The US Senate fillibuster is not a law but one of the Standing Rules of the United States Senate.

So my question is can the Commander-in-Chief declare the behavior of the Senate to be a threat to national security and use the President's Constitutional Authority to defend the nation against it?

I have no illusions that the current president has the political clout to do so, nor that circumstances are anywhere near the calamity that would justify even a suspension of the Senate rules by the a more politically powerful head of the Executive. Separation of Powers is sacrosanct for him.

But theoretically, might it be a way to save our democracy should Senate rules cause total gridlock.

I would not be surprised if a Republican president - like Sarah Palin or Ron Paul - would attempt to do so, by other means if not outright. After all a previous one took us to war by subverting the Constitution in my opinion. And a Democratic president attempted to pack the court, unsuccessfully I might add, during a previous period of national crisis brought on by domestic forces. So what sayeth thee?

Only if he wants to commit political suicide.

The president does make appointments during Senate recesses, when the Senate is blocking a confirmation, and he justifies it as an emergency or some such. A recent example is the Bush appointment of John Bolton.

If the present president or a future one behaves according to your scenario, he/she would be called to task for subverting the rule of law and the separation of powers.

Has the presidency dispensed with the rule of law before "in a national emergency?" Lincoln suspended writs of habeas corpus. Here's a useful read and a recent analogy:

Slate Article

We're not in a civil war.

From the articleThe words "rebellion or invasion" open a loophole wider than the one that the Bush administration wiggled through to get us into Iraq and to justify torture on territory outside the USA.

That we are not at war may become debatable if there are copycat versions of the bombing of the IRS building in Texas. There are a lot of crazy people with conventional "WMD" in this country. Why Joe Lieberman hasn't spoken up about this as an act of domestic terror is beyond me.

But my concern is the national security threat posed by fundamental financial regulatory problems in the USA. Their sustenance is related directly to the gridlock in the US Senate.

Again Lieberman - and I am not singling him out but using him as a prime example - virtually single-handedly destroyed health care reform to protect the insurance industry, and along with it, his job. Obama's director of national intelligence has already declared the economic crisis the major threat to national security.

God, I sure hope not!

Of course, had Bush even hinted at doing this, you guys would be having conniption fits.

I don't even understand how anyone here can complain about the filibuster when Democrats employed them incessantly, especially where judicial appointments were concerned. The hypocrisy on this issue is astounding. Democrats have no problem employing the filibuster when it suits their needs, but if the Republicans even think of filibustering, liberals are screaming about it six ways to Sunday.

No, he cannot, because doing so would be a de facto declaration of dictatorship. While the President could "command" that the Senate not follow its own standing rules regarding filibuster, what power would the President have to enforce such a command? None, short of military or police intervention. It would become a showdown that would lead to total collapse of the government. The separate of powers has to be respected for the government to survive.

Believe me SFTom and Crew Chief, my gut reaction to the prospect of the Senate being reigned in by the Executive was the same as yours when the thought first occured to me. And it would indeed take a much worse threat to national security than the current one - not to mention a president with overwhelming popular support and (probably) impecable military credentials - to accomplish the task, assuming the Senate does not both heel and heal itself.

In fact we would have to see worse economic conditions than those in the Great Depression and more domestic violence than failed Wall Street powerbrokers jumping out of skyscrapers or - and this seems more likely in this modern economic meltdown - more things like disillusioned domestic middle class malcontents with pilot licenses crashing planes into federal buildings.

But keep in mind that the fillibuster is not in the Constitution, and it is questionable whether it is constitutional at all. The Executive and the Supreme Court combined, along with the cooperation of the House of Representatives (who are elected entire, every two years and must be more in touch with daily sentiments of the voting public) are the only institutions that could heel or heal a Senate that is threatening national (and indeed international) economic stability and has become incapable of acting or allowing action.

Given a popular military-origin Republican or Democratic president, a strong Speaker of the House and a wise Supreme Court, the harm that is being done by the current stalemate could be resolved constitutionally.

There's nothing unconstitutional about the filibuster ... it is not prohibited by the Constitution. But you're right that the Senate might alter the rule itself (as it did previously, reducing the number of votes necessary to break a filibuster from 67 to 60) if public sentiment comeplled it to do so.

Unless specifically prohibited by the Constitution, then it is permitted. The Left seems to forget the importance of the 9th Amendment. If something is not prohibited, it is up to the individual states to make rules. Now, with the filibuster, even though it's a similar line of thinking, the ability to establish it comes via the Constitution's words giving each house of Congress the right to make their own rules.

Again, I find it amazing that the filibuster is even an argument, because it seemed to be totally acceptable when Bush was president or when Republicans controlled the Senate. Now that they have 41 votes, Liberals are up in arms about it--until they threaten to use it again if a Republican president should appoint judges.

