U.S. Senate
www.c-span.org
The Senate will vote to advance President Trump's nomination of Matthew Whitaker to be the U.S. Ambassador to NATO. He previously served as Acting Attorney General during the first Trump Administration.

The filibuster is expected to go through the night, against fast-tracked nominees by the Trump Administration. Booker’s protest appears to be in response to a recent wave of Republican nominees being fast-tracked through the confirmation process, many of whom are aligned with Trump’s second-term agenda and Elon Musk’s increasingly influential role in federal advisory circles.

  • vvilld@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 days ago

    This is where we are now with the filibuster. Pretty much every single bill that doesn’t enjoy broad bipartisan support gets a silent filibuster as a matter of course. This means that basically all legislation coming out of the Senate requires 60 votes to pass. That means that the minority gets to set the agenda since it’s easier to come up with 41 votes against something than 60 votes for something. This contributes to and feeds off of the hyper polarization in our politics. A minority party knows that if they can just keep all their members in line, they can easily block pretty much anything the majority wants to do unless it gets enough national attention that blocking it would garner negative press on the minority party. But even that is heavily mitigated by the existence of stuff like Fox News and media echochambers (of which, the Right is WAY better at creating and controlling).

    It’s also important to recognize that the silent filibuster is a big part of how we got to the point in our politics where Congress is so incredibly dysfunctional that Trump can actually just ignore and bypass Congress as much as he wants. All the shit he’s done since taking office this time has been done without Congress. In a previous era, that might have drawn a lot more criticism, even from his own party. But the existence of the silent filibuster and 60 vote threshold to pass legislation has created the conditions where we’re all used to Congress not doing anything at all. People want action, and they’re used to Congress not being able to do anything, so Trump doing it through Executive Order seems like a relief to them. And the same thing, although to a much less authoritarian degree, happened under Biden, Obama, and W Bush, too. Remember Biden trying to cancel student loans through EO? Remember Obama creating DACA by EO or telling the DEA to not enforce cannabis prohibition in states where cannabis is legal? That’s all stuff Congress is supposed to be doing but can’t because of the silent filibuster and 60 vote threshold.

    Since the late 90s, any speaking filibuster in the Senate, like we’re seeing Booker do now, is purely political theater. It’s done to attract national attention and news coverage, not to actually block or prevent legislation. Which is fine, so long as we all understand the purpose. Political theater is important to actually getting stuff done sometimes because it can drive mass action or sentiment.

    My overall point here, though, is that everything about this history of the filibuster and how it works today was the result of short-term thinking to solve an immediate problem without consideration of the long-term consequences.