Breaking the Rules to Change the Rules

Congressional Calvinball is in play.

From Lambert at Corrente:

The rule is, 60 votes to cut off debate. Yet Bill "Hello Kitty" Frist and his Dominionist owners claim that 50 votes can change that rule. Suppose your bass fishing club had a rule that a 60% vote was needed to admit a new member. And some guys wanted to admit a really obnoxious guy you didn't like, but only had 50% of the votes. So, with that 50%, they decide to change the rules requiring a 60% vote, so they can get their guy in. Would you stand for that? I didn't think so.

That's just what the Republicans are trying to do, and the Senate Parliamentarian (the umpire, the Republican-appointed expert on the rules) wouldn't stand for it either:

When he was majority leader, Lott appointed the parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, after firing his predecessor, Bob Dove.

Reid received the assurance from the parliamentarian during a private conversation within the past few weeks, according to aides. Reid told reporters this week that the parliamentarian assured him that, if Republicans go through with the move, “they will have to overrule him, because what they are doing is wrong.”

A Congressional Research Service report on the subject, updated this month, leaves little doubt that moves being contemplated by Republicans — specifically a ruling that a supermajority requirement to cut off debate is not in order — would not be based on previous precedents of the Senate.

The appeal of such a ruling would normally be debatable, although a Republican could move to table any such appeal — denying Democrats the opportunity to delay a ruling.

“Employment of either of these versions of the constitutional nuclear option’ would require the chair to overturn previous precedent,” according to the report, “either by ruling on a question that by precedent has been submitted to the Senate, or by ruling non-debatable a question that by precedent has been treated as debatable.”
(via The Hill)

Jim Lehrer and Norman Ornstein detail how this train wreck would happen:
JIM LEHRER: Now, let's go to the next step. Let's say the filibuster is on, the call is for the cloture vote, and then they don't have 60 votes.

NORM ORNSTEIN: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: Then Bill Frist will do what, under the nuclear option?

NORM ORNSTEIN: Under the nuclear option he will stand up and make a point of order that a filibuster against a judicial nomination is unconstitutional. And the chair, which very likely in this case will be Vice President Dick Cheney, the president of the Senate -- doesn't have to be -- will agree with that point of order, and say the opinion of the chair is unconstitutional.

JIM LEHRER: Then that goes to a vote, does it not?

NORM ORNSTEIN: Goes to a vote. There's a little bit of a catch-22 here, however that is that under the Senate rules, constitutional issues themselves are debatable. So the point of order, in effect, would be debatable. And that could be filibustered.

And what will have to happen here is that the chair [Cheney or, possible, Stevens] will have to ignore the parliamentarian, who has already said that in his opinion that's what would have to take place, or they would basically overrule the parliamentarian. Then the way the Senate operates is that points of order or challenges under the rules can come to a vote, and a majority can make that decision. So it will be a majority vote.

JIM LEHRER: So then assuming that Majority Leader Frist gets his way and through some combination, either it's 50/50 and then the vice president would cast the deciding vote, so you have a new set of rules that would apply to judicial nominations, right?
(PBS)


"Point of order, Mr. Chairman, point of order..." The past isn't dead, is it? It's not even past.

Frist and his Dominionist cronies might still be stopped, however, if there are a few sincere traditional conservatives left in the Senate.

This happened last week when Dick Lugar, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tried to ram through John Bolton's nomination over the objections of Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Barbara Boxer.

In a remarkable dramatic two hour video clip (requires Real Player or Windows Media which can be downloaded here: go down to "RECENT PROGRAMS" and "Senate Foreign Relations Cmte. Vote on John Bolton, U.N. Ambassador Nominee (04/19/2005)"), the Democrats actually earn their pay for a change.

They managed to get enough hard data out, in front of the C-SPAN cameras, over the objections of the Committee Chair, to convince several traditional Republican Senators that Bolton might be more than your garden variety NeoCon, but that he might have serious issues of emotional instability beyond his simple doctrine of insanity.