I think many people (including myself) have found the filibuster to be counterproductive for a very long time.

In other political news: Scott Brown assailed by the far right for being too "bipartisan."

It is hard to even begin to explain how broadly that statement could be interpreted, or better said "mistinterpreted", since I am sure it would never have been your intent to justify slavery, second-class citizenship for women, or the abrogation of treaties with foreign powers signed by the President and ratified by Congress - just to name a few.

Constitutional interpretation has to be constantly evolving to allow for both technological changes as well as the fluid mores of the people who inspired, wrote and are supposed to be protected by it. In a word: us.

The current gridlock in the Senate has more to do with differences in philosophy between progressives and fundamentalists, the former seeing the document as subject to interpretation the latter seeing it as static and literal, as they do religious scripture. An early version of this economic ecumenism was best described by its high priest Ronald Reagan:That "force" assumedly includes any policing authority enforcing IRS functions.

What he failed to note, as have all his acolytes, is that government is the people. And if we don't control the economy then someone else will. Right now that is an oligarchy of all but un-regulated financiers.

Slavery was specifically permitted by the Constitution. Moreover, Congress was forbidden to even do anything about it for the first 20 years following the Constitution's ratification.




Absolutely, positively, unequivocally NOT! This renders the Constitution meaningless, for if one Justice is to conclude one year that the Constitution means "X," what is to stop another Justice 50 years later to say it means "Y"? It is NOT the job of federal judges to treat the Constitution as some evolving document because it was not meant to be. You want it to evolve? To change? To say something different? The Founders installed a way to do just this. It's called an amendment.

I vehemently oppose anything else, because I do not wish to weaken and trivialize that great document. Your philosophy does just that. It subjugates the Constitution to the political and ideological whims of a particular time or a particular judge.

By suggesting that the Constitution does not mention slavery I would be making an error in fact. And I thank you for correcting that Crew Chief.

But while it is true that there was defacto recognition of slavery in the Constitution, it was only in the context of the morals of the times. Within those limits Justices could have made rulings based on the merits of the individuals - regardless of race, creed, national origin or color of their skin. Instead they continued a "tradition" established before the Constitution was consceived that subsequently rendered USA slavery arguably the most intensely race-based institution since the Greeks of Alexander the Great - who were looked down upon by the Romans who allowed more fluid social advancement for slaves, though even they were less tolerant of the more alien Africans. As for Constitutional interpretation remaining stagnant, we would hardly need a Supreme Court if that were truly the case. Once a precedent were set a computer could decide succeeding cases. We have lost the human factor in our society. And economic pressure makes that even worse, as one group is set against another - be it gay-straight, black-white, rich-poor or even within classes as is the case with the financial crisis in which financiers cleverly cleave investors from workers who are both "middle class" - making it necessary for any interpretation of the Constitution to be empathetic to the weaker party to make a just decision. I think it is safe to say that Justices who ruled based on race were opposed by many even during the earliest cases before the Supreme Court. Likewise we have differences about economic decisions.

I'm curious how far you are willing to take your line of reasoning. For example, the Constitution does not mention contraceptives and the Bill of Rights does not use the word "privacy," but the Supreme Court struck down a state law that prohibited sales of contraceptives in 1965 based on a right of privacy that it found within the various provisions of the Constitution. You think this was a mistake, and that there is no such thing as a "right of privacy" under the Constitution, right?

Or how about this: a state passes a law prohibiting and refusing to recognize any marriage between people of different races, which you would find okay under the Constitution since, after all, there is no "right of privacy." Other states, however, permit such marriages. The Constitution says that each state must give "full faith and credit" to the laws of every other state? Using only the literal language in the Constitution, how would you resolve this dilemma?

The greater danger posed by our gridlocked political system is that it will eventually further damage our decaying economic system. We must set a better economic example for the world.

Wealth disparity is the fundamental economic problem faced around the world. Producers of goods and services need customers. Wealth redistribution produces more, and more dependable customers: those who actually need products and services (the driving force in market-based economies) rather than those who simply buy luxuries on impulse (the favored buyers in marketing-based economies like our current one). We waste our time begging China and other growing/developing economies to revalue their currencies - a dead-end policy that will eventually be exhausted, just like our lowering of the Fed's prime rate to zero won't work here; and a policy that China rightly eschews.

Forcing companies to contribute more to a fund that will cover their own losses as they take more risks is much more sensible and would likely have prevented Goldman-Sacks and others from shuffling cards with insurers and national governments. If you know you will have to pay for your own problems with money you have in a fund, why would you take foolish risks with your own money? We should instead be encouraging China to do more of that and to redistribute wealth by increasing minimum wages, pension funds and improving health care. By doing so for our own population we would set an example, invest in ourselves and encourage China's population to seek the same, as they are now seeking to imitate our economy - despite nominal Communist rule. A side effect would be a huge increase in world consumers.