The Republicans want to pull a lot of stunts and try to make things difficult for the Democrats. But they are lazy:
They are very low energy about this stuff. In the following discussion of filibuster reform josh Marshall addresses the idea of making them a “talking” filibuster, or some form thereof. This one would require that they all stay around:
For instance, what if … the Majority Leader could bring a bill to a vote and to block it the minority would have to get forty votes on the floor to say no. You could mix that with some requirement to stay on the floor to keep it up. I guarantee you that would get old for the minority party really quick. That is not only hard to do – have everyone available at a moment’s notice – it’s visible. If Democrats were trying to get a vote on the minimum wage under this system you’d have repeated instances of the Democrats starting to hold a vote only to have 40 Republicans show up and say no we won’t let you hold a vote. That’s a bad look. And it’s central to the modern filibuster that it’s function doesn’t ‘look’ like anything. Because, as I said, it’s invisible.
How long would they keep it up?
We don’t entirely have to speculate.
This is what prompted me to discuss this today. The conciliation process actually has what amounts to a talking filibuster embedded within it – at least to a degree. And it just started this morning. It’s generally called the “vote-o-rama”. Basically there is an unlimited opportunity to offer amendments, all of which have to be voted on. It’s unlimited. So Republicans can basically just keep offering amendments indefinitely. But they don’t. That never, ever happens. Never. They get tired of it. They won’t to go to dinner. They want to go to the beach. They need to go to a fundraiser. They want to go home and go to sleep. No less important, after a certain number of days they would start to seem ridiculous.
One Senate veteran tells me that it’s not quite the same because at a certain point the chair can say the amendments have become ‘dilatory’, basically an obvious and excessive delaying tactic. It then goes to the parliamentarian for a ruling. But as we’ve just seen a majority can overrule the parliamentarian. At the end of the day, if 51 votes say it’s dilatory it’s dilatory and that’s the end. But there’s little question that the process could be delayed much, much longer than it normally is before that cudgel came into play.
This tells me pretty clearly – I mean, we have a clear test case – that if the filibuster required an on-going concrete action from the GOP it wouldn’t go on very long at all. As indeed, this vote-o-rama won’t go on for that long. Annoying, a spectacle, a time to make the majority wait. But it won’t go on that long.
I raise all this because if there’s a positive end game to all this battle for majority rule in Congress it’s ‘reform’ that allows folks like Manchin and Schumer to say they didn’t ‘abolish’ the filibuster. They saved the filibuster for future generations! By reforming it and taking away the incentives to get rid of it. But such reforms would likely make all the difference in the world for the reasons I note here.
They couldn’t even sustain their stupid “read the bill” stunt.
Marshall is right here about how to frame this for the Manchin and Sinema types who think their voters stay up night worrying about the filibuster: “Mend it don’t end it!” It could work.