Reform without silencing minority

By The Gazette Editorial Board

---

Eleventh-hour legislation aside, gross overuse of the filibuster nearly ground the U.S. Senate to a halt at times last session.

That once rarely used tool has become a routine method of obstruction - used 91 times in this most recent session to block or delay elected officials from performing their jobs.

Senate Republicans' recent abuse of the filibuster is a far cry from the filibuster's intent and traditional use: to protect the minority party from being ignored and keep the majority party from running amok.

Instead, it's led to the Senate's failure to conduct routine business. Most recently, we've seen this in the body's failure to adopt a budget before the end of the 2010 session.

The partisan power play also squeezes smaller bills from the floor, and unnecessarily stalls judicial and other nominations from the executive branch. According to one would-be reformer, Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, more than 125 executive nominees, including 48 judicial nominations, were pending with the Senate in the final days of this last session.

We agree with Merkley, who argues the abuse of filibuster fosters a climate of partisanship and frustration that harms the American people as a whole. And Republicans' defense - that Democratic Senators played similarly dirty when they were most recently in the minority - is an unpersuasive excuse for either party.

So we support Democratic Senators' push to exercise their “constitutional option” - to create new rules as a newly elected body on the first day of the 112th Congress.

That rule-making is common in the House of Representatives, where every legislator is elected on the same two-year cycle, even if it hasn't been tradition in the Senate. It would allow Senators to craft and pass new filibuster rules through a simple majority vote.

Exactly what those rules should look like, however, is a more complicated question.

We applaud Sen. Tom Harkin for joining Merkley and Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico in calling for filibuster reform. But the specific reform Harkin has proposed, to gradually decrease the number of votes needed to invoke cloture, eventually requiring just 51 to break the gridlock, seems extreme.

We respect Harkin's intent to protect the minority party's right to debate the issues. But some other proposals seem to us better suited to that purpose while addressing filibuster abuse.

Merkley's proposal, for example, to require an ever-greater number of senators to be present in order to sustain a filibuster - forcing opponents to stand up for their objection, not just throw a wrench in the works and walk away.

Senators should examine these and other possible modifications that do not erase the minority's voice.