Summations Only

You are correct. I was answering the question only from the Presidential perspective, but there certainly are many state and local races where both parties' nomination are up for grabs.

Yes, they overcame voter apathy, the commute, and standing in line to vote - for their preferred candidate. It's entirely possible that, without the Green Party candidate as an option, they would have succumbed to voter apathy.It is also possible that they, like Ralph Nader told them to, believed there was no difference between Democrats and Republicans. In which case, they may have split their vote, had they chosen to vote in the first place. But I still see it as just as likely that they wouldn't have voted at all had there been no Green party candidate. So, you would have preferred the Green Party candidate over Gore, but voted for Gore instead. There may have been quite a lot of people like you, who voted for Gore rather than the Green party out of a damage control mentality. Doesn't this just give more credence to the fact that those who didn't either didn't see enough of a difference between Gore and Bush to consider one "damage control" over the other, or were so apathetic about either that the only reason they got to the polls was to vote for the Green Party? I agree that Gore would have been much closer to their ideals than Bush was, but for some idealists, close doesn't cut it. I feel sorry for those people, because they are undoubtedly disappointed virtually every moment of their lives, but that still doesn't mean that they would have ever voted for Gore.

Come on, Rahvin. You have to know this is almost all bullshit.1) There was only "democratic control of Congress" for a period of five months or so between the much-delayed seating of Sen. Al Franken and the death of Ted Kennedy. And that 60-vote skin-of-teeth supermajority only existed because the Independent, non-Democrat Joe Lieberman, who you'll recall, campaigned against Obama, decided to bow to the will of his constituents for once and caucus with the Democrats.The most Democrats who have ever been in the Senate at one time during Obama's term was 58. There was never Democratic control of Congress. As you're aware, it now takes 60 votes to pass any legislation in the Senate.2) We left Iraq exactly at the time we planned to leave Iraq. There was never any secret about the Iraq withdrawal timetable, and surely you can see the position we were in - anybody who ordered a withdrawal from Iraq would have been made to look like he was giving up.3) Obama issued an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay in 2009, in the first months of his term. Is it his fault that his own party in Congress decided not to let that happen? You seem to forget that it's Congress, not the President, who are Constitutionally empowered to open and close military bases, as well as to determine the disposition of the prisoners located there.4) You're right that nobody in the previous administration who ordered torture will be prosecuted for it, but that's because prosecution is impossible and would be illegal. Can't be done. And surely even you can understand the precedent set for Republicans of arresting and prosecuting the previous administration for entirely legitimate, if disputed, political activities. Republicans, after all, believe fervently (and, yes, wrongly) that authorizing torture was within the Constitutional power of the President.5) The due process for the US Army to attack soldiers at arms against the United States in other countries is for the President to order them to do so, and Congress to allow it. That's it. That's the entirety of the legal process. Not in the history of the nation have there been trials, in absentia, for the citizens and soldiers of other nations who will be subject to military action. Maybe that's wrong, I dunno - it seems stupid, to me, to expect warfare to be exactly the same thing as a trial - but that's the historical standard. "Due process for blowing people up" seems particularly stupid since there's no court in the land that can sentence you to being blown up with a bomb.6) Obama absolutely did not sign a law that " allows anyone to simply be imprisoned indefinitely without trial." That's not a provision of the NDAA (which is what you're referring to.) And if it somehow wasn't enough that the NDAA doesn't say that the President can detain any American indefinitely, Obama added a signing statement:

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Section 1021 affirms the executive branch's authority to detain persons covered by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note). This section breaks no new ground and is unnecessary. The authority it describes was included in the 2001 AUMF, as recognized by the Supreme Court and confirmed through lower court decisions since then. Two critical limitations in section 1021 confirm that it solely codifies established authorities. First, under section 1021(d), the bill does not "limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force." Second, under section 1021(e), the bill may not be construed to affect any "existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States." My Administration strongly supported the inclusion of these limitations in order to make clear beyond doubt that the legislation does nothing more than confirm authorities that the Federal courts have recognized as lawful under the 2001 AUMF. Moreover, I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law.

