The Blues of Self-Regulation

One of the odder tropes of current conservative discourse related to the possibility of constraining the excesses of the Trump administration is blaming (who else?) Democrats for eliminating institutional checks available to the minority party, like the filibuster. What's weird about this is that if conservatives actually believe that such constraints are important parts of our system of checks and balances, they're absolutely free to restore them. Nobody's stopping them. But the idea that Republicans will self-regulate is seen as transparently absurd by all parties -- Republicans included.

Yet there's an even more fundamental absurdity: the implication that were it not for Democrats changing the rule-in-question sometime in the past eight years, the rule would be there to constrain Republicans. The problem being that, even when Democrats didn't change a rule protecting the minority party, Republicans haven't even blinked before casting them aside the minute they interfered with their partisan agenda. We already saw this with filibusters on Supreme Court nominees (Democrats abolished the filibuster for lower-court nominees, but not SCOTUS). And now GOP Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is proposing that the Senate eliminate the "blue slip" rule, which allows Senators to block judicial nominations in their home states. Democrats had kept that rule despite its use by GOP Senators to obstruct Democratic judicial nominations in the Obama administration. But -- surprise, surprise -- it turns out that whether Democrats keep or change a minority-protective rule has absolutely no bearing on whether Republicans want to keep it.

Standing Against the Tide

Ted Cruz's filibuster of futility has come to a close, but his office claims that the people are behind him: nearly 3,000 phone calls, as of late last night, mostly supportive.

I'm not saying I doubt the figure or the distribution, but I'm curious if a Senate office has ever released figures that said their boss got "almost 3,000 phone calls, mostly calling for his head on a spike."

In related news, just 14% of Americans support defunding Obamacare via government shutdown, versus 65% opposed.

Auto-Filibuster

On Friday, Kevin Drum stated that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was in a bit of pickle due to the particular procedural posture of the government funding bill. Cruz, of course, wants to stop the funding of the Affordable Care Act. Now, the normal Republican tool to stop anything they don't like is a filibuster. But procedurally Cruz can only filibuster the bill before cloture is called, and before cloture is called the bill is still the House bill -- which is to say, still defunds Obamacare. Once cloture passes, then Harry Reid will offer an amendment restoring funding to the ACA, but both the amendment and the final bill itself will only require 50 votes to pass. Oh no! Whatever will Cruz do?

I wish I had the foresight to put this on paper, because I promise I predicted the right answer: he'll filibuster his own bill, the one that actually does defund Obamacare. This may mark the first time a Senator has filibustered a bill that he fervently supports, but many things about this debate have been unprecedented.

Once he heard about that possibility, Drum thought it would come off as "ridiculous". I'm not exactly sure that's true -- the niceties of Senate procedure won't interest the average tv viewer, who will generally view the matter as Cruz trying to stop Obamacare from being refunded. The wonky procedural posture that leads Cruz to be filibustering what is essentially his own bill will be chalked up to that strange institution the Senate, just as Harry Reid often is seen voting against his own bills in order to preserve a later motion for reconsideration.

Of course, that doesn't mean the ploy will work -- it still would result in a government shutdown for which Republicans would assuredly be blamed, and they do not want that (and resent Cruz for foisting it upon them). But that Cruz was nutty enough to try this gambit I had no doubt about.

UPDATE: And now he just voted to consider the bill he just spent 20 hours railing against.

New Opposition

Regarding pressure on Democratic Senators from more conservative locales to vote nay on such things as public choice, Matt Yglesias writes:

If the issue were really that Ben Nelson has a deep-seated desire to advance a progressive legislative agenda but worries about how it’ll play back home in Nebraska, it would be easy enough for him to decide that the key priorities on which Barack Obama won a national mandate last November all deserve an up or down vote. If he ultimately chose to vote “no” on legislation that he thinks Nebraska voters won’t support, that would be that. You don’t need Nelson’s vote to get to 50.

At the end of the day, though, you don’t erect procedural roadblocks to legislation because you’re playing to public sentiment back home. You use procedural roadblocks when you really don’t want something to pass.

Eh. I'm skeptical. Certainly, a "nay" vote on the substance can help someone like Nelson muddy the waters back home. But it hardly would give him a pass -- the conservative activist groups which would target him know that the procedural vote is the one that matters, and will release the exact same ads lambasting him for his "support".

The fact is that what constitutes "opposing" a bill has changed. This may be a bad thing, but nowadays you're not really "opposing" a bill in the Senate unless you're trying to block it. When Democrats were the ones trying to block GOP bills (like telecom immunity), we weren't going to take a no vote on the merits as a sufficient substitute for filibustering (if the latter was the only way to stop the bill). It's silly to expect conservatives to do otherwise.

Bust It Up

Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) have announced they will filibuster the retroactive-immunity FISA "compromise" bill. Good for them. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has announced his support for the move, so good for him as well.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) also is apparently supporting the filibuster "from afar", but she already had her chance to derail the bill, so no good for her.