The Obstructionist Gang of 21

Our latest report [1] on the block-and-blame game [2] in the 110th Congress identifies 21 senators who voted to filibuster on each of 12 key votes on bills that passed the House and which had significant popular support.

These are the men and women who spearheaded what former Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said was a deliberate strategy of obstruction to keep the new Democratic majority in the Senate from changing the policies of the Bush administration and the previous Republican congressional leadership.

Another eight senators missed one or more of these 12 votes, but they voted to filibuster every time they did vote. That group includes Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

One result, the report shows, is a record-smashing 104 cloture votes, in which bill supporters have to amass 60 votes to break a minority-led filibuster. Filibusters became so routine in this Congress that it has become common for reporters to write [3] that bills in the Senate require 60 votes for passage. Actually, a bill can pass the Senate with a simple majority of senators present. The 60-vote threshold applies to motions to end debate on a bill; without a successful motion to end debate or a move to take a bill off the floor for consideration, a bill can be debated endlessly, or filibustered.

The only reason we haven't seen much [4] of what the public normally thinks of as a filibuster during the 110th Congress—the one exception [5] being a July vote on bringing an orderly end to the Iraqi occupation—is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid keeps pulling bills off the floor after they hit the obstructionist roadblock. The public doesn't get to hear all-night conservative rants about why the public shouldn't get House-passed legislation that would shift tax subsidies from oil companies to green energy, provide for equal pay for women, offer help for homeowners struggling with subprime mortgages or make it easier for workers to join unions.

It can't be stressed enough that the obstruction game is a political one, designed not to bring consensus but to keep the Democratic leadership in the Senate from building a record of accomplishment that would build build public confidence in progressive governance. Lott last year spoke of obstructionism as a "strategy" that "is working for us." In July conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer predicted [6] that the the obstruction strategy "will give the Republicans the one opening they are going to have in 2008."

Except that it hasn't. CQPolitics.com today projects that Democrats could add five seats to their slim majority (they now have 49, plus two independents who caucus with the Democrats). Among the "gang of 21" in danger of losing their seats are Senate Minority Leader and chief obstructionist Mitch McConnell, Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina. Two other senators who missed one or more of our key votes, Ted Stevens of Alaska and Wayne Allard of Colorado, are now rated by CQ as being in "leans Democratic" races.

The public appears to have gotten wise to the fact that people who scorn government, and who resist efforts to put government on the side of the people, ought not be given responsibility to lead it. There's still much work to do to make sure that the history of the 110th Congress is written correctly, not as a "do-nothing" legislature but as a victim of a petulant, "block-and-blame" conservative minority.