It saddens me that y'all seem to think that Obama and his people somehow stand for the left wing in the United States.
We have a small, but distinct left wing here. You can find it in magazines like Jacobin or Current Affairs. You can find it in many backers of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Or in Occupy.
But Obama? The left in the United States has spent eight years yelling bloody murder about his spying, his favors to the banksters, and his corporate giveaways. Obama's era has feature apthe combination of "not fighting hard for the good stuff he says he wants" and "fighting very hard for the bad stuff he wants". Don't lump him in with us.
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In the mid years of Bush, the D Senate filibustered more than usual in regards to nominations of non-Supreme Court judges.
In 2006, when Democrats took the Senate, the Republicans started filibustering up a storm. But no one in the press noticed because Bush would have veto'd anyway, so the balance of power didn't shift.
As soon as Obama was elected, the Republican Senate had an internal meeting where they agreed to filibuster everything all the time -- legislation, judges, executive appointments, everything. Even legislation they supported, just to throw a wrench into the plans. It was a momentous change. The press failed to point it out or make an issue out of it. And here we are.
Thanks, that's the summary I was looking for. I remember that shift happened, and thinking "that's odd". Then I checked out of politics for a few years, and noticed the current language, which doesn't even reference filibusters.
I am now curious to see if things will shift back once there's a Republican president. The Republicans seem far better at press management than the Democrats.
I'd call it politics of self-interest rather than politics of national interest. These actions were perfectly logical and reasonable, if your goal is to improve the position of your party potentially at the expense of the nation.
Well the point was that in a different political system such actions would not improve the position of your party. The idea that is does seemed odd to me and the only possible explanation I could come up with was that apparently enough people seem to dislike the Democrats so much that they would support such non constructive behaviour.
It's more that people just don't pay attention to the details and put far too much emphasis on the power of the President. President makes promises, fails to fulfill many of them, then the President and his party takes a hit. It doesn't matter that the reason they were blocked is because of action by the competing party.
I wonder what the odds are that the Republicans will end the filibuster once they take back the Senate. Seems like the smart play would be to only do that if you have a veto-proof majority or a Republican President, but who knows.
Not immediately. It's more useful as a "capitulate or else" weapon, at least for now. And immediately changing it upon winning has some petty, triumphalist optics to it. McConnell is a very shrewd politician.
FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), part apathetic electorate that chooses to not vote (period) because 'it doesn't matter', part uninformed electorate that votes based on a letter next to the name rather than positions (if the candidate even bothered to establish any positions / if the voter bothered to even look up the candidate's views) and a media that is so bent on presenting 'both sides' that they fail to call out the mountain of bullshit that we often hear (climate change isn't real, etc.).
I feel like this is the worst excuse, there are usually many things to vote on other than a US rep, or Senator. For example, here in Arizona the exit polls showed that people felt education was the most important issue. In turn, we elected a governor that loathes the idea of public schools / supports vouchers; and a school superintendent that loathes common core (because, state rights) and __did not__ run a campaign (other than repeating 'nobama' & 'states rights'). The needs and results couldn't be further apart.
Assuming no new R's vote right, that gets us to a vote of 50 / 50, with Biden getting the deciding vote. However, in the modern filibustering Senate, 41 Senators can kill any bill.
So in theory, if everyone who voted for the bill hangs tight, they could destroy any new legislation, including PATRIOT ACT reauthorization.
However, I'd be quite surprised if neither of these things happen:
1. McConnell decides the filibuster no longer works for him, so he kills it.
2. Obama puts remarkable pressure on fellow D's and they buckle.
But theoretically, we have all the votes we need. And if 1 new R senator joins the anti-NSA caucus (and all the D Senators hang tight, and all the D senators are good on the issue), they wouldn't even be a minority -- they'd have 51 votes.
I'm away from my lists, but some of the new R Senators will vote anti-NSA with Paul / Cruz. I would imagine the Patriot Act reauthorization might be problematic.
This article characterizes the new R senators as belonging more to the establishment wing of the party, in part because the party was fairly successful in getting its preferred candidates through the primaries, avoiding some of the surprises that characterized 2010/2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/us/new-senators-tilt-gop-b...
Some do have more track record in that regard than others though, so it might be that they won't all side with the national-security conservatives.
4 were swept into the House in the wave that brought the R majority and their voting record isn't exactly all happy happy with the establishment. Joni Ernst is not establishment. I am not sure about the other 2.
There were a lot a jockeying and some losses from the outsiders, but remember that Cantor got beat in the primary.
> All R's voted wrong except Cruz, Lee, Heller, Paul, and Murkowski.
The roll-call vote I'm looking at [1] only has Cruz, Lee, Heller, and Murkowski voting to move the bill to a vote on passage; Paul supported the filibuster.
Do you bother reading previous answers before you comment ? He is opposing it because it renews the Patriot Act, which is a higher order Evil compared to the NSA-related measures.
