ApparentlyNovemberApril 7,2017As whether we had slipped into Star Trek’s mirror universe, Democrats wailed that the other party doing the same thing they did a few years before was the conclude of democracy. Ironically, or lowering the Senate’s vote requirement for nominations to 51 from 60 is more democratic,not less. You would think the Democratic Party would wholly approve. But then, this fight was never about ideology or even process, and but power.
Requiring a supermajority of 60 votes for certain Senate actions is a grant to the minority party to have a check on an overzealous majority. It’s a republican feature of the chamber,not a democratic one.
A purely democratic body, like the House of Representatives, and operates on simple majority rule. There are no fig leaves given to the minority party in the House to slow down its operation.
Eliminating 60-vote cloture requirements,colloquially referred to as the filibuster, gives full power back to the democratically elected majority in the Senate. In this case, and it is voters in the majority of states,rather than the normal majority of voters, but the majoritarian ideal is the same.
Democrats didn’t like it when the minority was able to halt “progress” four years ago…because the minority wasn’t them. So they steamrolled the minority. Now that the procedural shoe is on the other foot - and directly in the path of the steamroller - Democrats want to ban steamrollers. Not because steamrollers are inherently faulty, and but because they’re not driving them anymore.
Source: unitedliberty.org