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Why? What problem would that have solved? Dennis Kusinich wouldn't have had any more than 58 Democrats in the Senate, either. Hillary, same deal. It never had anything to do with "spine". Our President is not Green Lantern who can make things happen just by willing them to occur. The Constitution offers the President no power to pass legislation simply on the basis of really, really wanting it and the notion that either Hillary or Kusinich could have produced a more progressive health care bill is absurd. We got the bill we got because that was the most progressive health care legislation that could have gotten the votes of Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Mary Landrieu - you know, the conservative Democrats who opposed the public option.Would the election of Clinton or Kusinich have made Mary Landrieu more likely to support public option health care? Would the election of Clinton or Kusinich have changed the fact that Ben Nelson's largest hometown industry were health insurance providers? How, exactly?It has absolutely nothing to do with "third parties." That's the solution to a problem we don't have. The problem we do have, the singular constraint on Obama's ability to enact a progressive agenda, is the requirement in the Senate that legislation be subject to a supermajority requirement. The election of Clinton or Kusinich would not have changed that at all. The problem here is that you're so ignorant about US politics, you can't tell the difference between what the President does and what Congress does. If you don't like what's in the American Care Act - and I suspect you don't like it because you have no idea what's in it, only what isn't - blame your Senator, not your President. Congress is still the branch that legislates in the United States.

The Republican primaries have been...entertaining for a foreigner. In my country we just elected the President for next 6 years and the campaign was actually very good.
We have a two-step election (technically if a candidate would get over 50% in the 1st round, he/she would be elected without the need for a 2nd round). In the 1st round there were 8 candidates and the top two battled in round two.The two finalists were a conservative (by our standards) ex-finance minister and a gay green-party ex-minister of the environment. By "your" standards even Mr Niinist (who won)would likely be labelled a communist.Living in a multi-party country I cannot help but wonder whether two-party system necessarily twists everything into black/white when in reality neither of those really exist.

Our two-party system exists because we have "supermajority rule" in our legislature. With a requirement that it takes 60/100 Senate votes to pass legislation, we can only support two parties. Further, our Senate isn't representational, so it biases towards Republicans because the Republican population is spread out throughout the country, while the Democratic population lives mostly in the under-represented cities in a small number of states. Simply based on demographic trends, if you had a Senate election in the US where the votes were 55% for the Democrat and 45% were for the Republican, that would result in a Senate that was 52 Republicans and 48 Democrats.It's hard enough, in the US, to form a ruling coalition in a single party and the reason that Republicans seem better at it is because the structure of the Senate itself is biased both towards their representation and their agenda. How on Earth would third parties make that any better? It's a systematic problem with the rules of Congress, specifically the Senate.

It's one of the oversights of the founding fathers. The Congress was created bicamerally to appease the desires fo both the big states (House of Representatives) and the small states (Senate). They never anticipated political parties, and rural vs urban wasn't really a problem yet. Though of course, it would indirectly lead to the Civil War and ultimately to the hyper-partisan politics we now enjoy.

I don't see how that can be true, since they already had political parties.

America's first political parties were the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, formed over the form the government should take, so yeah, they did exist, but the founders were idealistic in hoping that once the constitution was ratified, the federalist/anti-federalist debate would become moot, and there would no longer be parties.Had they anticipated the two-party system we currently have, they probably would have set things up differently. I know I would change things if I could to compensate for the modern world.

It's really, really not. No, it does not. The 60-vote requirement is only a requirement to defeat a filibuster, which the Republicans simply threaten left and right. A majority vote still passes bills to be signed by the President; a filibuster simply prevents that vote from happening.But you may have noticed that there have been no filibusters, only threats to filibuster, which has thus far been sufficient to cause the Democrats to attempt bad-faith compromising at every turn (until they accept a bill that gives the Republicans more than they were demanding in the first place). The results may be a bit different if the Democrats were to have forced the Republicans to actually filibuster (which requires a member of the body to speak continuously, else the vote can proceed; past filibusters, when they used to actually happen instead of just being threatened, have consisted of congress-critters reading from phone books or dictionaries for days straight). Make them carry through on their threats, don't just bend over. I don't give two shits, we shouldn't have been there in the first place. I don't care what it "looked like." Obama is the Commander in Chief. Responsibility for the military while he is in office rests squarely on his shoulders. He could have ordered a rapid reduction of force in Iraq the day he took the Oath. He did not. We are finally out of Iraq in the last year of his first term.I complained that we should have been out of Iraq sooner, and you're response is that we obeyed our own timetable - how silly, because that timetable was the problem. And the reason for that timetable was the expiration of the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, which protected American contractors (working for the State department) and soldiers from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

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As reported on Saturday, October 15, 2011, the Obama Administration had decided not to have American forces stay in Iraq (barring some last-minute move in the Iraqi parliament when they returned from a break in late November 2011 shortly before the end-of-the-year withdrawal date) because of concerns that they would not have be given immunity from Iraqi courts, a concern for American commanders in the field who also had to worry about the Sadrist response should troops stay and the general state of Iraq's readiness for transfer of power.

