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« But Which Eno? | Main | Super-negotiator »

If it walks like a duck, etc.

The Daily Howler wonders, or pretends to wonder, why a bill that had 54 votes in the Senate failed to pass. More to the point, he wonders why none of the articles covering the failure use the word filibuster. Kevin Drum explains:

Here's the answer: over the past few years, as the use of the filibuster has become routine, it's become common to speed things up a bit by adopting unanimous consent agreements under which both sides agree that a piece of legislation will require 60 votes to pass but won't require all the usual procedural hurdles of an actual filibuster. This is often convenient for both parties.

That's what happened in this case. The party leaders negotiated a unanimous consent agreement which specified that 60 votes were required to proceed to debate on Manchin-Toomey. It didn't get those 60 votes, so it failed. [UPDATE: This agreement also applied to all the other amendments to the gun bill, both Democratic and Republican. That's why they all failed.]

This puts reporters in a bind. Here are their options:

  1. Explain the whole thing: a UC was negotiated; it required 60 votes on a motion to proceed; the motion failed because it got only 54 votes. Unfortunately, this will leave readers confused unless you also explain why Harry Reid agreed to such terms in the first place. The answer is that if Reid didn't, then Republicans would formally filibuster the bill. 60 votes would still be required and a bunch of other procedural hurdles would be put in place. Reid was better off negotiating the UC.
  2. Chalk it up to "Senate procedures" or something like that and move on. This is short and sweet, but it risks leaving a lot of readers scratching their heads and wondering what really happened.
  3. Just call it a filibuster. For all intents and purposes, that's what it is, and it's the threat of a filibuster that prompted the UC in the first place. Technically, however, it's not a filibuster, so reporting it as one isn't precisely correct.

You can see the problem: none of these is really satisfactory. #1 is out of the question. It's simply too long. #2 is unsatisfying. It doesn't really explain what happened. #3 gets the guts of the explanation right, but it's technically inaccurate.

Nonsense. It's a filibuster. Filibusters have become so commonplace they are taken for granted and easy to do, but that doesn't change what they are. The arcane technical details are irrelevant here.

By fnord12 | April 19, 2013, 3:02 PM | Liberal Outrage