has different rules.

I am not even going to try and explain budget reconciliation because I have been doing politics for almost a decade and I still don't understand it. If you would like to read a Congressional Research Service report on it, there's one here: google.com/url?sa=t&sourc…

(if you are a young policywonk, you should spend a lot of time reading CRS reports. I always go to them as a first source.)

But TLDR, to pass legislation RN in the United States Senate, you need 60 votes. Because any individual senator can institute a filibuster and hold the vote unless 60 senators vote to overturn that individual senator's objections.

If you want to use budget reconciliation, the rules are really f****** complicated and you can't do certain things. One of those rules relates to trust funds. Because Social Security is funded by a trust fund.

I will say at this point that you may have heard of budget reconciliation because someone was talking about something Congress was going to do called a "bird bath".

It's actually a "Byrd bath" named after former Senator Byrd. Again, see CRS: everycrsreport.com/reports/RL3086…

But Senator Bryd wanted to protect Social Security and so there are extra rules when it comes to budget reconciliation and Social Security.

and those rules are really helpful in some ways because it means that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to do anything about Social Security. But it also means that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to do anything about Social Security.

Are Social Security benefits too low? Yes. Are Social Security benefits not fully funded for the next 75 years? Yes. How do we fix this? Well, we raise payroll taxes. And the sooner we do that, the cheaper it is going to be for everyone in the long run.

Rep. Larson has a bill in that would modestly raise the Social Security taxes you see on your paycheck to fund more generous benefits for low-income folks who haven't been able to save for retirement and make sure that every higher income earner is paying their fair share.

(At this point, I'm going to mention that anyone who makes over a certain amount of money--$137,700 in 2020--doesn't pay Social Security taxes on income above that cap and that's f****** wrong.)

But to make any changes to Social Security, we need 60 votes. To ensure higher income earners are paying their fair share, toake sure that seniors and PWD who rely only on Social Security are not living in poverty--all of that, requires 60 votes.

So in a lot of ways, the filibuster protects Social Security the most of all social programs.

And I still want a nuke the filibuster the minute that Democrats have control of the Senate.

Because we can't do any of the other positive stuff unless we get rid of the filibuster.

Do you think SGA is too low and we really should make it higher because you can't live on $1260 a month in the US? Nuke the filibuster.

Do you think that seniors and people with disabilities shouldn't live in poverty and we should raise the average Social Security benefit? Nuke the filibuster.

Do you think we should make sure that the highest income earners are paying their fair share towards Social Security? Nuke the filibuster.

Thank you for coming to my Twitter thread.