This is brutal: A list of Senate Democrats who were all for last week's failed filibuster after they were against it

 In the first column are 30 Democrats who infamously voted to abolish the filibuster late in the evening on Jan 19, 2022, which failed 48-52 because of Sinema and Manchin, but happily tried to mount one last week.

The roll call vote in the US Senate is here (the Wikipedia entry is wrong on this, citing a CBS story and dating the vote to Jan 20).

In column two are 7 Democrats who campaigned to abolish the filibuster but who also happily tried to mount one last week.

The 2017 letter to Mitch McConnell in the last column references the names of 19 Democrats who then said they were for the filibuster, but last week 5 of them weren't lol.

The irony of all this of course is that Joe Biden's spending for fiscal 2025 was just passed with little modification by Republicans with the help of 10 Democrats (1 Independent) and the Democrats are beating themselves up over it.

But it's kind of hard to crow about Joe Biden's success after you just forced him out of power.

🤷

 

LOL, 8 Senate Democrats were Yea before they were Nay: 9 Senate Democrats and 1 Independent broke their own filibuster to advance the House Republican continuing spending resolution to a floor vote against which 8 of them then voted as it passed on a simple majority

 8 Democrats: "See, we voted against it!"

The Senate filibuster is indeed a magical, wonderful, horrible, no good thing. It makes you collect 60 votes to end debate, but then you can vote to make yourself look good right after you betrayed your friends.

Senate passes GOP funding bill to avert a government shutdown

The Senate passed a six-month funding bill Friday to avert a government shutdown hours ahead of the midnight deadline, sending it to President Donald Trump to sign into law.

The vote was 54-46, with two Democrats joining all but one Republican in voting yes. Earlier Friday, the bill cleared a key procedural hurdle with the help of 10 Democrats in a 62-38 vote. Sixty votes were needed to defeat a Democratic filibuster.

The votes came after a dramatic 48-hour period during which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., broke with most House and Senate Democrats, announcing he would support moving forward on the bill one day after he declared it didn’t have the votes. Schumer ultimately voted no on final passage of the legislation.       

The cloture motion roll call 62-38 is here showing the nine Democrats and one Independent vote Yea to defeat their own filibuster.

The final passage roll call 54-46 is here showing eight of the ten, all Democrats, voting their phony Nays: Cortez Masto, Durbin, Fetterman, Gillibrand and Schumer, Hassan, Peters, and Schatz.

Peters, who voted Yea and then Nay, isn't running again next year, and neither is Shaheen, who really didn't care and voted Yea both times with King the Independent.

Rand Paul voted Nay Nay!

 

 

Nay Nay is good.

 

Republican Senator Mike Crapo is full of Orwellian crap, says extending the Trump tax cuts which increased deficits by $1.7 trillion won't keep increasing deficits

 

 If you're not changing the tax code, you're simply extending current policy—you are not increasing the deficit. The bottom line here is that it's a $4.3 trillion tax increase, not a $4.3 trillion deficit increase. 

-- Mike Crapo 

Most of the tax cuts passed by Republicans during President Donald Trump’s first term, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), which raised deficits by $1.7tn, are set to expire at the end of 2025. ... Without new legislation, current law requires tax rates to return to their pre-TCJA levels. Maintaining the current policy would cost nearly $5tn in lost revenue over the next 10 years. 

-- Oren Cass

Passing economic legislation through the US Senate can by-pass the 60-vote rule if the legislation does not increase deficits beyond 10 years. 

The total public debt has ballooned by over $16 trillion under the Trump tax cuts.

Ed Kilgore: Senate Democrats have no choice on the dirty continuing spending resolution if it passes the House, have only one filibuster to use in 2025, and now's the time

Johnson added conservative sweeteners to the CR, which isn’t “clean” (i.e., a simple extension of current funding levels for everything) as advertised, but instead adds immediate money for defense and mass deportation, and cuts domestic spending by $13 billion. House Democrats already inclined to vote “no” on the CR because it contains no language forcing the executive branch to actually spend the money appropriated (which would restrict the power of DOGE or OMB to unilaterally “freeze” spending, cancel grants or contracts, or fire personnel) now have even less motivation to keep the government open. ...

To kill the CR, Democrats would have to launch a filibuster, and in that circumstance it would be much easier for Republicans to blame the Donkey Party for shutting down the federal government, despite the clear intention of the Trump administration to keep gutting the government if it remains open. If just seven Senate Democrats choose to join Republicans (or all but Rand Paul, who is demanding deeper cuts; he’s effectively matched with Democrat John Fetterman, who’s vowed to vote to avoid a shutdown), the CR will pass.

If Senate Democrats are put to the challenge and subsequently cave, they will have more than likely forfeited any real Democratic leverage for the remainder of 2025 beyond stirring up public unhappiness with Trump 2.0. Appropriations aside, most of Trump’s legislative agenda will be enacted via a gigantic budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered. So the decision not to deploy a filibuster on the one crucial occasion it is available will represent an admission of powerlessness that won’t make rank-and-file Democrats happy. ...

More.

If you thought the GOP pretending that Ukraine started the war with Russia was nuts, behold Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho who wants to pretend that Trump's 2017 tax law wasn't passed under reconciliation rules

 

 Honest to God, these people are clowns.

Republicans consider major budget change to obscure deficit impact of extending Trump’s tax cuts

... Extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed into law in 2017, would cost $4.6 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the official nonpartisan scorekeeper.

That’s under the “current law” metric that has traditionally been used, as the tax cuts are slated to expire at the end of this year. But Senate Republicans want to use a different scoring method called the “current policy” baseline, which would assume that extending tax cuts costs $0 because they’re already law.

The chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, endorsed the “current policy” approach, telling reporters that it “recognizes that extending current law does not change the tax policy, does not reduce tax revenue.”

Congressional GOP aides say the idea could have a huge impact on what they’re able to pass in the budget bill. If they use the current accounting process, they have no chance of making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, because that would require paying for it. And this process would also be key to unlocking Trump’s other tax proposals, like slashing taxes on tips and overtime pay. ...

Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said it would set a “terrible” precedent if Republicans adopt that budgeting approach.

He said it would be a backdoor way to nuke the filibuster and take an anything-goes approach to the reconciliation process, which Congress can use once per fiscal year to evade the 60-vote rule in the Senate for changes to spending and taxes. The process imposes significant constraints, like needing to pay for long-term laws that add to the U.S. debt.

“My advice is: If they adopt that policy, we should advise the American people to forget about their credit card debt,” Neal said. “You wouldn’t have to analyze revenue and expenditure.” ...

The budget framework passed this week by the GOP House is guaranteed to raise the national debt by $19 trillion in 10 years, which means we'll be $60 trillion in the hole by 2035. 

All the shenanigans and pretending and make believe used over the years to get us to the current point of $36 trillion in debt, trotted out yet one more time aren't going to stop us from a date with $60 trillion in debt.

 

WE ARE NOT A SERIOUS COUNTRY.

Trump and Harris agreeing on ending the filibuster rule reminds me of McCain and Obama agreeing on something inadvisable in 2008

 

They both interrupted their campaigns to vote for TARP on October 1, 2008, which became law on Friday, October 3, but did nothing to stop the panic.

On Monday, October 6 Jim Cramer came on the Today Show at 7am and told people who needed their money in the next five years to sell their stocks.

The S&P 500 fell from 1099 to 848 by October 27th, almost 23%, on its way to the March 9, 2009 closing low at 676 (there was an intraday low of 666 on March 6).

Over 500 bank failures marked the era fueled by these events, and more than 6 million lost their homes.

And no one went to jail.

Nothing good will come of ending the filibuster, either, not with the country this divided.

 

For those saying Kamala Harris would get rid of the filibuster just for abortion, she herself said in 2019 she'd get rid of the filibuster to pass the green new deal

Everything would be up for grabs.

