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How Joe Biden could change the Senate

Bruce Ackerman notes<http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_biden_could_fix_the_senate>
that
filibuster reform has long been a preoccupation of Senate presidents (which
is to say, vice presidents). In fact, it took three of them, working from
both parties, to pass the 1975 change that brought the threshold for cloture
down from 67 senators to 60 of them. First Richard Nixon took his shot, and
then Hubert Humphrey raised the issue. Both failed. Then came Nelson
Rockefeller, whose role in this story is not well-known:

Nelson Rockefeller broke the log-jam when serving as Gerald Ford's vice
president. Both majority leader Mike Mansfield and the parliamentarian
opposed the Senate president's rulings. But Rockefeller refused to budge,
and this time, the Senate backed him up by a vote of 51 to 42.

Mansfield arranged a face-saving compromise, under which the Senate adopted
the current three-fifths rule without explicitly accepting the propriety of
Rockefeller's action. But there's no avoiding the fact that the current
filibuster rule is the product of the bipartisan campaign by Nixon,
Humphrey, and Rockefeller to overcome the opposition of parliamentarians and
majority leaders to change.

This constitutional point should not be obscured by the short-term politics
of health care. Vice President Biden has served 36 years in the Senate --
longer than the parliamentarian. While he should listen to Frumin's advice
about the complex Senate rules, he can and should make his own decisions.
And the current majority leader, Harry Reid, who supports filibuster reform,
will not stand in the vice president's way this time. Biden should establish
that the Constitution gives him independent authority and thereby preserve
his ability to lead a new round of filibuster reform in 2010 and beyond.

--
Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners
(202) 333-1880
[email protected]