Biden: 'No Democracy Has Survived Needing A Supermajority'

VP Biden is the perfect person to be out there, IN PUBLIC, saying this over and over again. It keeps Pres. Obama above the fray, while drawing attention to the perversion of Democracy the GOP is partaking in. Plus he's got decades in the Senate, so there is even more authority and weight behind this attack coming from him.

Well said. This way the senate and house is run is pretty much a joke. Our founding forefathers did not intend this.

Ditto to ending the filibuster....The Democrats need to pursue wise, rational and pragmatic policies to address the economy, health care,climate change, immigration and other pressing issues. There is basically a consensus on the progressive side as to what needs to be done, we just need the political toughness to enact legislation before this "window of opportunity" with large Demcratic majorities closes....ending the filibuster is about the only way to do it. Conservative ideas have failed miserably; we need to prove that progressive ideas work and can solve problems and lead to a better country and world. If we succeed we should have a majority for a generation or more, but we have to act NOW while there is still a brief amount of time.

You look at this dumb, doofus jerk Biden, & realize we could have had Sensational Sarah Palin is his job... then, you really understand his level of incompetence.

Historically, parliamentary precedent is such that only a vote of two-thirds may limit the body, either by imposing special restrictions on debate or ending debate immeditely. This is becacuse while majority rules, the minority must be treated fairly and have the right to be heard. Thus, historically parliamentarians would only allow a vote of two-thirds to cut off debate, because a vote of two-thirds indicates broad support for the proposal and that the minority is small enough that it can be fairly ignored.

It also prevents any one member (or a small group of members) of the body from obstructing the body's ability to make decisions that have broad appeal among every other. While this works well in a private organization and in smaller government bodies, it does not work well in large legislatures.

The problem with a two-thirds rule in such bodies is that governments have a variety of regular business that they need to transact, and failure to do so can cause broad economic and social problems. While the Senate originally had no cloture rule, eventually it was created at a two-thirds threshold. It was later lowered to the current three-fifths level.

Since there is normally no way to distinguish routine business (such as budgets) from special business (new laws or rules) the reconciliation procedure in the US Senate was created to empower the majority to pass routine business without worry about a filibuster. Many if not most world legislative bodies have dispensed with the need for two-thirds (or even anything more than majority) to pass motions limiting debate (even on non-routine business), relying on the principle of fairness to give minority parties time to be heard.

I believe the US Senate should follow suit, but doing so with anything less than a vote of two-thirds would reverse a lot of Senate precedent and may have unintended procedural consequences. Being that I am not a Senate parliamentarian, I am not an expert on what those consequences could be, but the procedure the House uses seems to work pretty well.

First we have a Senator invoke Hofstadter and the threat of Christian Middle-American Fascism...now this...he's right of course..."Democracies" do not survive under such conditions...and since we have never had a democracy in this country and since we have instead had various forms of oligarchy and fascism...what is clear is that the current system looks exactly like what any well-read person would recognize as a system on the brink...

so it goes...

Biden May Be Laying The Groundwork-Hopefully:

By: ducdebrabant, Democratic Strategist, 1/16/2010

“If Brown wins, Obama and Reid have a simple choice before them;
They can allow Republican Senators to filibuster all major legislation during 2010, which is not a choice at all since it would spell disaster for Democratic candidates in both the Senate and the House in November, or they can change the senate rules on filibusters through means as simple as one recently advanced in a New York Times Op-Ed by Tom Geoghegan;

"The president of the Senate, the vice president himself, could issue an opinion from the chair that the filibuster is unconstitutional. Our first vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, felt a serious obligation to resolve the ties and tangles of an evenly divided Senate, and they would not have shrunk from such a challenge."

Or through the strategy Jamie Court described in The Huffington Post;
"Rule 22 of the Senate, governing filibusters, can be changed or eliminated by a simple majority according to the US Supreme Court in U.S. v. Ballin (1892). Senate rules call for 67 to change the cloture rule, but Democrats should be able to rewrite the rules since they control the Rules Committee. Rule 22 can go out the door all together or be modified. Republicans under Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to blow up the filibuster in 2005 with far fewer numbers."

Biden, the biggest parasite in the Senate.

This same man who wrote all the current bankruptcy laws while his son was a lobbiest for the banking cabal shouldn't be trusted with...anything.

Here's an idea. fix the economy and keep the promises you and the new messiah made.

HOPE indeed.

Time to end the filibuster--or if not, please get Harry Reid to make the morons actually stand there and keep their speech going until they drop or say uncle!