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If the Agreement had been extended by Iraqi parliament, Obama would have left troops in Iraq longer.So what do we have? Obama campaigned partially on ending the Iraq war...but the only withdrawal timetable he used was the one created by the Bush administration, and he would have kept troops their longer if the Iraqi parliament had allowed the continued legal immunity for American contractors! If Bush had been in office for a third term, we would likely have seen identical results!I don't think it's "bullshit" to fault Obama for this, when he absolutely could have ordered every American soldier home and we could have been completely out of Iraq within months of his taking office. The President is Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Congress decides funding for bases and the military in general, but Congress does not tell soldiers what to do. That's under the authority of the Commander in Chief. If Obama had actually wanted, he could have ordered every Guantanamo detainee released back to their home countries. He did not. Obama is responsible for every day that every prisoner has spent in that prison since the day he took office. Congress can interfere with the actual base closure, and they could interfere with bringing the prisoners to the US mainland, but they have no authority to block the President from ordering US military forces to transport the detainees back where they came from or to a 3rd party nation willing to take them in. Provide evidence, immediately, that it would be illegal to prosecute those who ordered and committed acts of torture, which are violations of (among other things) the Geneva conventions. Your position rests upon the presumption that the torture was at least controversially legal, and it was not so. From the Geneva Conventions:

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Persons taking no active part in hostilities, including military persons who have ceased to be active as a result of sickness, injury, or detention, should be treated humanely and that the following acts are prohibited:

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violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
taking of hostages;
outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; and
the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

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The Unites States signed this treaty, making it law.We aren't talking about acts of questionable legality at all here, crash. If it's "illegal" to prosecute people for breaking the law, then apparently Administration officials are also immune to prosecution for rape or murder. Strawman. US drone strikes, even the assassination of Osama bin Laden, constitute illegal violations of foreign sovereignty. I'm outraged that people are sentenced to die within hours by a drone controller and his superiors with no evidence and no defense in violation of his home nation's own laws.What would happen, do you think, if a foreign nation started flying drones over American airspace and firing air-to-ground missiles at US citizens, claiming they were "terrorists?" I think we'd declare war, because firing missiles on citizens of a foreign nation is an act of war. The only reason the US gets away with it is because everybody else is afraid we'll declare war on them and turn them into Iraq or Afghanistan.It is indisputably true that US drone attacks into Afghanistan and Pakistan have slaughtered innocent civilians, including at least one wedding. There have been multiple stories in the news regarding the lack of virtually any target verification prior to authorization of a drone strike - if you're wearing traditional clothing and you're a group of men, especially if you have a weapon (or an object that looks a bit like a weapon from the air), that's all that's required to launch a missile and kill you and potentially your family. Barack Obama, as Commander in Chief of the United States Military, has the authority to order those attacks to continue or be stopped. He therefore bears full responsibility for every civilian killed in a drone attack.There is no reason you can provide that will justify the slaughter of innocent civilians in this manner. None. I don't care if 10%, 20%, 50%, or 80% of the targets were actually aligned with the Taliban or al Qaeda - if the tables were turned, American citizens would be thrown into a bloodthirsty rage for revenge. The actual text of the law, crash, is this:

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The detention sections of the NDAA begin by "affirm[ing]" that the authority of the President under the AUMF, a joint resolution passed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, includes the power to detain, via the Armed Forces, any person "who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners," and anyone who commits a "belligerent act" against the U.S. or its coalition allies in aid of such enemy forces, under the law of war, "without trial, until the end of the hostilities authorized by the [AUMF]."

