Even Independent King Excoriates Filibuster
“So the situation we’re in now is that 24 percent of the American people have effective veto over anything that 76 percent of the American people think is important public policy," Maine senator says
You know that things have gotten pretty bad in the Senate when a temperate, independent senator, such as Angus King of Maine, has apparently lost patience with the overuse of the filibuster.
King, just one of two independents in the Senate, complained that conservative Democratic Sen Joe Manchin's romanticizing of the filibuster is offbase.
“The filibuster and Joe's theory of the filibuster is it forces bipartisanship, it forces the parties to work together. That theory only works if both of the parties are willing to meet at the table,” King said in an on-air interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow after Republicans blocked the latest attempt to pass a bill to ensure voting rights. “If one of them just uses it as sheer unadulterated obstruction, which is what happened today, then, you know, that’s when, as you pointed out, I say, ‘You know, democracy has to trump a rule.’
“You know, the filibuster is not in the Constitution. We need to restore the Senate to what it was back when Lawrence worked there and when I worked there 40 years ago,” King added, referring to MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell, who once worked as a Senate staffer. “The filibuster was rarely used. Now we have to have cloture votes on deputy secretaries of defense. I mean everything requires either a cloture vote for nominees for 60 votes for anything substantive. That’s not what the Framers intended. They didn’t intend a supermajority in the Senate, and here we are.
“Let me give you one piece of math, Rachel, that I think you’ll find surprising. You can get 41 votes out of the current Senate, which was enough to block any legislation. And if you take the states that those 41 senators represent, add all the population together, you get 24 percent of the American people,” King said. “So the situation we’re in now is that 24 percent of the American people have effective veto over anything that 76 percent of the American people think is important public policy. I don’t think that squares with democratic theory.”
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