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Inside Views
You Can't Always Get
What You Want
The recent passage of health care legislation a
couple weeks back by the U.S. Senate was really
touch and go. Not because the passage was ever in
doubt.
The difficulty was the ability to end debate and
bring the motion to a vote.
While passing a piece of legislation requires a
simple majority of 51 votes, ending debate requires
60 votes. These 60 votes were only garnered by
serious changes to the legislation and huge bribes
to a couple of western and southern senators.
Many think this oddly called cloture rule is
unconstitutional and not what our founding fathers
intended.
Cloture rules which end debate, sometimes called
filibuster, are a tool of the minority. They are
used to prevent important matters from being
decided.
While it is true that the founding fathers did not
include the cloture concept in the Constitution, I
think they would see it as an important and useful
rule. The Constitution was designed to provide
checks and balances.
Its intent was to ensure that studious effort went
into any decision, and that compromise was achieved.
The thought of ramming something through would have
been abhorrent to its framers.
The tyranny of the majority was a key concept to
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the two major
intellects behind the Constitution. They understood
that for a democracy to succeed, the rights of the
minorities had to be protected from the passions of
the majority.
In fact, the Senate was set up primarily to ensure
this. At the time the Constitution was written there
were 13 states. Some like Virginia and New York had
large populations. Others like Rhode Island and
Vermont did not. The small states needed protection
from the large states and a body that equally
represented all states
would offset the power of population as represented
in the House of Representatives. The Senate was to
be another check on the passions of a majority
faction.
Okay, so why wasn’t this enough? Why did someone
come up with the idea of the filibuster and later
the concept of cloture to bring filibusters to an
end?
What Madison and Hamilton did not foresee was the
ascendency of political parties, at least when they
were framing the Constitution. Parties are by
definition factions. Their power is their ability to
get their members elected and then control them once
they are in office. In this country for some reason
we have always had two major parties, meaning a
majority faction and a minority faction.
Interestingly, when Hamilton started running the
government (he was Secretary of the Treasury in
Washington’s administration), he did an about-face
and created the first faction which ultimately
became the Federalist Party. He did this so he could
ram his agenda through Congress. Thomas Jefferson,
his arch enemy, founded the Democratic-Republicans
with James Madison to stymie Hamilton and push his
own agenda.
Filibusters came along in the 1840s as a way for the
minority to stop the majority from doing what it
wanted. The idea of closing off debate, i.e. ending
a filibuster, was a new rule added during the Wilson
administration. Back then, it took 67 votes to end a
debate.
The legislative strategy of using debate to prevent
action is as old as this country. It has often been
used to prevent or delay very admirable pieces of
legislation. One of the most effective filibusters
was Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia using the
technique in an attempt to prevent the passage of
civil rights legislation by a coalition of northern
Republican and Democratic senators.
More recently, when the Senate was controlled by
Republicans during the Bush administration, there
was a lot of talk about reforming the system of
cloture. At that time the minority Democrats were
using filibusters to block judicial appointments and
prevent an earlier attempt at health care reform
known as association-based
health plans.
So pray that we keep the present system. The health
care bill that finally passed is a lot better than
it would have been without cloture. You may not
always get what you want, but this system prevents
the tyranny of the majority.
James Coyle
President
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