Filibusters don't kill bills, senators kill bills, according to McCain's gang of well-fed elderly mavericks (HuffPost, via ThinkProgress):
It's just like child labor. Outlawing it missed the whole point; what they should have been focusing on was more good bosses, who would treat the little scamps with some kindness, see to their getting some kind of rudimentary education, make sure they had a nutritious lunch, and so forth. But no, liberals just couldn't resist getting involved and putting a stop to the whole thing by burdensome regulation, as usual, and what did we get?
Exactly what you'd expect, that's what. If you outlaw child labor, only outlaw children will have jobs, in fields like illegal drug retail marketing, sex trade, and worse—not to mention how much child labor simply got outsourced to places like Bangladesh and Honduras, cutting our country off from who knows what kind of economic growth.
In the same way, the senate worked just fine in the days of John C. Calhoun and Mark Hanna and silver-voiced Everett Dirksen. The problem nowadays isn't the rules of the institution, it's the inferior class of people that run it. No names, but you must have noticed some of those guys sneakily introducing legislation that could lower your ROI, and you know very well why: because the voters like it. Now they not only want to maneuver those Trojan horses into the chamber, they want to force folks to vote on them, just like in France or something. Can you imagine that? And a lot of those bills could pass!
"We have so many new members of the Senate, about half of the senators have never seen the Senate work properly because they've only been here five or six years," [Sen. Lamar] Alexander said. "So we're trying to get back to the days when the motion to proceed wasn't used to block so many bills and when the majority leader allowed senators to offer almost any amendment. Most of that has to be established by practice, by good behavior, rather than by changing the rules."
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| Irate Chagrian senator during the Great Galactic War. From starwars.wikia.com. |
Exactly what you'd expect, that's what. If you outlaw child labor, only outlaw children will have jobs, in fields like illegal drug retail marketing, sex trade, and worse—not to mention how much child labor simply got outsourced to places like Bangladesh and Honduras, cutting our country off from who knows what kind of economic growth.
In the same way, the senate worked just fine in the days of John C. Calhoun and Mark Hanna and silver-voiced Everett Dirksen. The problem nowadays isn't the rules of the institution, it's the inferior class of people that run it. No names, but you must have noticed some of those guys sneakily introducing legislation that could lower your ROI, and you know very well why: because the voters like it. Now they not only want to maneuver those Trojan horses into the chamber, they want to force folks to vote on them, just like in France or something. Can you imagine that? And a lot of those bills could pass!
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