Posts Tagged ‘senator’

Edwin A. Graning, Minister & Bus Driver, Fired for Refusing to Bring Patient to Planned Parenthood

​Here's an interesting moral question for you, dear reader: Edward Graning is an ordained minister. But he apparently doesn't have much of a following, which is why he was working as a bus driver ...

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Robert Byrd: KKK Says Late Senator ‘Wasn’t A Klansman Long Enough To Get His Sheet Broke In’

In the wake of the passing of Sen. Robert Byrd, the Ku Klux Klan, an organization Byrd briefly belonged to, is coming to the defense of the West Virginia Democrat who served in the Senate for 51 years. The Daily Caller reports: As politicia...

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The Ed Morrissey Show: Jim Geraghty, Andrew Langer, Senator George LeMieux

3 pm ET!

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Steven Weber: Newly Elected South Carolina Senator Alvin Greene’s Acceptance Speech

Hello. I want to thank the thousands of voting machines that elected me. I want to thank the ballots for making you think of Lou...

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Chuck DeVore should drop out of the Senate race in California and endorse Carly Fiorina

True conservatives.

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There’s no such thing as the secret hold

Disclosure: I'm going to be doing paid work as a Fellow for the Progressive Caucus Action Fund in addressing the necessity of cloture reform in the Senate. The Fund is being supported in part by CREDO Action and Blue America. You can help support this work by signing CREDO Action's petition and/or donating at Blue America's ActBlue page.

Annoyed Senators are at it again today, railing against the so-called "secret hold," and promising to end it once and for all, this time by shortening the ineffective and unenforceable six-day grace period for putting a name to a hold to two days, at which point the demand will also be ineffective and unenforceable.

Once again, I contend that there's simply no way to force a Senator to put his or her name to a hold. So long as the Senate attempts to bring a bill or nomination to the floor by unanimous consent, all anyone needs to do is object and claim that they object on someone else's behalf to prevent the bill from moving. And absolutely nothing about that process, nor any change that can be made to it, can force the objecting Senator to give up that name.

But there is a way to put a name there, nonetheless. And it exists right now, and requires exactly zero changes to the rules. And it's simple as all hell: the Senator who objects owns that hold.

The convenient fiction of the "secret hold" is that one's fellow Senators agree not to hold an objecting Senator's obstruction against him personally, so long as he contends that he's objecting on someone else's behalf. But why would anyone allow this fiction to continue? An objection is an objection, and it extinguishes an unanimous consent request just as surely as if the Senator allegedly objecting in secret had done it himself. So why permit obstructionists to hide behind a colleague's cloak?

What I suggest instead is, when a Senator objects to an unanimous consent request, you say so. When someone asks -- whether it be another Senator or a member of the press -- who's holding that bill, tell the damn truth. Tell them who actually objected.

Why shouldn't it be uncomfortable to have to explain the nuance? Why shouldn't it be uncomfortable to have to claim you're "just the messenger?" Everybody saw you object. So own it.

The idea here is that Senators should make it so personally and politically uncomfortable to let someone else hide beneath your hoopskirts that... Senators won't really want to do it anymore.

Of course, the better idea is to make the motion to proceed non-debatable. Neither solution actually ends holds, since the power to exercise one really grows out of the filibuster. It will require filibuster reform to do away with the power of the hold, or at least reduce it. But if the objection is to the secrecy, then I say, stop pretending that there's some imaginary power to hide. Blame the Senator who objects and be done with it.

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Wall Street reform gets better, but isn’t done yet

Yglesias calls it the "incredible growing FinReg bill", and he's right. Buoyed by some good ol' fashioned populist anger at Wall Street, some Democrats have been successfully pushing hard to strengthen the bill. While Republicans have been doing the best to drag their feet to slow the process down, they aren't by any means trying to kill this bill.

Just this week the Sanders' Fed audit passed, unanimously, and today a very good amendment by Jeff Merkley and Amy Klobuchar made it in:

Today, an amendment put forth by Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar to the Wall Street reform bill passed the Senate by a vote of 63-36. The amendment will protect homeowners by prohibiting mortgage lenders and loan originators from receiving hidden payments when they steer homeowners into high-cost loans and will create strong underwriting standards to ensure borrowers have the ability to repay their loans.

Unfortunately, it's not all good news coming out of the Democrats on this bill. Delware's Tom Carper is introducing amendment 3949, that would strips existing regulations that allow states to enforce stronger financial regulations than those passed by the federal government. It would actually weaken existing regulations, making its potential passage worse than the status quo. What make it particulary dangerous is it's potential to pass--Democratic Senators Evan Bayh, Tim Johnson, and Mark Warner are cosponsoring it.

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True Compass: A Memoir (Hardcover) tagged “politics” 67 times

True Compass: A Memoir (Hardcover)
By Edward M. Kennedy

Buy new: $23.10
200 used and new from $5.25
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Customer tags: ted kennedy(76), politics(67), kennedy family(61), autobiography(54), senator kennedy(48), book recommendations(29), chappaquiddick(22), boston(16), best seller(16), kennedy(10), memoir(5), senator ted kennedy(4)

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