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The actual law does not exclude American citizens - and it shouldn;t legally apply to non-Americans, either. The text as written authorizes the President to indefinitely detain anyone - all he has to do is accuse a person of supporting al Qaeda. He doesn't have to prove it, because the law itself prevents a trial from being necessary. The person illegally thus detained has no recourse, because he doesn't get access to a lawyer because his detention is secret, and so the Supreme Court will never, ever hear a case on the matter to rule on its Constitutionality! Signing statements are not legally binding. Congress makes laws, not the President; the Courts interpret laws, not the President. A signing statement is at best a guideline for future administrations, but they are under no legal compulsion to agree. Even Obama isn't legally obligated to follow his own signing statement.Obama, tomorrow, could order you arrested for supporting the Taliban, and you could be imprisoned indefinitely and secretly for the rest of your life with no appeals, no access to a lawyer, no due process. All he has to do is make the accusation, because you don't get a trial to defend yourself. I don;t believe Dennis Kucinich would have allowed drone attacks to continue. I believe he would have ordered the Guantanamo detainees released. I don't believe he would have signed the NDAA. I believe we would have exited Iraq faster, and possibly may have exited Afghanistan as well. As I very specifically said, crash, Obamacare is better than what we had. It's just not good enough. Sure, folks with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage, several million young adults are able to still be on their parents' health insurance, and so on. But the system itself is still broken, with health providers having a very clear and strong incentive to simply deny care whenever they can get away with it.And while Congress passes the laws, Obama did precious little to help the process. He didn't submit his own plan, he didn't veto plans that didn't go far enough. Of all your points against me, this is perhaps the most legitimate one...but Obama was the one who pushed for a healthcare reform bill in the first place, and I hold him at least partially responsible for the gigantic mess that resulted.

I agree with this. The Democrats should absolutely have forced the Republicans to carry through with their threats. At worst, it delays the votes on needed legislation that wasn't under threat of filibuster. At best, it puts the Republicans on actual record, showing exactly who is doing the filibuster, which is slowing down the work of Congress, and carrying on a filibuster indefinitely is hard. It is entirely possible they would have gotten tired of doing it and allowed a vote, or been less likely to threaten it on future legislation. This is true. He is responsible for the military personnel in Iraq. But a rapid reduction in forces would have created a bit of chaos, endangering American and Iraqi lives in the process. It would also have left a power vaccuum that the Iraqi government may not have been able to step in and fill in one fell swoop, perhaps leading to civil war.I agree that we should not have gone in, and I agree that we stayed longer than we should have, but to argue that anyone could have responsibly pulled out of Iraq in less than a couple of years is just wrong. Again, I agree that what is going on in Guantanamo is disgraceful, and Obama could have done more for the people there, but what you're suggesting is a bit reckless. Just sending them back to their own countries would be fine for most of the detainees, probably, but for the ones who are actually terrorists, the ones who now have an even more legitimate cause to hate America? They'd be attacking Americans as soon as they could.Trials are the solution.As for transporting them to some third country. We did that, but it wasn't pretty. Either you're putting potentially good people into a worse situation, or you're fostering off potentially evil people on another country to make them clean up our mess. This is true in cases where the harboring country did not give us permission. Drone strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq are legal because the government in place allowed us to do it. Whether it was moral is another question, one I won't get into here.Another issue is what should we do if an internationally recognized terrorist is being harbored in a country that refuses to grant us permission to go in and kill him. Should that person just get away with it scott free?In some cases, and it is way above my paygrade and intelligence clearance to determine which is which, it is justified to go into another country to pursue justice. If that other country is worked up enough about it, they can declare war or maybe report us to the UN or something. I would hope our country would use discretion in cases like that, and I am outraged when that seems to not be the case, but the raid on Osama was, in my mind, a perfectly executed and perfectly legitimate action. You'll notice, in the very text you quoted:

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that the authority of the President under the AUMF, a joint resolution passed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks

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The AUMF is what authorized the president to do this, the NDAA simply says that it is not rescinding this authority. Yes, I wish it would rescind the authority, but it is by no means authorizing anything that isn't already law.Presumably, if the AUMF were to expire or be repealed, the authorization included would be rescinded, and the NDAA would not stop that either. You may be right, or he may have, as Obama did, change to a more nuanced opinion after being made privvy to all intelligence that has been collected and verified. He may have, as a citizen, listened to the opinions of his, very smart, military advisors and again, come to a more nuancded opinion.Do I agree with everything that Obama has allowed in the so-called War on Terror? No. But would my mind be changed were I told everything they know? Quite probably. This is a legitimate criticism, and one that was made many times by those of us who really wanted a good plan to come out of the process, but I chalk this up to an inexperienced President. He has said that he felt submitting his own plan would hamper efforts in the congress to get things done. People would point to anything that a Senator or Representative offered that was in Obama's plan and would make the fight about him and not the policy. Is he right? Probably. Should he have done it anyway? Probably.Unfortunately, we're looking at this knowing what the outcome is. He was trying to project what the outcomes would be based on different actions he might take, and he took the one he thought would offer the best result. That's really all we can ask from a president.