 

Trump has long been against the filibuster because he thinks the bar too high to get anything consequential passed in the Senate

Although the filibuster is not in the constitution, the senate filibuster rule was as old as the constitution, and it acts like the veto power of the president which is in the constitution, except it is the senate's veto over the house so to speak.

It helps keep things bipartisan, and often slows down things which haven't been thought through enough. Obviously it hasn't been foolproof. 

 

 

Harry Reid eliminating the filibuster for judicial appointments worked out poorly for Democrats, Kamala Harris tells Wisconsin Public Radio she'd eliminate the filibuster to get a national right to abortion back

 It doesn't occur to these people that Republicans would retaliate in kind when they regain control of both chambers of Congress, passing their biggest ideas on simple majorities.

Retiring Senator Joe Manchin said ending the filibuster would turn the Senate into "the House on steroids," which is exactly right.

Retiring Senator Kyrsten Sinema said Republicans would use the new power "to ban all abortion nationwide", which is unlikely but possible.

But still Kamala persists, because she's not too bright.

 

 

Lindsey Grahamnesty basically tells Democrats that if it weren't for Dingy Harry Reid changing Senate rules Roe would still be the law of the land

 This is an odd argument for a conservative to make, hinting at nostalgia as it does for the status quo ante, but Lindsey isn't one, so there it is and here we are.

US Senate Democrats passed a $2.5 trillion increase to the debt ceiling 50-49 this afternoon without a single Republican vote after 14 Republicans voted to allow a one time simple majority arrangement

Seems like there's not much wiggle room between a $2.5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling and a proposed Democrat reconciliation spending bill now coming in at $1.75 trillion.

 Story.

 

 

The default position of liberalism is to blame obstruction by reactionaries for republican failure, not the revolutionary impulses of the autocrat

"The republicans made me seize power".

You know whose side they are on when people talk like this. Spengler long ago observed how liberalism is all about tyranny, but does anyone still read him?

"The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is all that Liberalism sets out to be."

The voices opposed to the US Senate filibuster, are, to put it bluntly, not related to our founding.

"However high-minded":

Caesar would soon seize autocratic power, and Cato would commit suicide rather than live under Caesar’s rule. Goodman and Soni argue Cato’s obstructionism — however high-minded — was a contributing factor to the Roman Republic’s collapse. America’s Founding Fathers, however, idolized Cato. George Washington’s soldiers staged a play about Cato at Valley Forge.  Patrick Henry’s famous quote, “Give me liberty of give me death,” is derived from a line in that play.

Democrats are squealing like pigs over Cocaine Mitch's supposed Supreme Court hypocrisy, but there isn't any

Americans put Republicans in control of the US Senate again in 2018, with Trump in the White House, so Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for what's about to happen, and Harry Reid in particular for trashing the filibuster rule for judicial appointments.  

From the story here, which explains it all:

The reason is simple, and was explained by Mitch McConnell at the time. Historically, throughout American history, when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies at any time — even in a presidential election year, even in a lameduck session after the election, even after defeat. Historically, when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees sent up in a presidential election year, and hold the seat open for the winner. Both of those precedents are settled by experience as old as the republic. Republicans should not create a brand-new precedent to deviate from them.

Yeah like Harry Reid getting rid of the Senate filibuster rule for "Obama judges" wasn't called "the nuclear option" BY EVERYONE

Democrats easily had stopped Kavanaugh had Senator Reid not deep sixed the filibuster rule

We'll see if Kavanaugh is truly the strong borders judge some have touted him to be.

Given the enthusiasm for him from the Bush camp, I'm not optimistic.

I would consider it a victory if at the very least Kavanaugh abandoned Justice Kennedy's radical libertarianism, but only time will tell.

