The Wrongologist

What’s Wrong Today:

Sen. Chuck Hagel just
missed clearing the 60-vote bar for confirmation today. The finally tally was
58-40, with one senator voting present. For procedural reasons, Democratic
Leader Harry Reid switched his vote to “no” at the last minute, a
routine move that allows him to bring up the vote again later on. 

The battle on the
floor of the Senate Thursday was historic. The Senate has never successfully
filibustered a Cabinet secretary. Only two previous Cabinet officials required
60 votes before confirmation, and this has never happened for a Defense
secretary nominee. Democrats hold a 55-45 edge in the Senate and have the
numbers to confirm Mr. Hagel on a majority vote, if allowed to get to that
point. 

It has
become increasingly evident the past few days that opposition to Mr. Hagel has become
a reason for Republicans to dredge up other issues such as Benghazi.

Josh
Rogin in Foreign Policy’s The
Cable says that Republicans intend to filibuster Hagel’s nomination, but
are looking for some way to weasel around the word “filibuster.”

They
don’t like that word (a) because they have tried to normalize the idea that a
60-vote super-majority threshold, which is the margin required to break a
filibuster, should be seen as the routine requirement for Senate action of any
sort; (b) because several prominent Republicans, including John McCain, have
already said that they don’t want to filibuster Hagel; and (c) because in the long history of Cabinet-level
nominations, outright filibusters are exceedingly rare.

What is a filibuster?

A filibuster
in the United States Senate usually refers to obstructive tactics used to
prevent a measure from being brought to a vote. The most common form of
filibuster occurs when a senator attempts to delay or entirely prevent a vote
on a bill by extending debate on the measure. The rules permit a senator,
or a series of senators, to speak for as long as they wish and on any topic
they choose, unless “three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn”(60
out of 100 senators) bring debate to a close by invoking cloture under Senate Rule XXII.

Most
people think that when someone is filibustering, they are talking endlessly in
order to prevent the Senate from conducting some piece of business, usually a
vote. This is possible unless a consent agreement limits a Senator’s right to
talk as long as he/she wants.

A
“consent agreement,” means a unanimous consent agreement. That
is, all 100 senators have agreed to limit the time for debate. In the absence
of a unanimous consent agreement, senators may talk until they drop.

But that
is not how the filibuster works.

Taking the
possible confirmation of Chuck Hagel as an example, Majority Leader Harry Reid tried
to negotiate a unanimous consent agreement with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
to bring Hagel’s confirmation up for a debate. The lack of unanimous consent is
the filibuster. One single senator refusing to grant his/her
consent is the filibuster.

In this
case, that unanimous agreement did not happen, so Harry Reid did something
called “filing for cloture.”

Cloture is
how the Senate overcomes the lack of unanimous consent. It currently requires
60 votes. If Harry Reid can get 60 votes for cloture then he has simultaneously
overcome the filibuster.

This will
be the fun part over the next few days.

Now, if 60
votes are quickly acquired, then we don’t talk about it as a filibuster because
the delay was short. We only really speak about filibusters when they are
successful.

By example,
there were a few Democratic senators who in 2006 didn’t grant unanimous consent
to begin debate on the confirmation of Dirk Kempthorne as Interior Secretary.
This only caused a delay of a couple of days; so many people don’t report it as
a filibuster. But that is exactly what it was. It was a failed filibuster.

And the
mini-filibuster of Kempthorne is the only known example of a lack of unanimous
consent to debate a cabinet nominee.

And in Conclusion:

There is no reason to have a dog in the fight over Chuck Hagel’s nomination, other than to beat on the Republicans for acting in a despicable manner. 

Mr. Hagel is a plausible
nominee who has been endorsed by several former Republican appointees,
including Robert Gates, Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, and George Schultz. His Republican
opposition started with personal smears and they have moved on to try and use
his nomination to continue the litigation of Benghazi.

Hagel is a Vietnam
veteran who served with some distinction, but he was unimpressive during his
confirmation hearing. It is hard to think of something he would do at the
Pentagon that some other technocrat couldn’t do.

And
Mr. Obama gets almost as much out of Hagel being blocked as he does if he wins
confirmation:

If he is confirmed, Mr.
Obama will have poked the neo-conservatives in the eye and they’ll have to live
with a Secretary of Defense who doesn’t believe in their ideas and would be
happy to screw them.

If he is not
confirmed, it will be because the Republicans filibuster him.

And that will give Democrats a chance
to laugh at Harry Reid, since he had the chance to reform the filibuster rules in
January, but he opted instead to make only a minor change in the Senate’s filibuster
rules. Under the new
rules, the amount of time to debate following a cloture vote has been reduced
from 30 hours to four. Under the new rules, if senators wish to block a nominee
after a motion to proceed, they will need to be present in the Senate and debate.

But failing to
confirm Mr. Hagel will also be food for thought for reasonable Republicans, that the GOP cannot be entrusted with
power.

It’s kind of a
no-lose situation: You’d have to work
hard to see more upside with his confirmation than with the Senate’s failure to
confirm him.

Why? Consider this: In the
span of less than a week, the Republicans will have invited Ted Nugent, a
gun-toting pedophile who admittedly soiled himself in order to avoid the
Vietnam draft to the State of The Union address. And now they will filibuster Chuck
Hagel, a former senator and decorated Vietnam veteran, in order to block his cabinet nomination.