American Civilization

According to any civics class in America, a bill becomes a law after a majority in Congress votes for the piece of legislation.  Then, the bill is sent to the president for his signature – or, in some cases, his veto.

However, that doesn’t seem to be really the way it works.  Especially right now in Washington, D.C., where Congress seems stuck in inertia.    A recent article in Newsweek by Ezra Klein suggested the key problem with the legislative process:  political manipulation.

For the minority party, presently the Republicans, the use of the filibuster, also known as Rule XXII, provides the ability to stop the process of legislation.  The original rule was created to provide an opportunity for the minority to express its opinion without a bill being steamrolled through Congress.  That was in the days before airplanes and t.v. cameras – where it may have taken a legislator time to return to D.C. for a vote.
Initially a single senator could stop the vote.  Today, however, it takes 60 votes in the  Senate to stop the vote.  That process is called « cloture. »Â Â  Klein observes that there were 214 calls for cloture between 2007 and 2010.  That’s more than there were between 1919 and 1976!

Now, the majority party, in this case the Democrats, also have their means to manipulate the system.  Their tactic is the use of « reconciliation. »Â  Reconciliation was  created  in 1974 as a way to balance two versions of the budget which occurred at different times of the year.  Now that process  has developed into a way to call for immediate action on bills which may unrelated to the budget process.  That’s led to some rather creative writing of legislation in attempts  to find ways to qualify bills as related to the budget process.

So, in order to return to the text book model of « how a bill becomes a law, » a simple recommendation would be to eliminate both the filibuster and budget reconciliation.  Avoid the manipulation of the system and just call for a clear majority of the votes.