> “In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Americans were eager to catch and punish the terrorists who attacked us. I, like most Americans, demanded justice. But one common misconception is that the Patriot Act applies only to foreigners—when in reality, the Patriot Act was instituted precisely to widen the surveillance laws to include U.S. citizens,” Sen. Paul said, “As Benjamin Franklin put it, ‘those who trade their liberty for security may wind up with neither.’ Today’s vote to oppose further consideration of the Patriot Act extension proves that we are one step closer to restoring civil liberties in America.”
Please don't make political arguments into personal quarrels on HN, even when someone doesn't bother reading. Political arguments are abrasive to begin with. Let's not add gratuitous abrasiveness.
This comment would be quite a good one without the first sentence.
Is it really gratuitous? Don't we want to show that some behaviors (like not reading the content) aren't welcome? Spelling that out rather than the mystery of a downvote is useful.
> Please don't make political arguments into personal quarrels on HN
I am not making any kind of political statement nor a personal quarrel, I am simply pointing out that he got the answer previously but jumped on the comment trigger before reading anything linked. Is saying "Do you bother reading" considered offensive now?
> Some of its opponents, like Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, believe it went too far in curbing the N.S.A. Others, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, thought it did not go far enough.
This bill was completely watered down and subverted from the original, to the point where even many of its initial champions turned against it. Voting it down was the right choice. The worst thing would have been to have passed it and pretended that "reform" had been made.
Google, MSFT, Apple, the EFF all supported this bill. Obviously there are further improvements that could be made, but instead of starting from a better platform, we're at ground zero with an incoming congress that has no interest in curbing the 'military' power of the US.
The EFF's case for supporting the bill that was just killed is very clear about this:
While you are correct that there's no such thing as perfection, this bill is so far from the changes that are needed that its arguably not worth passing. When you pass a watered-down bill, that buys a decade or more for the opposing side. When it gets voted through, all of a sudden they imagine themselves as champions of compromise and at the same time delude themselves into thinking that they gave their opposition a gift. If an inadequate bill passes, that's likely all we are going to get for the next 10-20 years.
Obama can update the EO's for the NSA without congress[+].
[+] EFF: "Future reform must include significant changes to ... Executive Order 12333, and to the broken classification system that the executive branch counts on to hide unconstitutional surveillance from the public."
He just doesn't want to stick his neck out.
So this bill was a distant 3rd choice for the country.
1) pass a good law
2) administrate the NSA into compliance
3) pass muddled legislation in a lame duck session
Maybe. But by passing anything that politicians (and virtually no one else) currently cry 'terrorism' over, we'll get a chance to see that the sky did not fall after all, and an incrementally better bill could be plausibly considered with incrementally more reasonable debate.
Neither Rand Paul nor Ted Cruz were going to break with the party on the eve of the GOP's assumption of the senate majority, knowing that in a year or so they're going to be on a stage debating other Republicans in front of the GOP base.
In fact: the more "grassroots-friendly" this bill had been, the less tenable a yea vote would have been, particularly for Paul.
Because, like Paul, he has the luxury to. If he ever held the tie-breaking vote he sure as hell would vote lockstep with the GOP. These people are "show libertarians," at best.
Nope. Paul refused to support the bill because of the provisions for the continuance of the Patriot Act into 2017. He's been quite consistent on this, and it really doesn't have anything to do with Senate majorities. I applaud his stand.
The new R's are going to do what they're told, just like Paul and Cruz did what they were told in this vote, as well: as stars of the Republican party, they were allowed to vote for cloture and deflect attacks on them in a year when the race for President heats up. And, they were allowed to do this because the leadership knew they already had the votes to block the bill.
I'm not sure why you think I'm suggesting they are? My only point is that, had the blocking of the bill depended on Paul and Cruz voting against cloture, they would have voted against cloture. Since it didn't, they were allowed to vote for cloture, and appear to be friendly to privacy/whatever, since both of them think they might be President someday.
It's why a lot of votes in both houses can seem close, or bipartisan, but in fact they are not - just Congressmen who are owed a favor being allowed to vote in such a way that won't piss off their constituents or hurt their chances of being elected to a higher office someday, or land them a sweet consulting gig after they leave office, or whatever. If the leadership knows they have votes to spare anyway. This is a pretty common and well-known practice I thought, so I don't really understand the downvotes.
I mean, if both Cruz and Paul had voted for cloture and the Senate had moved on cloture with e.g. 61 votes or something (i.e. both their votes actually mattered and were against the party interests), then their votes would be big news and evidence of an actual schism. As it stands, how they voted doesn't mean shit, other than that they are reasonably famous politicians.
I doubt most votes are motivated by what's "right" and "wrong" (since we're apparently pretending those are objective for the moment). I suspect most are motivated by the party lines, for members of both parties.
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After founding my first startup, I used to work at the Wikimedia Foundation, then took time off to travel the country, work on a few social good projects, and join my friend's startup. Now I'm ready to jump back into a full-time commitment.
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We have a small, but distinct left wing here. You can find it in magazines like Jacobin or Current Affairs. You can find it in many backers of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Or in Occupy.
But Obama? The left in the United States has spent eight years yelling bloody murder about his spying, his favors to the banksters, and his corporate giveaways. Obama's era has feature apthe combination of "not fighting hard for the good stuff he says he wants" and "fighting very hard for the bad stuff he wants". Don't lump him in with us.