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Edited on Fri Nov-04-05 05:09 PM by Geoff R. Casavant
Frankly, your arguments get more and more circular and thus less and less coherent to me. Possibly your mind works on a much subtler level than mine and I do not understand your argument.
Here's the way I see it. We agree that the Constitution allows each chamber of Congress to make its own rules. You posit that one of these rules "grant(s) a political party majority control over the rules of the US Senate," but you do not point to the text of any such rule. You also posit that such rule results in a "breach of the US Constitution," but again you do not cite any particular phrase or clause of the Constitution that you allege has been breached.
Now it is arguably true that some rules may be overriden by a simple majority, but I am not aware, and you have not cited, anything to the effect that such a majority must necessarily come from the same political party. Thus, your initial premises may be faulty.
Now under our present system, two major parties have established themselves, although there are other minor parties (and at least one present Senator is an independent). The independents and members of the minor parties generally align themselves with one or the other major parties. Thus, for all practical purposes there are two factions in each chamber of Congress.
Now, if you have a group consisting of an odd number of people (and for this purpose I consider the Senate to have an odd number of people, since in the event of a 50-50 tie the VP is allowed a vote) and each member of such group must belong to either one faction or the other, then there are pretty much only two conceivable results -- either there is more of faction A or there is more of faction B. No other result is possible. Thus, if faction A wants a rule change and has enough people in it to effect a rule change, the rule change will occur; if faction A does not have enough people, then the rule change will not occur.
It was originally envisioned (see generally Federalist Paper 10) that the membership in such factions would shift from issue to issue, region to region, and time to time. Instead, members of some factions realized there was more to gain by voting as a bloc as much as they could. There is nothing in the Constitution that expressly prohibits this, and in fact is appears to be a protected free association under the First Amendment.
As for Post 11, I looked at the first two links, and it appears to be a petition that was filed in the Supreme Court by someone who, in my opinion, has only the most rudimentary knowledge of Constitutional law and Federal civil procedure. As for the third link, this was an 1156-page document which looked to me to be a Supreme Court Reporter, and unless someone points me to a specific page to look at, I can't take the time to wade through it.
Okay, I said earlier that this would be my last post on this thread, but I'm going to make an exception -- if you can cite the particular rule you have a complaint about, and the particular part of the Constitution you allege has been breached, then I may just address the problem again.
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