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Uh-oh!

You're missing an important cause/effect relationship there Joph.

Can you seriously not noodle out why the number of cloture votes skyrocketed in the years in which the Democrats had 60 votes (or near to 60) in the Senate?

I'll give you a hint: You don't have to wait until the other guy filibusters to vote for cloture. Cloture simply closes debate and forces a vote on the issue within 72 hours (I think that's the time frame). It sets a clock on the vote. If you have 60 votes in the Senate and you want to push through legislature as quickly as possible, you simply vote for cloture the moment you floor the bill.

Which is exactly what the Dems have been doing.


You apparently failed to grasp the point I was making about how when one party has enough votes to ram whatever they want through the Senate without debate, that this is a bad thing. It will result in an increase in partisan legislation and an obvious increase in cloture votes (cause they have to in order to take advantage of their 60 votes). It has nothing at all to do with the GOP being obstructionist. It sometimes amazes me how you can so utterly fail to logically assess something so inherently obvious.

Edited, Mar 18th 2010 6:10pm by gbaji

You do not have to wait until a filibuster is either threatened or occurs before putting in a cloture vote. You are just plain wrong here Joph.


Trying to figure out filibuster attempts by counting cloture votes is going to generate false results. As the number of senators the majority party has approaches the number needed for cloture, the number of cloture votes will increase. How many are because of the need to bypass a filibuster and how many are designed to just push though the legislation with a minimum of debate because you can is impossible to say.

nm

Edited, Mar 21st 2010 8:27pm by manicshock