13 thoughts on “The Ratchet Of History”

  1. The problem is that every time the stupid is in power the evil party whines that they must share and the stupid party does it. We need to purge the GOP of those that are willing to share.

    Marxism is provably evil. Those espousing it should be easy to marginalize. That it isn’t done is the real failure of adult leadership.

  3. A party that sweeps the House, Senate and White House should be able to pass laws (including laws that repeal other laws). It could get chaotic — you could see major programs established by one president, only to be eliminated by the next, or programs eliminated by one president and resurrected by the next. That sort of thing is routine in parliamentary democracies. We will still often have divided government, so there will still be many periods when nothing big gets passed, but assuming that the legislative filibuster is the the next shoe to drop, it will soon be much easier for a party to enact its program.

    1. That sort of thing is routine in parliamentary democracies.

      Which is exactly why the Founders instead established a Republic, which the Left has been trying to destroy for over a century.

      1. The founders were strongly opposed to a supermajority requirement for passing laws and confirming nominees. It’s crazy to invoke the will of the founders in defense of the filibuster.

          1. I’m afraid your history is wrong. The Senate filibuster was created by accident, when Aaron Burr cleaned up the Senate rule book and got rid of the rule that let a majority end debate (he thought it was superfluous, since it hadn’t been used recently). It was decades before anyone thought to take advantage of the loophole he’d created.

            The Constitution is explicit about the things that require a super-majority (e.g. ratifying a treaty), and passing bills and confirming nominees are not among them. That isn’t an accident. As Hamilton wrote about a supermajority quorum requirement in Federalist 75, “The history of every political establishment in which this principle has prevailed is a history of impotence, perplexity and disorder.”

          2. It wasn’t an accident, Burr argued to change it in 1806 and the senate agreed, then wrote the new rule making filibusters possible.

          3. Here’s Sarah Binder (author of Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate)’s testimony to the rules committee in 2010:

            In 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr was presiding over the Senate (freshly indicted for the murder of Alexander Hamilton), and he offered this advice. He said something like this. You are a great deliberative body. But a truly great Senate would have a cleaner rule book. Yours is a mess. You have lots of rules that do the same thing. And he singles out the previous question motion. Now, today, we know that a simple majority in the House can use the rule to cut off debate. But in 1805, neither chamber used the rule that way. Majorities were still experimenting with it. And so when Aaron Burr said, get rid of the previous question motion, the Senate didn’t think twice. When they met in 1806, they dropped the motion from the Senate rule book.

            Why? Not because senators in 1806 sought to protect minority rights and extended debate. They got rid of the rule by mistake: Because Aaron Burr told them to.

            Once the rule was gone, senators still did not filibuster. Deletion of the rule made possible the filibuster because the Senate no longer had a rule that could have empowered a simple majority to cut off debate. It took several decades until the minority exploited the lax limits on debate, leading to the first real-live filibuster in 1837.

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