Reid promises filibuster reform

"The filibuster has been abused," Sen. Harry Reid said at a reporter's briefing this afternoon. "But next Congress, we are going to take a look at it. And we're going to make some changes in it.”

Reid wasn't very clear about what changes he'd make, or how he'd make them. But Reid (and, in separate comments, Sen. Debbie Stabenow) spoke much more about the time that filibusters consume than the supermajority requirement they impose. "I file cloture" -- the motion to end a filibuster -- "to move to discuss the bill on Monday," Reid explained. "That takes two days to ripen. We don't have a vote till Wednesday. Once that's done, Republicans have 30 hours to do nothing. After the 30 hours is up, you're on the bill. If there's no amendment offered" -- remember, amendments can be filibustered, too -- "you file cloture to move to the vote. It takes two days and then another 30 hours. So that's 60 hours plus four days to vote on the bill. That happened 67 times last year." You do the math.

Stabenow made a similar point to explain why there are 83 nominees pending before the body. It's not that these nominees don't have the votes, she argued. It's that the Senate doesn't have the time to spend a week waiting for the cloture motions that would allow each one a vote. "If we do," Stabenow said, "we won't have time to do anything else."

Reid has not traditionally been a friend of Senate reform. Recently, he poured cold water on the idea of changing the rules by saying that rule changes require 67 votes, which Democrats certainly cannot muster. But as Huffington Post's Sam Stein notes, Reid's pointed mention of the "next Congress" might be important here. "Changing the rules at the beginning of the 112th Congress will require the chair to declare the Senate is in a new session and can legally draft new rules," explains Stein. "That ruling would be made by Vice President Joe Biden, who has spoken out against the current abuse of the filibuster. The ruling can be appealed, but that appeal can be defeated with a simple majority vote."

This interpretation was given further force when Sen. Chuck Schumer spoke later in the session. "My committee, the Rules Committee, is going to look at this," he said. And one of the angles they plan to explore is that "the Constitutional right of the Senate to make its own rules supersedes the two-thirds rule, but only when we write new rules at the beginning of each Congress."

I asked Schumer whether there was a process ongoing to develop a single strategy to change the filibuster. "This is something we're very serious about," he replied. "It's not unanimous in the caucus, but the vast majority of the caucus is interested in seeing if there's a way to undo, modify, or lessen our filibuster rule."

For now, the process seems to be proceeding from the premise that Senate Democrats are fed up with the filibuster. "In baseball," Reid said in a clipped tone, "they used to have the spitball. It originally was used with discretion. But then the ball got wetter and wetter and wetter. So soon, they outlawed the spitball." The same, he said, had happened to the four-corner offense in basketball. "And just the way the spitball was abused in baseball and the four-corner offense was abused in basketball," Reid said, "Republicans have abused the filibuster."

Photo credit: Bloomberg

