It. Has. Not. Been. Tradition. The. Whole. Time. You. Dink.
The filibuster is a mistake of the rewritten rules, which deleted the rule for “previous question,” a loophole exploited by the Southern slaveholding class and later the Dixiecrats. That is the history of the filibuster.
The idea that the Senate rules were built around — where the esteemed gentlemen of the Senate will just cordially decide to have a majority vote once debate is naturally exhausted — is not anywhere close to reality
If Aaron Burr hadn’t screwed up the rules and John Calhoun hadn’t taken advantage of it, we’d have no filibuster as we know it. Any attempts to fix it have just made things worse/easier to use, so I have a hard time supporting even reforms over abolition of it at this point.
1918: oh no progressives are filibustering war money. let’s create “cloture” to cut them off with 2/3rds of voting senators

1972: oh no filibusters are eating up floor time, let’s make a two-track system to dodge them

1975: oh no, 2/3rds is a lot, let’s make it a flat 60 votes
2013: oh no, the GOP is using filibusters to cut off our nominees and legislation. better make an exception for executive nominees only.

2017: oh no, a SCOTUS justice is being filibustered. better carve that out too, but leave the legislative filibuster in place for reasons
god, i have written so many pieces on the filibuster in the last year — at least 8 of them since Jan. 21, 2021.

some of my favorites:

msnbc.com/opinion/filibu…

msnbc.com/opinion/vice-p…

msnbc.com/opinion/joe-ma…
AND ALSO: the Founders didn’t invent the filibuster to provide for the rights of the minority! they did a bunch of other things in designing the Senate to prevent the rabble’s mood swings from shifting policy, but the filibuster ain’t one of them

msnbc.com/opinion/gop-fi…
(In retrospect, it’s the “you dink” that really makes this tweet sing)
the whole point of the Senate is not the filibuster, or “unlimited debate,” or even the “minority’s rights” idea

it’s that every state has the same number of representatives. the states are as powerful as ever in this format, to an extent that defies their relative sizes

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More from @HayesBrown

11 Jan
Sinema concluded her remarks by "urging other senators to contact her if they wanted to discuss the issue further.” And I would love to be a fly on the wall for one of those meetings. Or maybe present at one of those meetings. I could make charts.
"Manchin and Sinema need to let legislation live or die by the majority's will. If they truly want bipartisanship to have its day again, they need to be unafraid to let bills come to final votes, even if they find themselves voting with the minority.”

msnbc.com/opinion/joe-ma…
Read 4 tweets
10 Jan
You know how you can register to vote at the DMV? Mitch McConnell fought against that bill in 1992, calling it a “solution in search of a problem.”

He’s saying the exact same thing now about Dem bills making it easier to vote

msnbc.com/opinion/mitch-…
From 1992, again on the National Voter Registration Act: "Republicans, who twice in the last year used the threat of a filibuster to block the measure from coming to the floor, say the bill will encourage vote fraud.”

msnbc.com/opinion/mitch-…
McConnell DID say a lot of good things about the Voting Rights Act — before the Supreme Court gutted it. This was him in 2004, arguing for making DOJ preclearance permanent instead of needing reauthorization

msnbc.com/opinion/mitch-… Screenshot: "Republican Sens. Bill Frist of Tennessee,
Read 6 tweets
29 Sep 21
TO REPEAT MYSELF: “We should understand this effort as plastering the veneer of technocracy onto her already shallow version of moderation, where aesthetics are more important than policy.”

msnbc.com/opinion/sinema…
When I wrote this I considered the potential that it’d turn out Sinema has PLENTY of specifics and policy ideas! Or that she’d use the technocracy as a cover for caving to leadership’s plans! But no. She still has no idea what she actually wants except “big number get smaller"
Read 5 tweets
28 Sep 21
New from me: I wrote on the most benignly weird thing that we’ve learned about the Trump era to date — WH staff using the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber to calm down the former president’s rages — and why it makes perfect sense

msnbc.com/opinion/trump-…
Come for the AMAZING art from @chelseastahl, stay for my extremely on-brand discussion of the Trump-ALW overlap

msnbc.com/opinion/trump-…
"Everything is overwrought” in a Webber hit. "If there isn’t a parade of dancing cats following the loosest plot heretofore discovered by man, there’s an entire chandelier crashing on stage, and a legion of exhausted first sopranos strewn in his wake.”

msnbc.com/opinion/trump-…
Read 4 tweets
14 Sep 21
New from me: Kyrsten Sinema, we learned in an Axios article, has a secret weapon in her fight to winnow down Democrats' $3.5 spending plan — spreadsheets

…As you might guess, I was not impressed.

msnbc.com/opinion/sinema…
If you read the article, you wouldn’t get many more details than that.

Sinema doesn’t want Democrats spending too much.

She has spreadsheets tracking that spending.

That’s it.

msnbc.com/opinion/sinema…
So why does this article exist? Simple — to give Sinema the veneer of technocratic competency.

She has SPREADSHEETS. She is collecting DATA.

Which obscures something missing from the article: There’s no discussion of WHAT that data represents.

msnbc.com/opinion/sinema…
Read 8 tweets
3 Sep 21
New from me: one thing that ties together the Republican agenda lately is the sheer creativity on display as rules, laws, and norms are bent, twisted, and invented out of whole cloth in the pursuit of power

msnbc.com/opinion/texas-…
The conservative wing of SCOTUS’s use of the shadow docket? Novel.

The Texas GOP writing a law that makes nobody and everybody responsible for enforcing it? Groundbreaking.

Trumpists taking over precinct officer roles for elections? Visionary.

msnbc.com/opinion/texas-…
Meanwhile, Democrats are, well, conservative in how they think about The Rules. And it’s forcing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs in the face of an onslaught of inventive chaos from the GOP.

msnbc.com/opinion/texas-… What we’re seeing from Democrats is not only a lack of ima
Read 4 tweets

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