UPDATE: Looks like I was wrong on this one. While cloture is a motion to end debate, on Saturday the Senate invoked cloture on the motion to proceed to the bill, not on the bill itself, making the statement that the senate agreed to begin debating the bill a true one. I should have looked more closely!
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Time for a quick civics lesson! Countless news agencies are misreporting that yesterday’s Senate vote on the health care bill is a vote to begin debating the bill.
From the Washington Post:
After days of indecision, the last two Democratic holdouts — Sens. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Mary Landrieu (La.) — joined their caucus in supporting a motion to begin debate.
The Senate voted on Saturday to begin full debate on major health care legislation
the Senate voted to move ahead with a floor debate
These are just a few examples, but you can find countless others on Google News.
The problem?
They’re all wrong. The Senate voted to invoke cloture, a motion to limit debate on a bill or other matter (i.e. nomination) pending before the Senate.
In olden days, you couldn’t actually ever stop debate on a bill if any Senator wanted to keep talking about it. As you can imagine, this meant that if a couple of Senators were really opposed to something, they could just take turns talking about it until the rest of the Senators caved and moved on to the other things they needed to vote on. In an effort to help move things along, the Senate changed its rules so that if two-thirds of the Senators wanted to end debate, they could do so by invoking cloture. Yes, it sounds a lot like closure, and the two words have very similar meanings. They’re about bringing something to an end.
The bar for invoking cloture was still so high that it was nearly impossible to do. Getting two-thirds of the Senate to agree on everything is like getting two three-year-olds to eat all of their vegetables. In fact, cloture was only invoked five times during the next 46 years. Consequently, the Senate changed its rules to require only three-fifths of the Senators to vote for a cloture motion in order for it to pass.
I hope this little history and civics lesson has helped you understand what the Senate voted on last night. The fact is that the news agencies weren’t reporting what really happened. Cloture takes a bit more to explain well than can be put in a news article about another topic, so they took a shortcut. The party in control of Congress (currently the Democratic Party) sets the agenda and can debate whatever they want. They didn’t have to win a Senate vote to debate health care reform, they had to win a Senate vote to put an end to debating health care reform so they can actually vote on passing the bill.
How do I know so much about cloture? Well, I used to work for a Senator, so I learned a lot about what it was and how it worked. I didn’t really know the history part, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and Wikipedia pointed me to two articles on the Senate website that give the history of cloture.
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Cloture_Rule.htm
http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RL30360.pdf
Will, Thank You for your article — It actually sparked me to write one of my own on the matter of Saturday’s Senate vote. But reading your explanation, particularly your opening, I think they did effectively vote to ‘begin debating the bill’. I know that’s perhaps not technically what the vote was, but isn’t it just the difference of which end of the (same) tunnel you’re looking through?
Curious on your thoughts — FYI, my article is posted here . . .
http://littledem.com/2009/11/what-actually-happened-on-the-senate-floor-last-night-vis-a-vis-healthcare-reform/
Great point Will. With your permission, I would like to cross-post this on The 44 Diaries.
Hey, Will, Thank You for the kudos on my interpretation at LittleDEM.com, but I have a follow-up question . . . WHY exactly did they have to vote for Cloture? Was that the only alternative to the Majority Leader’s request for ‘unanimous consent to lay a bill before the Senate’?
It may seem overly detail-oriented, but I think it’s worth nailing down exactly why 60 votes were even needed just to — effectively — START the debate on Healthcare Reform.
Great overview, Will. However, it looks like LittleDEM has the problem the left always accuses Independents and Republicans of – an inability to comprehend what he is reading.
The rule on cloture is just another example of the abuses that are leading to the collapse of this once great nation. It was implemented during time of war to allow votes on issues having direct effect on American lives. As with any emergency measure, there should be restrictions on use to only those times where lives will be lost should debate continue.
It turns out that Woodrow Wilson was not the legislative expert he purported to be, just another in a long line of fools chipping away at the Constitution.