Why Does Tom Harkin Want To Change The Filibuster?

Opinion | Time to Retire the Filibuster

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/01/opinion/time-to-retire-the-delay.html

Time to Retire the Delay

Jan. i, 1995

Credit... The New York Times Athenaeum

See the commodity in its original context from
Jan one, 1995

Department four , Page

8Buy Reprints

TimesMachine is an sectional benefit for domicile commitment and digital subscribers.

About the Archive

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's impress archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not change, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other bug; we are standing to work to improve these archived versions.

The U.Southward. Senate likes to telephone call itself the world'southward greatest deliberative torso. The greatest obstructive trunk is more like it. In the final session of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the volition of the majority. This relentless corruption of a time-honored Senate tradition and then disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is at present willing to forgo like shooting fish in a barrel retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him.

For years Senate filibusters -- when they weren't conjuring upward romantic images of Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith, passing out from burnout on the Senate floor -- consisted mainly of negative feats of endurance. Senator Sam Ervin one time spoke for 22 hours straight. Outrage over these tactics and their ability to bring Senate business organization to a halt led to the current and so-called two-track system, whereby a senator tin concord upwardly one slice of legislation while other business goes on equally usual.

The ii-track organisation has been nigh as obstructive equally the old rules. Under those rules, if the Senate could non muster the 60 votes necessary to end fence and bring a bill to a vote, someone had to exist willing to go along the debate, in person, on the floor. That is no longer required. Even if the 60 votes are not achieved, contend stops and the Senate proceeds with other business. The measure is simply put on concur until the next cloture vote. In this way a neb can be stymied at any number of points along its legislative journey.

One unpleasant and unforeseen consequence has been to make the filibuster easy to invoke and painless to pursue. In one case a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which senators held passionate convictions, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, dooming whatsoever measure that cannot command the 60 required votes.

Mr. Harkin, forth with Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, now proposes to make such obstruction harder. Mr. Harkin says reasonably that there must come a point in the process where the bulk rules. This may not sit down well with some of his Democratic colleagues. They are now perfectly positioned to exact revenge past frustrating the Republican agenda as efficiently as Republicans frustrated Democrats in 1994.

Admirably, Mr. Harkin says he does not want to practise that. He proposes to alter the rules so that if a vote for cloture fails to attract the necessary 60 votes, the number of votes needed to close off debate would exist reduced by 3 in each subsequent vote. By the time the measure came to a fourth vote -- with votes occurring no more oftentimes than every second mean solar day -- cloture could be invoked with only a uncomplicated bulk. Under the Harkin plan, minority members who feel passionately almost a given mensurate could withal hold information technology up, but not indefinitely.

Another set of reforms, more incremental but as well useful, is proposed past George Mitchell, who is retiring as the Democratic majority leader. He wants to eat away at some of the more than abrasive kinds of brakes that can exist applied to a measure forth its legislative journey.

One case is the procedure for sending a mensurate to a conference committee with the Firm. Under current rules, unless the Senate consents unanimously to send a measure to briefing, three separate motions can exist required to motion information technology along. This gives i senator the ability to concord up a measure out almost indefinitely. Mr. Mitchell would like to reduce the number of motions to one.

He would likewise like to limit the contend on a motion to ii hours and count the fourth dimension consumed by quorum calls against the debate fourth dimension of a senator, thus encouraging senators to save their time for debating the substance of a measure rather than in obstacle. All of his suggestions seem reasonable, but his reforms would go out the filibuster substantially intact.

The Harkin program, along with some of Mr. Mitchell'southward proposals, would go a long way toward making the Senate a more productive place to behave the nation's business. Republicans surely dread the kind of obstructionism they themselves practiced during the last Congress. Now is the perfect moment for them to unite with like-minded Democrats to get rid of an archaic rule that frustrates republic and serves no useful purpose.