Filibuster or No Filibuster, Harry Reid is Still a Coward

Well, shit. It appears that forcing Senate repugs to "really" filibuster instead of just threatening it is not the solution many of us thought it would be.

Reid's office has studied the history of the filibuster and analyzed what options are available. The resulting memo was provided to the Huffington Post and it concludes that a filibustering Senator "can be forced to sit on the [Senate] floor to keep us from voting on that legislation for a finite period of time according to existing rules but he/she can't be forced to keep talking for an indefinite period of time."

Bob Dove, who worked as a Senate parliamentarian from 1966 until 2001, knows Senate rules as well as anyone on the planet. The Reid analysis, he says, is "exactly correct."

To get an idea of what the scene would look like on the Senate floor if Democrats tried to force Republicans to talk out a filibuster, turn on C-SPAN on any given Saturday. Hear the classical music? See the blue carpet behind the "Quorum Call" logo? That would be the resulting scene if Democrats forced a filibuster and the GOP chose not to play along.

As both Reid's memo and Dove explain, only one Republican would need to monitor the Senate floor. If the majority party tried to move to a vote, he could simply say, "I suggest the absence of a quorum."

The presiding officer would then be required to call the roll. When that finished, the Senator could again notice the absence of a quorum and start the process all over. At no point would the obstructing Republican be required to defend his position, read from the phone book or any of the other things people associate with the Hollywood version of a filibuster.

"You cannot force senators to talk during a filibuster," says Dove. "Delay in the Senate is not difficult and, frankly, the only way to end it is through cloture."

And cloture requires 60 votes. Democrats, short of Minnesota's Al Franken, have 58.

(Actually, there are only 56 U.S. Senators elected from the Democratic Party. Two non-Democratic Senators caucus with the Democrats: Bernie Sanders of Vermont, elected as an Independent, and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the sole member of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party. Socialist Sanders, as contemptuous as he is of Harry Reid and the other DINOs, is highly unlikely to vote with the repug minority. Lieberman, though a fucking Traitor and repug fellator who should be tarred and feathered and run out of the Senate on a rail, has to run for reelection in 2012 in a state where no republican can ever get elected and where he is barred for life from the Democratic Party. His only hope of reelection is to spend the next four years as Obama's bitch.)

Yes, Reid could propose changing the rules to reduce the cloture number to 55 or even 51. However, the cloture majority on a filibuster of the rule change would be not 60, but rather 2/3 of the Senators present - meaning as few as 34 repugs could stop the rule change.

Steve Benen asks "Now, can we talk about getting rid of the filibuster altogether?"

Fuck that. Now, can we talk about getting rid of the Senate altogether?