Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 1:40 pm
A Filibuster-Proof Majority?
Posted by Karen Tumulty | Comments (25) | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email This
How long has it been? You have to go all the way back to 1937 to find the last American President who enjoyed what was, in practice, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, according to Senate Associate Historian Donald Ritchie. That was when Franklin D. Roosevelt, having just won what was then the biggest re-election victory in history, permanently alienated Southern Democrats by trying to "pack" the Supreme Court by adding two more justices.
From then until the late 1980s, the two parties in the Senate were too fractious internally to really function as a filibuster-proof majority. (For most of that time, it took a two-thirds vote to overcome a filibuster; in 1975, the Senate changed its rule so that it could cut off debate if 60 Senators voted to do so.) In Jimmy Carter's first term, for instance, there were more than 60 Democrats in the Senate. However, conservatives such as James Allen of Alabama often voted more to the right than their Republican colleagues, while there were liberal Republicans such as New York's Jacob Javits who rarely sided with their own party.
So in practice, it was almost like there were four parties in the Senate, where lawmakers aligned as much by ideology as by partisan identification. Not until Ronald Reagan's day did the two parties start voting again in a cohesive bloc--and begin to give the President more partisan leverage, says Ritchie.
More:
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/04/28/a-filibuster-proof-majority/
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