Bernie Sanders actually argued on CNN yesterday that a filibuster against Neil Gorsuch would not be a filibuster at all. Filibusters, he seemed to say, are only against things Bernie Sanders likes.
Requiring 60 votes in the Senate to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is not a filibuster, Bernie Sanders argued Sunday ahead of a Democratic effort to block President Trump’s nominee to the high court.
“It’s not a question of filibustering,” Sanders said on CNN’s State of the Union. “The rules right now, for good reasons, are 60 votes.”
…”There will be a vote,” Sanders said. “If he doesn’t get 60 votes, he does not become Supreme Court justice.”
“It’s not like people are going to be there standing for months and months bringing down the government,” he said of a filibuster.
But of course, the reason the Senate needs 60 votes is that, in theory, senators have the right to prolong debate infinitely unless three-fifths of them vote to end debate. Although it’s quite rare to see a senator actually try to speak as long as possible in order to prolong debate, modern filibusters occur when senators reserve the right to speak forever by objecting to requests to move to a vote, and their objections stand unless 60 votes are reached.
The practice of prolonging debate in order to prevent an up-or-down vote is known as a “filibuster,” a word derived from Dutch via Spanish to describe piracy.
Technically, one could argue that the filibuster is the long speech itself. And that is probably just pedantry, but the fact is even Sanders has not used the word that way in the past. From 2009 through 2014, he had no problem using the word “filibuster” to describe the parliamentary tactic that he was then speaking against because the Republican Senate minority was using it to block Democratic legislation and (until 2013) President Obama’s nominations.
For just one example, this story describes an interview he gave on Ed Schultz’s old show in, right after President Obama’s re-election:
“In a time of dysfunctionality in the Senate, and all kinds of absurdity, this probably takes the cake when you filibuster your own” bill, the self-described “democratic socialist” lawmaker told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Friday evening. “The American people want action and it is undemocratic, it is unAmerican when a small minority can deny the majority from going forward….[T]he majority in this country has the right to rule, has the right to make decisions. Obama won a huge victory. We won 25 out of 33 elections in the Senate. We won seats in the House.””
Sanders would go on from there to vote for and encourage Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., to abolish the filibuster for nominations, but also for ordinary legislation. Under the headline “Filibuster Reform Needed Now,” Sanders issued a press release to that effect in January 2013:
Sen. Bernie Sanders said today he strongly supports long-overdue filibuster reform to stop a single senator without explanation from forcing an extraordinary majority of 60 votes to advance legislation. “This country faces enormous problems in terms of jobs, global warming, health care, campaign finance reform, deficit reduction and many other important issues. The Senate has been blocked from considering many of these and other major issues of our day by a stubborn minority’s abuse of a rule originally designed to guarantee debate, not silence it,” Sanders said.
“We were brought up to believe that in our democracy the majority rules. In the United States Senate, unfortunately, on virtually every piece of major legislation the majority does not rule. Only a supermajority rules. Republicans have used parliamentary delaying tactics and demanded 60 votes to even debate bills, let alone pass legislation,” Sanders added.
So having railed then against what he described as a “filibuster,” and having controversially voted to limit its use, Sanders now refuses even to use the word “filibuster” to describe the very same thing, which he now supports and wants to preserve. It’s almost as if hack politicians use misleading rhetoric and define terms selectively to suit their purposes in the moment.
