It's silly to rail against this when this situation is being caused by the filibuster being used by Republicans in the senate.<p>I recently found out that it was in the last 50 years that the Senate implemented dual-tracking, which lets the senate just move on when there is a filibuster threat, drastically reducing the consequences of doing so for the minority party. Some details are here:<p><a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/how_dual-tracking_destroyed_th.html" rel="nofollow">http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/how_dual...</a><p>I suspect the democrats would have fared better if they forced the republicans to filibuster 24/7 until public opinion turned against them for delaying work on other bills. It's important to remember that you only need 50 votes to pass the bill; 60 people only have to agree to let a vote happen. However, the democrats seem to have a much less effective political machine, so I can't imagine them making a move like this.
The Constitution states (Article I, Section 5) that “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings”, and even though the self-executing rule strikes me as a way to hack parliamentary procedure, every member who votes for that bill will know what its effect will be.<p>Also, the Republicans had no aversion to using self-executing rules back when they were in power. (<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201003150041" rel="nofollow">http://mediamatters.org/research/201003150041</a>)
Oh please. Since when is something published on the opinion pages on the WSJ -- or any newspaper for that matter -- anything other than a political hit piece?<p>I vote we leave this stuff to the Huffington Post, and get back to what HN does best: ^Top (3|5|7|10) (ways to|most annoying|tips for|coolest) (dropout|VC|programmer|hacker) (under 25|in just one year|teen) (founder|failure)
I'm shocked that people are shocked that the party in power will bend the rules to serve their own ends. I'm sure if you look back to the heady days of the Bush administration, you would find opinion pieces written in the New York Times railing against how "we have entered a political wonderland" when the tax cuts, etc. were passed.
how can facebook organize 400M people to tell each other what they ate for lunch, and yet we can't get ourselves organized to put pressure on the 535 people who are so interested in protecting their career politician status that they won't solve a single long term problem?
I'm upvoting this because as a political junkie I believe a historical change is underway in how the United States government operates. As such, these changes should be important to small business owners from here on out, no matter what your party or policy preferences are. i.e., it's not just about the current party or current proposed law.<p>But heck if I'll make a comment about the politics. While the overall story is historically important, bickering over the individual case here doesn't seem like a good use of time for anybody.