Maddow Provides Smokescreen to Hide Stealth Effort by Democrats to Change Rules in Middle of Game
August 25, 2009 by Jack Coleman
You know why you never hear about the Senate needing 51 votes to pass anything any more? It's because since the Republicans have been in the minority in the Senate, they've taken a once rarely-used exception to the 51-vote rule and they've turned it into a new rule. It's called the filibuster and it means that the minority won't even allow something to be voted on without 60 senators giving it the nod.
use of the filibuster prior to 2006 was a "rare exception" to the rule, at least according to Maddow. Which is true -- if one ignores when Democrats resorted to filibusters, as they so often did when Bush was president.
For example, here's what Time magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote about the filibuster in a Dec. 13, 2004 column about then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid --
The Senate is the only place in Washington where Democrats, though a minority, can force the Administration to make a deal. They can do so because of arcane rules that require a 60-vote majority to stop a filibuster and get almost anything done. As it happens, the filibuster is a tactic Reid quite enjoys, since it gives him the opportunity to stall proceedings by reading aloud long passages from the book he wrote about Searchlight (Reid's hometown in Nevada).
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