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| Re: No.1 killer of blacks in NYC (742718) | |||
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Re: No.1 killer of blacks in NYC |
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Posted by PHXTUSbusfan on Sat Feb 26 18:42:50 2011, in response to Re: No.1 killer of blacks in NYC, posted by Easy on Sat Feb 26 18:38:20 2011. Per Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate Recent U.S. Senate history In 2005, a group of Republican senators led by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, responding to the Democrats' threat to filibuster some judicial nominees of President George W. Bush to prevent a vote on the nominations, floated the idea of having Vice President Dick Cheney, as President of the Senate, rule from the chair that a filibuster on judicial nominees was inconsistent with the constitutional grant of power to the president to name judges with the advice and consent of the Senate (interpreting "consent of the Senate" to mean "consent of a simple majority of Senators," not "consent under the Senate rules").[26] Senator Trent Lott, the junior Republican senator from Mississippi, had named the plan the "nuclear option." Republican leaders preferred to use the term "constitutional option," although opponents and some supporters of the plan continued to use "nuclear option." On May 23, 2005, a group of fourteen senators was dubbed the Gang of 14, consisting of seven Democrats and seven Republicans. The seven Democrats promised not to filibuster Bush's nominees except under "extraordinary circumstances," while the seven Republicans promised to oppose the nuclear option unless they thought a nominee was being filibustered that was not under "extraordinary circumstances." Specifically, the Democrats promised to stop the filibuster on Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, and William H. Pryor, Jr., who had all been filibustered in the Senate before. In return, the Republicans would stop the effort to ban the filibuster for judicial nominees. "Extraordinary circumstances" was not defined in advance. The term was open for interpretation by each Senator, but the Republicans and Democrats would have had to agree on what it meant if any nominee were to be blocked. On January 3, 2007, at the end of the second session of the 109th United States Congress, this agreement expired. In the 2007-08 session of Congress, there were 112 cloture votes[21] and some have used this number to argue an increase in the number of filibusters occurring in recent times. However, the Senate leadership has increasingly utilized cloture as a routine tool to manage the flow of business, even in the absence of any apparent filibuster. For these reasons, the presence or absence of cloture attempts cannot be taken as a reliable guide to the presence or absence of a filibuster. Inasmuch as filibustering does not depend on the use of any specific rules, whether a filibuster is present is always a matter of judgment.[23] On July 17, 2007, Senate Democratic leadership allowed a filibuster, on debate about a variety of amendments to the 2008 defense authorization bill,[27] specifically the Levin-Reed amendment.[28] The filibuster had been threatened by Republican leadership to prompt a cloture vote.[citation needed] Usually proposals for constitutional amendments are not filibustered. This is because a two-thirds majority is needed to pass such a proposal, which is more than the three-fifths majority needed to invoke cloture. So usually a filibuster cannot change the outcome, because if a filibuster succeeds, the amendment proposal would not have passed anyway. However, in some cases, such as for the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006, the Senate did vote on cloture for the proposal; when the vote on cloture failed, the proposal was dropped. The 111th Congress again broke the record for the number of filibusters in a session, passing one-hundred cloture votes in the first eleven months.[29] In March 2010, freshman senator Al Franken attacked the majority of the filibusters—some on matters which later passed with little controversy—as a "perversion of the filibuster".[30] From April to June 2010, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration held a series of monthly public hearings entitled "Examining the Filibuster" to examine the history and use of the filibuster in the Senate.[31] The Committee held the first such hearing, entitled "History of the Filibuster 1789-2008" on April 22.[32] It held the second hearing, entitled "The Filibuster Today and Its Consequences", on May 19.[33] On June 23, the Committee held the third hearing, entitled "Silent Filibusters, Holds and the Senate Confirmation Process".[34] On December 10, 2010, Senator Bernard Sanders, I-VT, began a "Tax Cut Filibuster" at 10:25 a.m. and finished at 6:59 p.m. later that day[35] on the floor of the Senate. Sanders' office said the intention was to "speak as long as possible against a tax deal between the White House and congressional Republicans."[36] In response to the use of the filibuster in the 111th Congress, all Democratic Senators returning to the 112nd Congress signed a petition to Reid requesting that the filibuster be reformed, including abolishing secret holds and reducing the amount of time given to post-cloture debate.[37] |
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