Dave Weigel notes the underreported fact that Frank Lautenberg hasn't been healthy enough to vote for some time now, and that his missing vote could scuttle the gun bill. And that this matters, in part, because the Senate did not adopt the flipped responsibility on cloture -- one of the relatively minor reforms that was proposed but rejected in January was changing the cloture rules from 60 votes needed for cloture to 41 votes needed to prevent cloture.
Now...on the other hand, I'm really not convinced that it's going to matter in this case. A bill (or key amendment) that can't get 6 Republicans (assuming all 54 other Democrats vote and vote for the bill, which is hardly certain) is probably doomed in the House, anyway. If I had to speculate, I'd guess that the gun bill needs at least 10 of the 45 Republican Senators to stand a decent chance in the House. Although I suppose there's a possibility, for example, that a Senator could vote against Manchin-Toomey but still vote for cloture on the final bill...the final bill probably needs strong support to have a chance in the House, but perhaps there may be important votes that really need "only" 60.
Still, the logic of 41 to sustain cloture vs. 60 to defeat it is awfully strong...although there's no particular reason that the rules on this should be, well, logical. After all, the 3/5 standard is arbitrary to begin with -- there's a logic of sort to supermajority, but not really for this particular supermajority. Also: remember that switching to 41-to-sustain would not lead to any other particular burden for the minority; in particular, it wasn't going to lead to surprise cloture votes to try to catch the minority with Senators too far from the Senate floor to vote.
At any rate: nice catch!
"Also: remember that switching to 41-to-sustain would not lead to any other particular burden for the minority; in particular, it wasn't going to lead to surprise cloture votes to try to catch the minority with Senators too far from the Senate floor to vote."
ReplyDeleteWhy not? Couldn't Reid engineer such a thing? Or would a rule like that force the Republicans to have one Senator on the floor at all times to object/note the absence of a quorum?
Why not? Comity. And rightly so: you really wouldn't want to run a legislature with surprise votes to catch the minority out of school.
DeleteOTOH, there would be some hardship involved in making sure all 41 were there for a scheduled vote; as it stands now, only "yes" votes matter on cloture votes.
That makes sense.
DeleteThen again, we see that kind of chicanery in state legislatures quite often. And episodes like the Medicare Part D vote in the House are only a stones-throw away from such tactics.
I also wouldn't want to run a legislature that allows the minority to obstruct everything, but here we are. Why is comity always only ever applied against majoritarianism, rather than minoritarian obstructionism?
DeleteA truly, deeply pedantic (and semantic) quibble, but isn't cloture the action of shutting off debate, and therefore, in principle, ending a filibuster? So that 'sustaining cloture' should mean defeating a filibuster and allowing a simple majority vote?
ReplyDeleteAs I say, a pure semantic quibble on what 'sustain cloture' means, with zero bearing on the substantive question of whether the minority should have to take an affirmative act to filibuster, versus the majority having to take an affirmative act to avert it.