After five years of filibusters, obstruction, lengthy waits for confirmation and arguments over whether the party that failed to win either the White House or the Senate nonetheless has the power to hold top government jobs open for as long as Barack Obama is president, Senate Democrats finally decided that enough is enough. On Thursday, nearly every member of the Democratic caucus invoked a procedural maneuver that will allow the Senate to confirm several blocked nominees by a majority vote. The era of minority rule is over, at least where it comes to almost every confirmation.
As the two parties try to blame each other for the circumstances that made this maneuver necessary, a lot of graphs, charts, statistics and outright fabrications are going to be thrown around by each side to prove that the other was the instigator. The truth, however, is that you only need to look at one chart to understand how we got here — this one:
Though it’s not a perfect measure, a common mechanism used to gauge the frequency of filibusters is the number of “cloture motions” filed during a particular Congress — “cloture” is the procedure used to break a filibuster. So, while filibusters certainly were not unheard of before Democrats gained their current majority and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) became the Republican leader, they spiked massively the minute McConnell assumed this position. Indeed, nearly 3 in 10 of all cloture motions filed in the history of the Senate were filed during McConnell’s tenure as Minority Leader. Any claim that the Senate’s current minority is simply following past practices is not credible. The filibuster existed before the Age of McConnell, but McConnell made them commonplace.
