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Filibuster: the use of extreme dilatory tactics in an attempt to delay or prevent action especially in a legislative assembly

I believe, at my heart, that the concept of the Senate filibuster, as it stands now, is an process that subverts democracy and incites partisanship.

It subverts the democratic process by allowing a “tyranny of the minority”. Those who are of the minority opinion have the ability to block any legislation that they disagree with. It would be as if the losing side of an election prevented the candidates seating by talking ad infinitum.

I also believe that it fuels the partisanship that is currently splitting the U.S. by forcing the minority party to band together to prevent legistlation they feel is wrong which, in turn, forces the majority party to band together to fight the minority. These groups then become an “all-or-nothing” approach to politics. You are either with the party or against it. There is no middle ground.

So what is the solution? I believe there are two possible ways to help fix the divide. Either eliminate the filibuster option altogether or return it to it’s pre-1975 levels.

By eliminating the filibuster, we eliminate the tyranny of the minority. No longer will a group be able to block legislation from passing by talking it to death (which doesn’t happen anymore, it’s now just a procedural filibuster). Instead legislation will be presented, debated, then voted. Simple democracy at it’s best, but obviously a massive change in the Senate balance of power. The minority will lose it’s ability to block what they perceive to be harmful legislation. Obviously this has to be proposed by the minority, otherwise it will be viewed as an attempt by the majority to grab power. But the benefits may out-weigh the risks. First, it allows legislation to be passed quickly and without needing to gather together a super majority. Secondly, there will no longer be unified blocks and provides incentive for Senators to vote for what they feel is best for their constituents and the country instead of towing the party line. Theoretically. Of course, built into this revocation of the filibuster would be a new law that says that to re-enable to filibuster would require some 2/3 majority vote or some other such language.

Alternately we can return to the pre-1975 filibuster rules. Prior to 1975 if you wanted to filibuster, you had to actually engage in the filibuster. Someone had to “read the from the phone book”, holding up the legislation, passing to the next filibusterer when exhausted. Now all you have to do is file paperwork to say you are filibustering (rule 22). As a result senators can just hide away in a group, file the paperwork, and not have to do anything else. The majority then puts the legislation aside until it has gathered the requisite 60 votes. And with today’s climate, 60 votes isn’t that hard. But in the pre-1975 days you needed 67 votes, a much harder number to reach. By going back to the pre-1975 filibuster rules you force the senators to engage in bi-partisanship, and failing that you force the minority to engage in actual work to keep their filibuster in play. Both of which are better than the current “here’s the paperwork, see you when you got 60″ concept. This would again shift power, but this time towards the minority, which means that the majority would have to propose it.

As it stands now, the filibuster is a broken concept that forces people to choose black or white from an otherwise gray world. That’s not the American way.

Because of an obscure foot note in the annals of the SCOTUS, corporations are considered persons for all intensive purposes.  But unlike real people, they can’t die, are not subject to criminal prosecution (members can be, but corporation can’t), and they can derive their membership from inside and outside the country (there’s no requirement that an American be the head of a corporation). Their large cash reserves and departments of lawyers can influence policies on a massive scale, and they have no reason to obey any social morals.  Instead, they are semi-parasitic entities on our society, contributing as little as possible for maximum gain (which is not a bad thing. We all do that to an extent, just not to the same effect a corporation can).  If you have any doubt, look at how copyright law has been manipulated and extended ad-infinitum to keep content owned (since they don’t actually create) by the corporation out of the public domain and protected by our government against infringement (I’m looking at you Disney!).

There was hope.  The McCain-Feingold bill and prior SCOTUS precedent put limits on corporations.  This meant that corporations, while still considered a person, were limited by what they could spend on any given election within certain periods of time.  So corporation X couldn’t spend millions to get candidate Y elected because candidate Y is willing to give them no-bid contracts.

But that changed today.  The SCOTUS issued a ruling on the Citizens United v. FEC case which basically says that corporations (and unions), because they are have personhood, are allowed the same rights as anyone else, including the First Amendment, which means that there are no limits for them.

To put this in perspective, if a quarter of the people in the state of Alaska contributed $100 each to a Congressional Senator candidate’s campaign that comes out to almost $17.5 million.  While that is not exactly chump change, it is small potatoes for any of the Fortune 500 who might have a vested interest in some Alaskan resource.  And that’s just a Federal election.  Imagine how much a corporation could out-spend on local elections.  They could probably get a complete moron elected to be Governor.

Justice Stevens had this to say in the dissenting opinion:

. . . . corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their “personhood” often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.

I can’t agree more. With this ruling, democracy died a little bit more today and we’ve moved a little farther towards a world where only corporations have a vote.

References: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood_debate

Everyone is entitled to their belief system.  Whether you are a Christian, Buddhist, or other faith, you have the right to believe what you want.  We as a society have decided that.  But when a news commentator, like Brit Hume evangelizes to Tiger Woods to convert to Christianity on a news show, it crosses a line.

It shows that he lacks a fundamental understanding of how faith works.  Brit may be a Christian, believing in all the tenants of the faith, but Tiger Woods is not.  A professed Buddhist, he does not believe in Jesus as the Messiah.  It’s not that Tiger is given a choice between Christianity and Buddhism, it’s a matter of faith and belief.  Just like Brit Hume does not believe in Thor or Muhammad, Tiger does not believe in the divinity of Jesus.  To say “turn to the Christian faith” would be like a Muslim turning to Brit Hume and saying “turn to Islam”.  It’s not something one easily does because the belief in the fundamental tenants are not there to support faith needed to take up a new religious world view.

Much like Pascel’s Wager, Brit Hume is assuming that there are only two choices, Christianity and “Not Christianity”.  That is not the way the world works.  Tiger may convert to Christianity (or any other religion) as a result of his troubling times, but that will be after a long road of spiritual exploration, not some newscaster saying turn to Christianity.  To believe otherwise is just plain ignorance.