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Busting the Filibuster And What It May Mean To The LGBT Community

12/14/09-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
Senator Tom Harkin is considering reintroducing legislation which would put an end to the filibuster. His reasoning is fairly simple, “I think, if anything, this health care debate is showing the dangers of unlimited filibuster. I think there’s a reason for slowing things down … and getting the public aware of what’s happening and maybe even to change public sentiment, but not to just absolutely stop something. You could hold something up for maybe a month, but then, finally you’d come down to 51 votes and a majority would be able to pass,” Harkin said. “I may revive that. I pushed it very hard at one time and then things kind of got a little better.” Truthfully, the filibuster is not what it use to be. Rather than bringing the Senate to a complete stop as it did in the past, the filibuster now is used to simply delay votes from occurring. Because the Senate often moves on to other business, the ability to hold up any and all debate has been obliterated. However, it has largely meant that often times a super majority is needed to even bring any and all pieces of legislation to a vote rather than a simple majority.

This has been brought up largely due to the fact that Senator Joseph Lieberman is trying anything and everything he can to get back at both the Progressive Caucus of the Democrats, who successfully forced him out of the Party in his last reelection campaign, and President Barack Obama for, well, winning against his friend Senator John McCain. Lieberman has been willing and able to derail healthcare reform simply because he is upset that the Democratic Party did not support him when he crossed sides to support John McCain, and in his loss in the Democratic Primary. Harkin first proposed this legislation in 1994. The filibuster has been changed repeatedly since it was first used. Constitutionally, the necessity of a cloture vote has to do with the belief, at the time, that debate would be a good idea and that gentlemen would, eventually, reach a consensus. What it later became was a means by which to force the minority views upon the majority irregardless of the direction in which the nation wanted to head. It was used in 1957 to filibuster the Civil Rights Act, and again in 1964 to filibuster the successor legislation. Both were ushered through on compromises engineered by Lyndon B. Johnson. As time went along, the filibuster was dropped from a full senate vote to end debate, to three quarters, to the present sixty votes. This legislation would drop the cloture vote to around 51 since putting in a mechanism which would totally end the filibuster would require a Constitutional Amendment.

This move has odd ramifications for the LGBT Community. While this would seem to be something completely unrelated to LGBT issues, the issue of the filibuster has been one of the things the has held up reform on DADT, DOMA, ENDA, and even the Matthew Shepard Act. Often times bills which would benefit the LGBT Community are being placed into other bills in order to get them through. The Matthew Shepard Act went through with a defense spending act, for instance. The reason had to do with the difficulties of getting it through without the filibuster happening from the Right. Enough Conservative Democrats worry about supporting LGBT issues that they would be unwilling to break the filibuster and support the measures that would benefit the LGBT Community. This has made it nigh on impossible to get legislation through Congress which would end DOMA and DADT, and pass ENDA. The big problem with ending the filibuster is that it then becomes impossible when the Senate flips parties to stop those pieces of legislation from being reenacted by the new Senate. This could create a problem where the law could go back and forth regarding issues such as marriage, employment and housing rights as the Republicans try to drum up support for their electoral victories on denying LGBT Americans their rights, and the Democrats win back the Senate and reverse the Republican’s laws to deny those rights.

Tom Harkin May Reintroduce Legislation To Kill Filibuster