BIDEN HIGHLIGHTS OBSTRUCTIONISM…. It can use all the attention it can get.
Joe Biden, seeming to lay the groundwork for the case for moving health care legislation forward without 60 votes in the Senate, described the supermajority rule as a perversion of the Constitution.
“As long as I have served … I’ve never seen, as my uncle once said, the Constitution stood on its head as they’ve done. This is the first time every single solitary decisions has required 60 senators,” he said at a Florida fundraiser, according to the pool report. “No democracy has survived needing a super majority.”
It’s an unsustainable course for our political system. Policymakers, when given power by the electorate, need to be able to govern.
We have a system that allows the voters to reject a failed minority, but nevertheless allows that minority to stop the majority from advancing its agenda. Indeed, the system has a built-in incentive that encourages and empowers the minority to guarantee the failure of the majority.
Sure, the procedural mechanisms have been in place for quite a long while, but we’re dealing with a new legislative dynamic now, which has no precedent — a mandatory Senate supermajority on literally every vote of consequence.
This just can’t last as a political system.
