With hopes of winning full control of Washington in the 2020 election, Democrats have proposed bold ideas from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal. Fearing potential roadblocks, some have sought structural changes to American politics recently, calling for abolishing the Electoral College, packing the Supreme Court, and radically […] Read more »
Nuking The Filibuster May Hurt Republicans In The Long Run
The Supreme Court filibuster just died. Having failed to break a Democratic filibuster on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Republicans voted 52-48 to invoke the so-called nuclear option, allowing debate on Gorsuch and future Supreme Court justices to be ended by the Senate on a simple […] Read more »
The Gorsuch Filibuster Shows The Liberal Base’s Clout
At least 41 Democratic senators have publicly committed to filibuster President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, leading to a probable showdown with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The filibuster might seem like payback for Democrats after Republicans refused to consider the nomination of then-President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, […] Read more »
Democrats Cheer ‘Nuclear Option’—Republicans Not So Much
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s recent decision to eliminate filibusters on most presidential appointees is viewed almost entirely through a partisan prism, with Democrats cheering and Republicans jeering. A National Journal poll found a majority of Democrats, 59 percent, said they agreed with Reid’s move last month to gut the […] Read more »
Public opinion and the filibuster
… Identical questions repeated over time — the only way to be certain about change — are hard to find. However, a United Technologies/National Journal poll in November revealed a 7-point margin in favor of changing the filibuster rule, while a CBS/New York Times poll pegged the advantage of anti-filibuster […] Read more »
Do Americans approve of the filibuster? Depends who is filibustering
… During the 2009 battle over health-care reform, we measured the preferences of the same 800 individuals in two contexts: in a period (August 2009) characterized by relatively little media coverage of Senate procedures, and later (January 2010) in the immediate aftermath of a major obstructionist episode in the Senate. […] Read more »