Senate To Speed Up Its Business

Udall said the agreement would alter the way the Senate handles nominations, conference committees and motions to proceed to debate on legislation. The changes will also make filibusters more transparent and bring objectors to the chamber for actual debate, Udall said.

Udall did not speak on the Senate floor before the vote.

UDALL: Will keep fighting for filibuster reform

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M, also voted for the reform compromise and praised Udall’s leadership on the issue.

“Opposition and obstructionism rather than accountability and deliberation have become far too common in Washington,” Heinrich said in a statement. “Today, I voted to fix that. While there is still much more we can do to govern effectively, important legislation that would benefit working families in New Mexico now has a better chance of being debated, amended and passed into law.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., negotiated the compromise agreement in private and presented it to their caucuses Thursday. Supporters of the changes said they would allow the Senate to operate more efficiently while preserving the minority party’s right to block legislation with the filibuster.

The most significant change adopted Thursday would eliminate one in a series of potential filibuster votes during so-called “motions to proceed” to a bill. Udall has long complained that Republican filibusters of motions to proceed prevent any debate on legislation at all.

The new rules would also reduce from three to one the number of potential filibusters the minority could employ to block House-Senate negotiations, or conference committees. It would also reduce the cloture process on motions to go to conference from 30 to 2 hours. However, the minority party could still filibuster that one motion.

The proposal would limit the time to debate nominations to sub-Cabinet positions to eight hours and federal judicial nominations to 2 hours after cloture has been invoked. Udall’s proposal would have reduced the post-cloture time for all nominations, except Supreme Court justices, to just two hours.

The compromise agreed to Thursday averted the majority party’s need to exercise a constitutional option – sometimes called a nuclear option – to change the rules with a simple majority of 51 votes. The resolutions to change the rules were adopted by a 78-16 vote.

“If that (nuclear option) had to be used, it would have turned Senate gridlock into a meltdown,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and a leading proponent of a less expansive rules change than Udall had supported.

Advocates of more far-reaching filibuster reform condemned the agreement Thursday. Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, which has sued in court to challenge the constitutionality of the existing filibuster rules, said the agreement is akin to business as usual.

“The deal … allows individual senators to continue blocking debate and action by the entire body and to do so without explaining themselves to their colleagues or the American people,” Edgar said. “This is not the Senate of debate and deliberation our founders envisioned.”

But Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said a bipartisan deal was best for the Senate.

“That’s how this world (the Senate) works,” Durbin told reporters before the vote. “People start aspiring at very high levels, then you get into negotiation and then you reach something called compromise. The fact that the two leaders have been able to work this out together is great for the Senate.”
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal