For all the seething Republican primary voters, disgusted with politics, furious at the “spineless” GOP majorities “refusing” to stand-up for conservative positions and values, and demanding a government shutdown, it’s time for an intervention. For this exercise, you will need a calculator, a bit of historical context and a copy of the Constitution.
Let’s begin with two numbers; 218 and 60.
218 represents the simple majority that is required to pass legislation in the House of Representatives with a total of 435 seats.
60 represents the number of votes required to end debate in the Senate, in a two-step process that is followed by a vote that requires only a simple majority – 51 – to pass legislation.
This voting construct is not a requirement of the Constitution, but a part of the evolution in a long-standing Senate tradition, dating back to the early 19 century, where truly unlimited debate in the Senate allowed Members to literally talk a bill to legislative death.
The Senate did not actually move to create a parliamentary vehicle to “end debate” (a Cloture vote) until 1917, when the Senate adopted Rule 22, which officially ended a filibuster when 2/3rds of the Senate agreed – a very high threshold, which was rarely met.
Informed by the bruising experience of southern Democrats filibustering civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, the Senate eventually streamlined its Cloture policy in 1975, lowering the requirement to 3/5ths – or 60 votes with today’s Senate composition of 100 total members – to reach cloture, end a filibuster, and allow a simply majority vote on legislation. To change Senate rules, it has been customary to require 2/3rds majority to ensure comity and consensus.
While both political parties tend to be exasperated by the filibuster when in the majority, as it creates maddening delays in moving forward with the majority’s priorities, leaders in both parties have, until very recently, been careful proposing changes to it, knowing that at some point in the future, when they are inevitably in the minority, their ability to influence legislation may depend on filibuster alone.
In this context, consider that from 2009-2011, the filibuster was the only tool available to the GOP to shape, influence or delay legislation from united, progressive control of the federal government.
The biggest and most consequential change to the Senate rules occurred under Harry Reid’s leadership in 2013 when Reid exercised the “nuclear option.” Reid did two things: 1) he revised Senate rules with a simple majority – breaking decades of tradition where only 2/3rds majority agreement could change the rules of the body – and, 2) he created an exception to the filibuster that required only a simple majority to confirm non-SCOTUS presidential appointees. Until that moment, the filibuster had been the only tool available to Republicans to influence or stop President Obama’s judicial and other ranking appointee picks.
Reid’s move prompted outrage Republicans, prompting calls for “revenge” when the GOP eventually took over.Even a few Democrats were on record lamenting the path that their leader had taken to assure that a constitutional clash with SCOTUS over the president’s ability to make recess appointments did not have the impact of invalidating hundreds of rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which Reid’s action assured.
With the filibuster it is crucial to remember, what goes around, comes around.
The next two numbers are 291 and 67.
291 represents the number of House members who must vote affirmatively to override a presidential veto of legislation passed by the both the House and Senate and sent to POTUS – if all House members are present (otherwise, 67 percent of those voting). This is a requirement of the US Constitution (Article I Section VII).
Bipartisan votes have been the substance of most veto overrides. Ronald Reagan suffered a veto override in 1982 with Republicans voting with Democrats in the House, while a Republican Senate did the same. The Democrats were the last party to hold a veto-proof majority in the House from 1975-1979.
67 represents the corresponding number of Senators who must vote affirmatively to override a presidential veto (with the same attendance requirements as the House). As with the House, this is a requirement of the US Constitution (Article I Section VII). Like the House, through history, most of these overrides have been bipartisan, though the political history of polarization in the last 25 years makes that mostly inconceivable today. The Democrats held the last veto-proof majority in the Senate, from 1965-1967.
Which brings us to the last set of numbers. 247-188 and 54-46.
247-188 is the current GOP majority in the House, one of the largest GOP majorities in nearly 80 years. The Speaker can lose as many as 29 votes in the GOP caucus and still pass bills on a party-line vote. To override a presidential veto however, John Boehner would need 44 Democrats plus the vote of every Member of the GOP caucus.