It really, really is, and this post is more of it, piled higher and deeper. No, they don't "simply threaten" it. They invoke cloture on every bill. And the rules of the Senate allow them to invoke cloture on every bill except those that can be passed by reconciliation, which the Affordable Care Act was not.The filibuster isn't "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"-type shit where a guy stands up there in an adult diaper and orates for hours and hours. The filibuster is the act of invoking cloture and it requires 60 votes for the Senate to pass cloture. If cloture doesn't pass but the Senate elects not to take up debate again, the bill is dead. Kaput. And that's the filibuster. That happened more than 100 times in the 111th Congress.There hasn't been a requirement that cloture actually be accompanied by debate for almost 50 years, Ravhin. Jesus, learn something about how legislation gets passed in this country. Then no timetable for withdrawal would have pleased you. Nice of you to admit it. But recall, if you will, that Obama opposed the war in Iraq; Hillary voted in favor of it. Well, right. Because withdrawal of the troops was always going to result in massive civilian deaths in Iraq. (It already has.) That was always going to happen. It's defensible politics, at least, to rip that bandaid off according to the timetable that everybody had already agreed on. I would have liked the war to be over sooner as well, but this was the soonest that it realistically could have ended. Remember what happened when Obama tried to close Guantanamo? Even his own party stood up to ensure that he could not. And neither does the President tell prisons what to do. Closing Guantanamo was always contingent on not simply leaving the prisoners there, and every single member of Congress stood up to prevent Obama from moving the prisoners anywhere else.You're just being unrealistic if you think that Obama had some kind of power to sidestep Congress on this. Is that really what you want? Obama to set a precedent for violating the separation of powers, checks and balances of the Federal government? How do you think that plays out when a Republican is in power? I don't see how you can sit there and criticize the President for not doing enough to roll back Bush's enormous expansion of Presidential power and then criticize the President for not doing enough to expand Presidential power. We have agreements with nations like Pakistan that regulate our deployment of weapons within their territory. No violation of sovereignty has occurred because our troops and equipment deploy in Pakistan by the invitation of that nation. And, of course, when nations violate our sovereignty by attacking us, a state of war is created that allows us to legally respond. Again, the "due process" for a military strike against a target is for the President to obtain an authorization of the use of force from Congress - which was passed on Sept 14th 2001 - and then order the military to attack that target. Fine. War is outrageous. I think most adults understand that, but most adults also understand that different laws govern different situations, and that a situation of civil order enforced by the police is a different situation, legally, than the chaotic situation of the battlefield. The legal process due someone who is going to be executed by the state is a much different process than that due someone about to be attacked by a soldier. They've never - in the history of the world - been subject to the same laws.Drone controllers aren't passing down "sentences", they're attacking military targets consistent with their orders and the AUMF passed by Congress. That's all the due process that is required. I think that would be an act of war, if the government of the US hadn't agreed to such a thing. Whether the US government could legally agree to that, I'm not sure, and I don't know anything about Pakistani law so I can't tell you if their agreement to authorize the use of force within their country is legal inside Pakistan or not. But neither can you. Your cited text proves my correct, because as you can see the law affirms - it does not create, it affirms - provisions of other laws. Specifically, the 2001 AUMF. Whether or not the provisions of the AUMF apply to US citizens is a function of the text of the AUMF, not of the NDAA. Whether or not the NDAA refers to the citizenship status of detainees is irrelevant. The AUMF is the controlling legislation on detainment of terrorism suspects, and Obama has unambiguously stated that the AUMF, properly interpreted, doesn't allow for indefinite detainment of US citizens or the suspension of habeas corpus.So it's an absolute lie to say that Obama has signed a law that allows for indefinite detainment of US citizens. You know that's bullshit, 100% bullshit. All the NDAA says is "2001 AUMF? Still in effect." Of course not, because that would be Obama writing legislation instead of following it - something, by the way, you keep insisting you want Obama to do. But signing statements show how the administration interprets law, and the NDAA statement pretty incontrovertibly demonstrates that Obama signed a bill that doesn't allow for indefinite detention of US citizens. Dennis Kucinich would not have had the power or the authority to do so, nor the political consensus to get 60 votes for anything. In year three of an Kucinich administration you would have been complaining about the do-nothing, spineless fecklessness of the Kucinich leadership, and boy wouldn't things have been different if they'd ran that Obama guy instead, now that guy was a real barn-burner!Like most of us liberals you're envious of the Republican ability to demand uncompromising adherence to the party line, but you don't know about the psychological and systematic mechanisms that have that result in the Republican party. For instance, leaderships and committee positions in the Democrat party are assigned based on seniority, which is why Leiberman was able to retain his chairs even after he so betrayed Democrats in the 2008 election. Of course, liberals like you called for his head and faulted "no-drama Obama" for not putting the knife in; come March 2009, though, and there would have gone your five months of filibuster-proof supermajority all because you had a fit of pique and a case of jihadist-envy when you should have been marshalling the allies you needed in the face of years of racist Republican intransigence. Thank God Obama is so, so much smarter than you, Rahvin. The Affordable Care Act is the best health care legislation that could have gotten 60 votes in the Senate. If you want something better, get more Democrats in the Senate. Get better Democrats in the Senate so that the 60th-most progressive senator is someone who supports the public option.But you didn't do any of that. You sent Obama to the White House with 55 Senate Democrats and thought you were done, because you thought Republicans wouldn't take advantage of all of their options in the Senate, for some reason, and allow Democrats to win on things. Jesus Christ, why would he veto a plan that didn't go far enough? That makes no fucking sense unless your goal, like Dronester, isn't to actually do anything in government to help people's lives, it's to live out a fantasy of proxy martyrdom watching the President die on hill after hill.

