Daily Archives: 26 July 2021

“Hold the Floor”

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President Joe Biden (D) is pretending he doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster.

There’s no reason to protect it, other than you’re going to throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done. Nothing at all will get done. There’s a lot at stake. The most important one is the right to vote, that’s the single most important one.

So far, so good.

But. Because there’s always a but.

Biden referenced former Senator Strom Thurmond (D at the time) of South Carolina, who once conducted a 24-hour filibuster in a failed bid to halt passage of civil rights legislation in 1957.

And then he gave his game away with this:

The president reiterated his stance that lawmakers should be required to “hold the floor,” or deliver continued remarks in the Senate chamber, in order to maintain a filibuster.

What happened after Thurmond’s “hold the floor” filibuster? A straight party-line, strictly partisan vote on that bill. Just as would have been done were the filibuster abolished outright, only with a few hours’ delay.

The point of a cloture vote of 60 or more Senators agreeing to bring a bill to the floor for debate—even strictly partisan debate—is to force a measure of bipartisanship to legislation, even if it’s only a matter of some Senators from the minority party agreeing enough with the bill to debate it.

Requiring “holding the floor,” requiring Senators to speak to exhaustion, as the means of filibustering is no filibuster at all. It only delays the strictly partisan, party line, vote for some hours.

An honest Senate, a truly deliberative body, will keep the cloture vote filibuster.

“King’s X”

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That’s what Progressive-Democrat-run cities are crying against the backdrop of the explosions in crime, including violent crime, that followed their loud and proud defunding of their police forces.

The article centers on Dallas, TX, but that center applies to the myriad other Progressive-Democrat-run cities that have moved to defenestrate their police.

I obviously don’t speak for others, but for my paycheck, I wouldn’t apply for, nor would I accept, a position as a police officer in any of those cities until there occurred a complete turnover of the men and women in those governments. The incumbents have shown themselves entirely untrustworthy, especially by cops.

Innocent people would continue to be hurt—the minority of voters who wanted different candidates elected but lost those elections? Perhaps. However, karma applies to those who sit on the sidelines, too, and the majority of those allegedly innocent minority of voters chose to continue as eligible voters and sit on the sidelines rather than bestir themselves to be voting voters.

Pericles, some years ago, said words to the effect of Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you. Those disinterested ones are experiencing the inevitable outcome right alongside those whose interest includes that defunding.