54-46 is the current Republican Senate majority, six short of a filibuster-proof majority, and 13 short of the 2/3rds required to override a presidential veto. Mitch McConnell is in charge of the Senate, but unless he unilaterally repeats Harry Reid’s reckless actions on the filibuster and changes the rules by simple majority, he is entirely dependent on Democratic support to move legislation in the Senate to say nothing of overriding a veto.
In sum, this is the harsh math of national governance. Some principles based on tradition, others required by the Constitution. There is no clearer example of why elections and majorities matter, since every policy, program and proposal must be assessed through these formulas.
Now lets apply these realities to the current issues:
Obamacare: the grassroots are enraged about Obamacare as are a durable majority of Americans and Republicans in both the House and Senate. However, increasing Republican majorities in the House and Senate since 2011, have accomplished nothing in repealing the law.
First, its is not for lack of trying. The House has passed dozens of repeal bills since the GOP takeover in 2010, but they go to the Senate to die, where Harry Reid refused to consider them, and where Mitch McConnell today cannot get the support of 60 Members to end debate. And in a fantasy world where the Senate miraculously agreed, such a bill would face a certain presidential veto. There is no credible vote counting available today that shows Congress overriding an Obama veto.
Iran Nuclear Deal: one of the worst agreements that the United States government has ever been party to. It legitimizes Iran as a nuclear threshold country (destabilizing the region that now realizes such) and provides and end to sanctions and the gift of $150 billion that can be used to support terrorist enterprises globally. The House voted the deal down, under legislation agreed to by Congress and the Administration. But more than 40 Democrats blocked McConnell’s attempts to get to a simple vote on the agreement, effectively ending any chance of denying congressional approval.
Planned Parenthood: the videos are horrific. The practices outlined are barbaric, inconsistent with a just and moral society. Planned Parenthood has over $1 billion in assets. There is no reason for the organization to be funded by the federal government. It absolutely should be de-funded. But the math intervenes. The House can pass a bill, but McConnell must get six Democrats to vote with him in the Senate in order to pass a defunding bill, which POTUS has said he will veto.
The reaction to these political defeats has been reckless and futile.
The first, articulated by many candidates for president, is that Mitch McConnell should simply exercise his version of the “nuclear option” and in a vote of the GOP caucus, change the Senate rules so that all legislation requires a simple majority vote.
The immediate gains would be impressive. Bills repealing Obamacare, defunding Planned Parenthood and killing the Iranian nuclear deal would all be approved by Congress. But what happens next? Those bills then go to POTUS and he vetoes every last one of them. Again, there is no credible vote counting that gets you to a veto override in either house, let alone both, which is required to override a veto.
Thus McConnell would have trashed the rules of the Senate – rules that have protected the GOP in the minority – all for no tangible gain, just as the GOP Senate majority is precarious in the lead up to 2016. Politically, such a move is an epic affront to basic intelligence.
The second, articulated by presidential candidates, and most vocally by Member of the House “Freedom Caucus,” would be to hold up any funding of the federal government until other branches of the government bend to their political positions.
The greatest flaw in this position is that it’s been tried before, and with nothing short of catastrophic results.
From October 1-13, 2013, House conservatives shutdown the government over the issue of Obamacare funding, refusing to consider legislation to fund the federal government that continued the program. What’s more, none of the arguments posited by the leaders of that disaster came to pass.
The public never rallied around the GOP cause. Indeed the public, which has the ability – wholly absent in the conservative caucus – to separate its opposition to a program from the overall requirements to fund the full government, turned violently anti-Republican as a result. Instead of being put on the defensive, as pro-shutdown Republicans had proudly predicted, President Obama and Harry Reid reveled in the GOP’s epic political stupidity and their own good fortune.