They did, over 100 times in the 111th Congress alone.The "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" vision of the filibuster that goes along with a requirement of actual debate isn't how the filibuster works, guys. You need a better picture of this Senate bylaw than Hollywood movies, don't you think?Here's how the filibuster works - if you want to take a bill out of debate and vote on it, you have to make a motion for cloture. The Senate can either allow the motion to pass or put it to a vote. Anybody in the Senate can say "I want to vote on this", waiving cloture requires unanimity. In order to pass cloture with a vote, you need a 60 vote supermajority regardless of how many Senators there are so the fact, in early 2009, that Al Franken was legally prevented from taking his Senate seat meant that the Republicans had basically an extra vote in the Senate on cloture.If cloture passes, a vote on the bill can be scheduled two days later. If cloture doesn't pass, the bill goes back into "debate" status but that doesn't require that the bill be debated. There is, in fact, no requirement that the Senate ever actually debate anything. If the Senate never again schedules debate on the bill, it's dead forever. And, of course, even getting to the point where you debate the bill requires unanimous approval of the Senate, because any individual Senator can place an infinite, anonymous hold on the debate of any bill, by "gentleman's agreement" of the Senate.Republicans don't "threaten" to filibuster, they are actually filibustering when they vote against cloture on a bill. That's the filibuster, not the "stand there and talk for hours" stuff you guys know from old movies. It hasn't worked like that in decades. Back then you needed 86 votes to pass cloture; the 60 vote requirement was part of the compromise, and the other side of that was that you didn't need to actually debate a bill that failed cloture. It would just be done. Think this through. Currently, we have a system where each time Republicans want to block a bill, they have to assemble 41 votes for either doing so or doing nothing (because not voting is the same as a vote against cloture.) You'd rather replace that with a system where Republicans can get 41 votes or nonvotes together once and use that to block all further Senate business? That's fucking crazy. Why on Earth would that be better? Jesus!Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

* coughs *Awesome Republican Primary thread, remember?If you really want to get into something else, let's have a spinoff thread.

Well, they already do this. They filibuster any and all legislation they have even minor disagreements with. As you said, they did it 100 times in 2 years, and the Senate isn't in session for large chunks of that 2 years.I would much rather have transparency, yes. The anonymous hold is just plain bullshit. I would much rather force someone to stand there and quite visibly bring the Senate to a stop, rather than someone standing up and saying they're enforcing a hold that some other, unnamed Senator requested.As it stands, legislation just kind of disappears and the voters have little to no idea why or who is to blame.The Majority Leader in the Senate should be able to schedule debate on any and all bills, and there should be a record of who opposes said bills, or even the debating of said bills.

Except some stuff is making it through. The creation of the Consumer Protection Bureau. Appointment of Executive Branch positions. National debt reauthorization.Remember under your system nothing can happen - not even the stuff that can't be filibustered because under your system, a filibuster stops all Senate business. You can't even do majority-rule reconciliation under your system. You couldn't have the Senate approve new officers of the US military. You couldn't even elect a President, because the Senate could never schedule a ratification of the election. Cloture votes are on the record, and I don't see how your system gets any more voter attention. CNN isn't going to cover hours and hours of pointless oratory; voters are going to be just as confused about who's responsible for what under your system as they are now.