Prevent Abuse by the Senate Majority Leader
September 27, 2019 at 8:13 pm | Posted in Abuse of Office, Conceited, Dysfunctional Politics, Enemies of Freedom, Fairness | Leave a commentTags: Constitution, Mitch McConnell, Senate
Mitch McConnell at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore. (For more imformation see Post 141 in theploblog’s index of posts.)
Mitch McConnell abuses his position as the Majority Leader of the Senate.
Mitch McConnell has declared himself to be the Senate’s Grim Reaper, a position not forseen in the Constitution.
He has declared that the Senate shall not even consider any bill that the President wouldn’t sign, thereby rendering empty the Constitution’s provision for Congress to overturn a Presidential veto – a central ingredient of the Constitution’s mandating of checks and balances, including Comgressional oversight of the Executive.
McConnell has unilaterally declared that no nomination by a President will be considered during that President’s last year, if that President was from the opposing party. He sneered that no such restriction would apply to a similar nomination by a President belonging to McConnell’s own party.
McConnell has obstructed efforts to protect the integrity of American elections.
McConnell has obstructed efforts to prevent sensible limitations on access to weapons that enable mass killings, despite the large majority of Americans that now favor such limitations.
The Senate Majority leader has too much power.
The writers of the Constitution never foresaw the possibility of this type of abuse of power by a Senator, and certainly wouldn’t have wanted it to occur.
Either the rules of the Senate must be changed to prevent this sort of abuse, or the Constitution must be amended to do so.
The rule should be that within 10 days of receiving a bill passed by the House or a nomination from the President, the whole availible body of the Senate shall vote on whether to have debates and a vote to approve or to disapprove the bill from the House, or the nomination by the President. This first vote does not require the Senators to have studied the prospective bill or candidate: they need only to have a rough sense of what the bill is about, or a rough sense of the nominee’s background. If at least 40% of the Senate votes to debate and then vote upon the House bill or on the Presidential nomination, the debate and the legally-binding vote shall occur in a timely fashion. Those who voted for the debate and the binding vote shall schedule the date for the binding vote, allowing adequate time for Senators to scrutinize the bill or to interview the candidate. The Majority Leader of the Senate shall have no special role in setting that date, and may participate in setting that date only if having voted for the debate and binding vote to occur.
Most of the procedures in a legislative body should be independent of which party currently dominates the membership of that body. Of course the outcomes of many of votes will be determined by the majority. But not all outcomes will ne determined that way: legislators have the right to not always vote the party line. McConnell’s rule takes away some of that freedom of conscience, and assumes that all voting will be by unchanging blocks.
Mitch McConnell has chosen to become one of the major villains in American history.
The State Department and the Afghan Interpreters
November 21, 2013 at 12:25 pm | Posted in Abuse of Office, Conceited, Fairness, Judicial Misjudgment | Leave a commentTags: Afghanistan, Chuck Hagel, Commander in Chief, Department of Defense, House of Representatives, Pentagon, President Obama, Secretary of Defense, Senate, State Department, U.S. Congress, Washington Post
Lithograph of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Currier & Ives, 1865.
Afghani’s who served as interpreters for US forces in Afghanistan knowingly exposed themselves to risk by doing so. They now face dramatically increased risk as the US presence winds down. The Taliban have a long-established record of making examples of those who have cooperated with US forces.
After all, the Taliban have assassinated Afghanis who have cooperated with outside humanitarian groups, or even with the Afghani government. They will surely attack those who helped US forces.
Realizing the danger to themselves and their families, some Afghan interpreters have applied for visas to the US.
The State Department has denied visas to most, even though the visas have already been allocated by the US Congress. According to articles (here, here, here, and here) in the Washington Post, “the State Department says there is no serious threat against [the interpreters’] lives.”
This should remind you of the judges in civil courts who refuse to grant restraining orders, pooh-poohing the fears of those who are begging for protection from a spouse or ex-boyfriend. Those judges are the enablers of the events you later read about when the newspaper reports the murder of the person who asked for the restraining order. The judges are never the ones who suffer for their bad judgement.
In exactly the same way, the State Department employees whose magical source of infallible knowledge tells them that “there is no serious threat” are not the ones who will pay the price of being wrong.
Denying these visas is both cruel and unjust, and extremely harmful to US efforts in all future conflicts.
These brave interpreters accepted a huge risk in helping us. Their help saved many US lives, and were essential to anything we achieved over there. We owe them gratitude and protection. If we do not shield them, no one will be foolish enough to help us in any similar situation.
Chuck Hagel, as the Secretary of Defense, would be well advised to urge the State Department to reverse the decisions made by its incompetent employees.
President Obama, as Commander in Chief, should issue an Executive Order establishing a policy to admit those who have exposed themselves to local hostility by helping us.
Congressional committees in both the Senate and the House should ask the State Department why it has taken actions that are completely contrary to US interests, to fairness, and to the expressed desires of Congress.
