"Avast ye debate pirates!" ~The 2011 Filibuster Reform Compromise

Last week, the Senate took up a debate that can only reasonably take place once every two years: whether to change the Senate rules, specifically those pertaining to the filibuster and the cloture needed to end one.

The romantic in me loves the filibuster. One senator showing the resolve to stand up for his (or her) beliefs and argue his cause. Every one can have his voice heard. And then the process continues, either the lone senator has rallied support, or he hasn't.

But, alas! That's only how the process works in my head. Nowadays the filibuster has been twisted into a stall tactic used to block even the most banal of bills. Either the minority has its way or no legislation makes it to an outright vote. Though such tactics have led most observers to agree that some sort of reform is needed, no one is saying that the Senate should get rid of the filibuster in its entirety.

In 1975, a similar point was reached. The senate majority invoked a 1957 decision by then Vice President Nixon and led a powerful compromise that took the constitutional (aka: "nuclear") option off the table in exchange for lowering the threshhold of votes needed to pass cloture from two-thirds (67 of 100) to the current three-fifths supermajority (60 of 100), excluding special cases such as with international treaties. Simple, right? After the change, another fifteen years of relatively civil discourse prevailed until the early nineties when the filibuster came back into vogue.

China and the Democratic-Communism Conundrum

So the big news of the day is that the Nobel Committee awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese scholar who is currently serving an 11 year prison term for his pro-democracy and human-rights advocacy. This came just a few days after a likely counter-productive statement to the Nobel committee from the Chinese government warning that giving the award to Liu would have a negative impact on Chinese-Norwegian relations.


This got me to thinking about the nature of communistic governments and why China's government is so belligerent towards its dissidents. The combination of watching too much Star Trek and having a great world history teacher have always led me to believe that communism would work great if humans weren't involved, or at least the current human nature was radically altered. The problem is, of course, that humans are selfish and often materialistic creatures.