Trying to find the answer about what's needed for breaking the filibuster, googled this old article. Seems like good advice. I wish GWB and the Senate Republicans had done something like this beginning a year ago when it could have had a double whammy effect on Senate races, and on a certain Presidential aspirant (who fortunately lost, anyway). Even though Daschle is also gone, it appears that there still could be some benefit in two years by working towards a "filibuster proof Senate."
americandaily.com
A Filibuster Proof Senate
By Bruce Walker (11/21/03)
Democrats seem to believe that they are the majority party, which is why they insist on using the filibuster to stop judicial nominations and the threat of a filibuster to stop legislation which would grant Republicans substantive policy victories. In fact, Republicans are clearly the majority party in America today.
At the presidential level, Republicans have been the majority party for a long time. Since the end of the Second World War, only once, in 1964 won the Presidency with a majority of the popular vote (Carter in 1976 did not have a majority when all ballots, including discarded ballots, were counted.) while Republicans have won majorities of the popular vote in six presidential elections. Five of these Republican victories were landslides, while Democrats have won just one presidential landslide, when LBJ defeated Goldwater four decades ago.
Republicans are the majority party of the House of Representatives as well. In the last five general elections, Republicans have not only won more seats in the House than Democrats, but Republicans have received more popular votes for congressional candidates nationally than Democrats.
Democrats have chosen to rely on the only tool of obstruction left to them - the ability of forty-one senators to stop fifty-nine senators from accomplishing anything at all by the forty-one senators exercising their right under Senate rules to filibuster. President Bush and the Republican Party turn this against the Democrats.
The Senate ought to be the most Republican part of the federal government, because states are overwhelmingly Republican. Since 1945, Republicans have carried a much higher percentage of states than they have gotten as a percentage of the popular vote. When President Bush was elected in 2000, an extraordinarily close election, he carried 58% of the states while Gore only carried 42% of the states.
This understates the gap. Gore lost two states, Florida and New Hampshire, by paper thin margins, but Bush lost four states, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico and Oregon, by paper thin margins. If these six states had broken evenly, Republicans would have carried 60% of the states and Democrats only 40% of the states. Thirty states have enough senators for cloture.
Democrats understood how to use tactical advantages like that. Thirty years ago, Democrats passed a number of bills that seemed popular and forced President Ford to veto those bills. When congressional Republicans provided just enough support to sustain those vetoes, Democrats made that the focal point of the 1974 election, demanding a “Veto Proof Congress.” It worked. Republicans lost five seats in the Senate and forty-eight seats in the House of Representatives.
During the Ford Presidency, which largely covered the two years after that general election, Ford had a whopping twenty-five percent of his vetoes overridden, which was a far greater percentage than any other president in the Twentieth Century. The key element in this campaign was to identify the veto as the obstacle to action.
This dramatic Democrat victory is very much like the dramatic Republican victory twenty years later in 1994. What did House Republicans do? Newt Gingrich and House Republicans using polling data to identify ten popular measures which the Democrat House leadership prevented from even coming up for a vote.
The Contract With America promised that each of these ten measures would come up for a vote, and the brief specifics were spelled out in advertisements in T.V. Guide, newspapers and mailed campaign literature. Republicans promised, if they ran the House, to allow a vote on each of the ten issues. This was a promise Speaker Gingrich scrupulously kept.
Senate Democrats today are preventing a vote just as House Democrats did ten years ago. Republicans should pounce on this. How? Identify ten popular measures supported by the American people and overwhelmingly supported by congressional Republicans. Pass these measures out of the House of Representatives and introduced the measure into the Senate with a majority of the Senate as co-sponsors of the measures.
Democrats cannot filibuster Senate committees, so these ten measures could pass out of Senate committee with a favorable report. President Bush should then send a letter to Congress and to the nation stating that he will sign each measure as soon as the Senate votes on the measure. At that point it is transparently clear that a majority of both houses of Congress, a majority of the American people, and the president all support these measures.
If Daschle and his Democrat colleagues filibuster, Republicans should ask the American people for a “Filibuster Proof Senate.” Each time in recent American history in which this approach has been taken - Truman and his 1948 “Do Nothing” Republican Congress; Democrats demanding in 1974 a “Veto Proof Congress;” and Republicans in 1994 submitting a “Contract With America” - the result has been an absolute disaster for the party of obstruction.
Republicans, as soon as it is clear that Senate Democrats will filibuster these measures to death, should then begin a grassroots campaign to apply maximum pressure on Senate Democrats. In those states which allow the recall of sitting senators, Republicans should begin the recall process.
In those states with Republican state legislatures or a Republican governor, President Bush should visit the state, address the state legislature, hold a press conference with the governor, and at every point ask “Why are Democrats afraid to allow the Senate to vote on these measures?”
But the attack should not stop at that level. Republicans should query every Democrats running for any state or federal office if he supports the Senate Democrat filibuster. Force House Democrat candidates and Democrats running for governor or other state offices to take a stand. Make the filibustering Senate Democrats the centerpiece of the campaign.
Democrats would either cave under this pressure or face a decisive and broad political defeat in 2004. Either way, Republicans will have won a crushing victory - a “Filibuster Proof Senate” - which will allow President Bush to begin to really transform America for the better.
Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared several professional and political periodicals.
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