Rand Paul on John Brennan: He's unhinged, deranged, an insult to our government

Quoted here:

PAUL: “John Brennan started out his adulthood by voting for the communist party presidential candidate. He is now ending his career by showing himself to be the most biased, bigoted, over the top, hyperbolic, sort of unhinged director of the CIA we have ever had. And really it is an insult to our government to have a former head of the CIA to calling the president treasonous just because he doesn’t like him. But I realized that Brennan — I filibustered Brennan, I tried to keep Brennan from ever being the leader of the CIA. But realized that Brennan and Clapper are known for wanting to expand the authority of the intelligence agencies to grab up everyone’s information, including Americans. So I don’t have a lot of respect for these people even before they decided to go on hating the president. I dislike these people because they wanted to grab up so much power and use it against the American people. ... Some people are deranged with Trump and that’s why I think they’re crazy.”

Reid junked judicial filibuster, Grassley junks "blue slip" tradition, Trump to pack the courts

Jake Novak provides the good news, here.

Mark Levin did a great job eviscerating Republican hypocrite Bob Corker in the show's first hour tonight

As Levin says, we have Bob Corker's defiance of the constitution to thank for Obama's Iran deal.

The Washington Times had a nice summary of Corker's malfeasance from Jed Babbin, here:

He sponsored a measure that required the president to submit the agreement to the Senate but turned the Constitution upside down. Under Article 2, Section 2 the president must get a two-thirds vote in favor of any treaty to make it a part of the law of the land. Instead, Mr. Corker’s provision required opponents of the deal to muster a two-thirds vote — 66 senators — to vote against it. It was a pretense to conceal another Republican cave-in to Mr. Obama. Mr. Corker’s provision passed the Senate by a vote of 98-1, Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, being the only negative vote. In an entirely predictable result, when the time came for a disapproval vote, Republicans couldn’t even overcome the Democrats’ filibuster to get a final vote on disapproval. After that, it was a small matter for the president to take the Iran deal to the U.N. Security Council, which eagerly approved it. What Mr. Corker had done was to enable Mr. Obama to claim Senate approval of his deal even though the Senate hadn’t done anything of the sort.

Like Jeff Flake, Corker won't be standing next year for reelection to the Senate.

Greedy for revenue lost to their business tax cuts, Republicans want to cap 401(k) contributions at $2,400 (they're $18,000 now)

That's right. Republicans want to penalize savers in order to reward business, but they call it stimulating the economy. The owners of business will surely prosper under their plan, but workers will not.

From the story here:

The proposals under discussion would potentially cap the annual amount workers can set aside to as low as $2,400 for 401(k) accounts, several lobbyists and consultants said on Friday. Workers may currently put up to $18,000 a year in 401(k) accounts without paying taxes upfront on that money; that figure rises to $24,000 for workers over 50. When workers retire and begin to draw income from those accounts, they pay taxes on the benefits.

Rumors have circulated for months that negotiators were debating including a cap as a way to help offset the revenue loss from a reduction in business tax rates that Republicans have put at the center of their plan. Reducing contribution limits would be, in effect, an accounting maneuver that would create space for tax cuts by collecting tax revenue now instead of in the future.

This is what you get when you choose to live by the rules of budget reconciliation, rules designed to get around the Senate's 60-vote rule. Under them any tax cut must by definition be temporary and cannot increase deficits over the next ten years. In other words, there is no tax cut. 

Once again it's the Senate's filibuster rule which stands in the way of true reform of anything in this country, along with the ubiquitous discriminatory attitude of government toward money in the case of taxes, some of which (business') is more equal than other (yours).

It's long past the time in this country when the people revolted against this system and demanded a smaller government which spends less. That's where true tax cuts can come from. Anything else is simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 

Orange County Register thinks Trump has a point, correctly calls for an end to the filibuster rule in the Senate

Here:

The 60-vote requirement to cut off debate isn’t in the Constitution. In fact, the opposite is true. The Constitution’s forerunner in 1781, the Articles of Confederation, required the approval of nine of the thirteen states to pass a law, but that supermajority provision was conspicuously absent from the document hammered out at the convention in Philadelphia in 1787 after the Articles were replaced.