Defending Senate Filibuster, Heritage Hosts Corporate Lobbyists Who Specialize In Holding Up Legislation

By Lee Fang In response to Sen. Tom Udall’s (D-NM) bipartisan attempt to reform the Senate, today the Heritage Foundation will host an event in defense of the Senate filibuster. In the first two years of the Obama presidency, Senate Republicans have obstructed through procedure, blocking a stunning record number judgeships, administration appointees, and pieces of legislation, all with as little as one to forty-one votes. For example, using a “secret hold,” which allows a single senator to block a bill or nominee, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) prevented a veterans’ benefits bill from debate; the two Republican senators from Tennessee stopped legislation that would level the playing field between FedEx and UPS; and, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) ensured that Obama’s nominee to head the TSA could not be confirmed during the period leading up to the Detroit Christmas-day bomber.

Heritage has applauded this dictatorship of the minority by hailing Republicans for exploiting loopholes in Senate parliamentary rules. But the status quo has little to do with “tradition” — filibusters have never been used as they were in the past two years by Senate Republicans. Rather, Senate obstruction benefits corporate interests looking to delay or kill regulations, reforms and taxes.

For today’s event, Heritage has invited lobbyists who personify the very problems of Senate obstruction to speak in support of the current Senate rules. Steven Duffield, one of Heritage’s experts for the event, is a GOP operative and the president of Endgame Strategies LLC, a lobbying firm he founded. According to Roll Call, Duffield, a former aide to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), the Republican whip in the Senate, created his firm to help his clients work with Senate Republicans to “use their power to filibuster to hold up legislation.” Duffield’s lobbying website advertises that he can help his clients find just the right “backbench Senate Republicans” to “exercise their prerogatives to delay or obstruct” controversial legislation:

Managing Holds and Filibusters. Your organization has an interest in a bill that has proven controversial and you require advocacy before those legislators – often backbench Senate Republicans – who may exercise their prerogatives to delay or obstruct. Endgame Strategies will give you new ways to manage your interests in a legislative environment that gives great power to individual senators.

Although Duffield does not disclose his full client list, Duffield’s LinkedIn profile says he serves “corporate” clients. Joining Duffield for the Heritage panel is another lobbyist whose business has monetized the broken Senate, Bill Wichterman. A longtime Republican operative who was caught funneling donations to a Green Party candidate to boost his ally Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) in 2006, Wichterman now works at the firm Covington & Burling representing a variety of corporate clients, including the mercenary company Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater), a copper company, and Avantis Medical Systems. Like Duffield, Wichterman’s firm specializes in helping corporations win legislative battles by simply exploiting Senate procedures. Martin Gold, a colleague to Wichterman at Covington & Burling, advertised the firm in a fairly candid pitch for a lobbying seminar:

Can you turn Congressional rules and procedures into a tactical advantage for achieving your policy goals? Absolutely!

While he helps corporations place secret holds for his corporate clients, Duffield has elected a new crew of Republican senators to boost his business. In addition to his lobbying gig, Duffield serves as “Policy Director” of Crossroads GPS, the undisclosed corporate front group that helped elect Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), and other freshmen Republican senators. By granting Duffield and Wichterman a platform to promote Senate obstruction, Heritage is doing a service for corporate lobbyists.

Senate Dems unanimous: Time for filibuster reform

By Daniel Tencer

All Senate Democrats returning to Congress next year have signed a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking him to take up filibuster reform first thing in the new year.

It's a sign that the Republicans' use of the filibuster at historically high rates to block Democratic legislation may have backfired, and coalesced the political capital needed to change Senate rules.

The letter, delivered this week, "expresses general frustration with what Democrats consider unprecedented obstruction and asks Reid to take steps to end those abuses," the National Journal reports.

Among the chief revisions that Democrats say will likely be offered: Senators could not initiate a filibuster of a bill before it reaches the floor unless they first muster 40 votes for it, and they would have to remain on the floor to sustain it. That is a change from current rules, which require the majority leader to file a cloture motion to overcome an anonymous objection to a motion to proceed, and then wait 30 hours for a vote on it.

"There have been more filibusters since 2006 than the total between 1920 and 1980," Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) says.

Udall has proposed a plan that would allow Democrats, who will hold 51 seats in the new Senate, to change the rules using a simple majority. Currently, Senate rules require that a change to the rules, such as a change to filibusters, be agreed to by an even larger super-majority -- 67 votes -- than the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.

But Udall says this is unconstitutional, because the Constitution allows each new Senate to change its own rules. Udall's "Constitutional Option" would see rule changes made with 51 votes -- just enough for the Senate to change filibuster rules, if Democratic senators' unanimity on the issue holds. (An 1892 Supreme Court ruling agrees with Udall's argument.)

Changing filibuster rules is not without historical precedent. In 1917, the bar for a filibuster was set at 67 votes, and in 1975 it was reduced to 60.

Another proposal, put forward by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), would see the threshold for a filibuster fall as the filibuster goes on.

"On the first cloture attempt, sixty votes would be required. But, over a period of days or weeks, the number of votes required would fall to a simple majority of fifty-one senators," he wrote inThe Nation.

Regardless of the specific shape of the filibuster reform -- which could come before the Senate as early as Jan. 5 -- the very push to change the rules shows that the GOP tactic of heavily using filibusters may have backfired, Ezra Klein argues at the Washington Post.

"They say elections have consequences. So too, it turns out, does obstruction," he writes. If the Democrats don't lose their nerve, the Republican minority will soon "labor under the knowledge that misuse of the rules will mean reform of the rules."

The push to change filibuster rules isn't limited to the halls of Congress. A coalition of progressive organizations has come together to form Fix the Senate Now, a pressure group meant to support the effort to reform Senate rules. Among the organizations backing Fix the Senate Now are the AFL-CIO, the Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause, SEIU, the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers.

"In the US Senate, there are back room deals, secret holds, and filibuster rules that allow a handful of senators to stop the rest from making any progress. Senators don’t even get to debate about really important legislation on the Senate floor, let alone vote, and no one is held accountable. But the rules can be changed by a majority vote at the start of the next Congress," the group implores.

Conservative observers have accused the group of "astroturfing" the filibuster reform movement.

And as the effort to change the filibuster gains steam, Republican backers -- afraid of a loss of influence in the upper chamber -- have begun to argue that no reform is necessary.

"The bottom line is this: the Senate was never intended to be a democratic body, a reflection of one man, one vote," writes "Vladimir" at the Red State blog. "It is a deliberative body, and a consensus-building body. The filibuster has an important role to play in making that possible."

M.C.L Comment: I wished the Senate Dems thought of this two years ago when Senator Barack Obama became President-elect Barack Obama. It shouldn't been too much of a shock to Democrats that the Republicans in the senate would use every trick in the book to slow up or kill progress for political gains.