Starboard Broadside

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who several years ago boldly said that (simple) majority rule was sufficient for everything in the Senate, whether budget-related or not, recently tried to argue Democrats can't use budget reconciliation to pass health reform with 51 votes because our "Founding Fathers" established a 60-vote filibuster requirement and rejected the parliamentary system consciously.

I can only imagine he believes the Founding Fathers were in the Senate in the 1970s... which is when the not-Constitutionally-based filibuster power was reduced from 67 votes to 60 votes, and when they would have been far enough into the age of the Westminster parliamentary system's modern application around the world to be able to reject it (if that were a good idea). Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly sums up the problems with Gregg's claim:

It's hard to overstate how truly ridiculous Gregg's analysis is. It simply has no foundation in reality. The Senate wasn't "structured" to require supermajorities on literally every bill, nomination, and resolution -- that's the exact opposite of the truth [the Constitution grants tiebreaking authority to the Vice President, thus the Founding Fathers cannot have anticipated a supermajority requirement that would render a tie impossible]. This isn't a subjective question open to interpretation; Gregg is just lying.

And when Gregg says the framers of the Constitution "saw the parliamentary system" and rejected it, he's just making things up. Matt Yglesias, who refers to Gregg as "an idiot," explained, "There were no countries operating on a modern parliamentary system when the constitution was written. And why doesn't it work? It seems to work in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Korea, etc."

Update: While I'm on the subject...on Thursday, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) submitted a proposal to change Senate rules (mostly) to make a motion to proceed non-debatable -- thus eliminating one opportunity for obstructionists to stall and delay until 60+ Senators vote to stop debate and get on with it -- while preserving the opportunity to filibuster cloture (end of debate) on actual debate. Basically, Senators would get one less chance to filibuster, and there would be an immediate up or down vote on whether or not to proceed, without creating a debate-within-a-debate on that motion. If that makes sense.