Moreover, the damage incurred on the GOP was undone, not by a grateful public’s esteem for a Republican show of commitment to “the cause,” but rather by the public’s astonishment and disgust with the implementation of Obamacare, which dominated the headlines for the next three months after the GOP capitulated.
Today, the same logic applies to funding for Planned Parenthood.
In a letter to Speaker Boehner, the Freedom Caucus sports 32 signatures pledging to vote against any funding bill that continues to provide financing to Planned Parenthood. Funding for the US government expires at midnight on September 30th. Without those 32 votes, Boehner can only pass a Continuing Resolution- to fund the government temporarily while a final deal is worked out – with the support of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, who are demanding a very high price for their support.
As with the Obamacare fiasco in 2013, there is no mathematical possibility that a move to defund Planned Parenthood without either; 1) the agreement of six Senate Democrats and President Obama, or, 2) 57 Democrats in the House and Senate pledging to change their vote support the Republican approach. Neither is remotely realistic.
Worse, for all the barbarity that is revealed in the Planned Parenthood videos, funding for the organization amounts to 71 minutes of federal spending. Is the GOP really willing to shut down the federal government for funding that makes up less time than an NFL football game?
Yes, it is completely and totally infuriating, but the math is harsh and unrelenting. It is a fight that cannot be won. And all the talk about taking up the “moral fight” is romanticized political rubbish. Pickett’s Charge and the Charge of the Light Brigade are glorious in history – but neither one of them succeeded.
And as with the 2013 shutdown, triggering another governing crisis will only turn public opinion against the GOP again, and this time, right before the Party must establish its governing bone fides before the next year’s presidential election. There is no Obamacare debacle on the horizon to detract attention this time around.
Worse, the fractures in the Republican caucus in the House over this have emboldened Democrats to hold out a high price for their votes to keep the government funded. Obama/Pelosi want to break the sequestration caps on domestic spending as the price for a bipartisan Continuing Resolution. That would entail spending that is orders of magnitude bigger than the $540 million going to Planned Parenthood.
Ironically the Freedom Caucus, in its zeal to defund Planned Parenthood by any means necessary, jeopardizes one of the singular victories of the conservative movement during the Obama years, the sequestration restrictions, which have significantly slowed the growth of spending.
A moment here on blame.
In the end, the “elites” always get blamed. The “establishment Republicans” who traffic in cronyism, pray at the altar of the status quo and betray in office the promises made on the campaign trail.
Utter, complete and total hogwash.
If Mitt Romney were president, Obamacare would be history, the Iran deal would never have happened and a Planned Parenthood defunding bill would have a presidential signature. But some of the very people in the grass-roots sat out 2012, because Romney wasn’t conservative enough.
And what about the transformative elections of 2010 and 2012? The most conservative elements in the grassroots and the “purity” brigade supported Ken Buck in Colorado, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharon Angle in Nevada, Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Akin in Missouri, all over better qualified “establishment” candidates.
All lost.
If the better candidates had been nominated they would have almost certainly won and as a result, McConnell today would have something far closer to a filibuster-proof majority, requiring perhaps one or two Democratic votes, instead of six. Instead of blaming the DC GOP, how about a little show of responsibility for what the grassroots wants to send the Washington. In effect its the officials running the show in DC that are doing the best they can, trying to work with what the people send them. It’s hard, disappointing, even discouraging at times. But it is reality – and it starts with the grassroots voter.
You want Obamacare gone? A new policy on Iran’s nuclear deal? The end of Planned Parenthood funding? How about a simplified tax system? An end to mindless regulation? A military worthy of America? Growing incomes, a recovering middle class?That will require a Republican president and a Republican Congress.
Until then, beware of the “anger stokers” – with their ring leader, Ted Cruz – who are nothing but false prophets. Cruz, better than anyone else, knows that there is no way to win this fight, but he carries on for the spotlight and campaign funds it will generate. It’s is colossally disingenuous and a genuine disservice to the GOP and the Republic.
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