Filibusters and Arcane Obstructions

Wow, what the fuck is wrong with our government.

"Michael Bennet, a freshman Democrat from Colorado, said, “Sit and watch us for seven days—just watch the floor. You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing."

"The goal was to finish the bill by the end of the evening, so that senators wouldn’t miss a day of their spring recess—apparently, the only thing worse than a government takeover of the health-care system."

"Merkley could remember witnessing only one moment of floor debate between a Republican and a Democrat"

“Sometimes, you’re dialling for dollars, you get the call, you’ve got to get over to vote, you’ve got fifteen minutes. You don’t have a clue what’s on the floor, your staff is whispering in your ears, you’re running onto the floor, then you check with your leader—you double check—but, just to make triple sure, there’s a little sheet of paper on the clerk’s table: The leader recommends an aye vote, or a no vote. So you’ve got all these checks just to make sure you don’t screw up, but even then you screw up sometimes. But, if you’re ever pressed, ‘Why did you vote that way?’—you just walk out thinking, Oh, my God, I hope nobody asks, because I don’t have a clue.”

"The most pervasive authority over the institution is not the Constitution or the Bible but, rather, an impenetrable sixteen-hundred-page tome, by Floyd M. Riddick, called “Senate Procedure: Precedents and Practices,” which only the late Robert Byrd, of West Virginia, was known to have read in its entirety"

"Many of the Senate’s antique rules and precedents have been warped beyond recognition by the modern pressures of partisanship. The hold, for example, was a courtesy extended to senators in the days of horse travel, when they needed time to get back to Washington and read a bill or question an appointee before casting their vote" 

"Three hundred and forty-five bills passed by the House have been prevented from even coming up for debate in the Senate."

"In the current Senate, it has become normal for a handful of senators, sometimes representing just ten or twenty per cent of the country’s population, to hold everything" 

"the Senate should not be a graveyard for good ideas"

 “The Senate wasn’t created to be efficient,” he argued. “It was created to be inefficient.”

"And so climate change joined

immigration, 

job creation,

food safety,

pilot training,

veterans’ care,

campaign finance,

transportation security,

labor law,

mine safety,

wildfire management, 

and scores of executive and judicial appointments

on the list of matters that

the world’s greatest deliberative body is

incapable of addressing."