CLOTURE HAS LIMITED PURPOSE

This morning on +Steve Kornacki’s show Up (MSMBC) a former parliamentarian +Allan Frumin made an interesting statement. In reference to the recent decision concerning the “nuclear option” to overturn the right to filibuster, he said that of all of the braches of government, only the Senate paid attention to the minority. For this, he gave credit to the rules of cloture. The statement implied that the Founding Fathers codified the Senate as the “only” body where compromise is the rule is so fundamentally wrong at all levels that it was shocking to hear from a man with his experience. Compromise means every decision has taken in the minority view. The founding fathers designed all branches of government except one to be “compromising” bodies. The one exception was the Supreme Court; they are to judge if a law is constitutional or not. The rules of cloture were never intended to insure compromise and certainly not to give a minority power; the purpose was to make sure the most people are represented on only two kinds of decisions.

A majority of people elect the president with the understanding that he represents all the people. It is not like the parliamentary system where the majority political party selects the prime minster. While it is true George W. Bush did not do that but followed the advice of neo-cons, the founding fathers intended the president to represent the best interest of all of the people that is what democracy means. In addition, the divisiveness of party politics suggests future Republican presidents would act in that manner as well. The ideal of the Democratic Party, which was the ideal of the founding fathers, is that in the government treats everyone equally, which means everyone has an equal say. In contrast, the “new” Republican Party causes divisiveness by voter suppression and moving toward a class society; in the misleading words of George W. Bush, “the makers and the takers” but really the rich verses everyone else or in the words of the recent protests, the 1% verses the 99%.

The House of Representatives is composed of common people elected from among us who represent a numbers of peers irrespective of where they live. It is true that political operatives have distorted that ideal by gerrymandering, which means packing the maximum number of poor and minorities into minimum of district while putting the rich and affluent in the maximum numbers of districts. In contrast to an equal number of individuals, Senators are supposed to represent regions: rural states metropolitan states, costal states verses landlocked states, eastern states verses western states, northern States and southern States. This turned out to be the most difficult body to distort from its intended purpose until “political operatives” learned to use the rules of cloture in a nefarious way. The intended purpose of cloture was to insure maximum approval of lifetime appointments and treaties. Because of the ability of a minority, even a minority of one senator, to block presidential appointments and legislation, political operatives in the Senate have subjected that body to minority rule. Rather than insuring compromise and maximum agreement, politicians have put teeth into the political party divisiveness.

Even the one section of government that was supposed to be above corruption by political operatives, the Supreme Court of the United States, has been compromise.  A judicial body rules on legality of a law and is not to judge law based on political belief. Well-funded campaigns for judicial appointments, passing of laws by a minority of representatives, and political decisions by SCOTUS to judge those laws constitutional have distorted the purpose of the court.

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