The State Department should identify the incompetent employees who are making decisions that are so unjust and so contrary to US interest, and revisit their decisions. Those employees should be moved them to more suitable positions, where they will have no discretion over matters like these.
Decisions on this matter need to be made by people who have hearts and brains. Those currently making the decisions have neither.
If you wish to comment on this post but do not see a box where you can submit a comment, that is because WordPress includes the mechanism for commenting only on the page for the individual posting, never on the page that shows all of the recent postings. So click here, scroll to the bottom of the post, and submit your comment.
An Effective US Senate
November 12, 2012 at 6:28 pm | Posted in Dysfunctional Politics | 1 CommentTags: filibuster, Harry Reid, ineffective Senate, Mitch McConnell, secret hold, Senate, Senate hold
The gavel of the United States Senate, used by the presiding officier (Vice President or President Pro Tempore, usually). This gavel dates from 1954, and was a gift from India. It replaced a nearly identical earlier version which had been in use since at least 1831 and maybe 1789, but which had come apart earlier in 1954.
When Congress convenes next year, there will be a new Senate: the 113th. It will run for two years.
There is a brief window of opportunity at the opening session of each new Senate to revise the rules under which that Senate will operate.
Harry Reid has been the Senate Majority Leader since 2007. That period spans the 110th, 111th, and 112th Senates. He is presently most likely to be chosen as the Majority Leader of the new Senate, as well.
Harry Reid (D-NV), United States Senator from Nevada and Majority Leader of the United States Senate, official portrait, 2009
Historians will lay at Harry Reid’s doorstep his failure to see and fix, at the beginnings of at least three Senates, the structural problems that have allowed uncompromising political partisans to turn the Senate into an ineffective body. Those structural problems derive from the rules and traditions of the Senate. Both the rules and the traditions can and should be changed.
The symptoms of the constipation of the Senate include
– delayed and prevented appointments of qualified, honorable nominees
for positions that need to be filled for effective government,
– delayed and prevented votes on important legislation,
– cynicsm and disgust by the American public,
– reduced appreciation worldwide for the advantages of an open society.
Harry Reid appears to be too uncritically attached to the Senate’s traditions to recognize the full extent of the changes needed to rescue the Senate from irrelevance. His focus on the Senate’s traditions is destroying the Senate.
Even if he did come to understand what changes were needed, he probably lacks the spine to insist on them. An invertebrate Senate Majority Leader is not what the Senate needs right now.
Ocypode quadrata crab on Martinique
(The invertebrates include the crustaceans. A crustacean has a shell, but no spine.)
Harry Reid should not be re-elected as the Majority Leader of the Senate unless he first guarantees that the Senate’s first order of business will be to revise its rules to eliminate all of the stalling mechanisms that now tie it in knots, so that it becomes an effective body.
The guiding principles of the revisions should be as follows:
(1) No individual or group can, without an immediately publicly stated reason by a publicly named Senator, delay voting on legislation or on an appointment.
Immediacy is required to prevent secret and anonymous holds, which use the present two-day delay to create de facto indefinite secret holds. Each hold must be associated with an individual Senator, not with a party’s spokesman in the Senate, nor with a party’s delegation as a whole.
(2) The plausibility and validity of the claimed reason for delay should itself be subject to immediate vote, with the outcome to be decided by a simple majority. Supermajorities should not be required, even to prevent a filibuster.
(3) Filibusters should be restored to their original form by enacting the changes advocated by the bipartisan organization No Labels.
The Senate’s job is to reach decisions by voting. Discussion is a means to that end, but it cannot be allowed to become endless.
Here is a poll on these issues:
Should every hold or other delay in voting require a publicly announced reason for the delay?
Should it require sponsorship by an immediately publicly named individual Senator?
Should that vote be decided by a simple majority?
Should the Senate adopt the changes advocated by No Labels to the rules for filibusters?
Please feel free to submit in the comment box your suggestions for making the Senate an effective body. The best submissions will be added to this blog post.
Practical ways of fixing the US Congress
November 7, 2012 at 8:51 pm | Posted in Dysfunctional Politics | Leave a commentTags: Congress, dysfunctional Senate, House of Representatives, No Labels, poltical stalemate, Senate
U.S. House Committee on Financial Services
__________________________________________________________________
Almost everyone considers the current US Congress to be utterly dysfunctional. The House of Representatives is dedicated to political posturing and to preventing the Executive Branch from accomplishing anything useful, and the Senate works under rules which make it too easy for individual Senators to prevent items from being voted upon.
Encouragingly, the disgust with Congress has become bipartisan.
A new bipartisan organization, No Labels, has come up with twelve practical measures for making Congress effective again. They have good arguments why these twelve measures would work.
This link connects to a good example: returning the filibuster process to its original purpose.
Visit that site, and see what you think.
Second committee room upstairs in Congress Hall, Philadelphia, PA, photographed by Ben Franske, August 2008.
‘I Voted’ emblem
Blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.
thepoliblog 