Sinema’s lame excuse on police reform
In such circumstances, nothing on police reform will pass Congress and become law that isn’t bipartisan.
Recently, the U.S. Senate tried to put an end to a virtual filibuster and proceed to debate and consider a police reform bill crafted by Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina.
Arizona’s Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema voted against cloture to end the virtual filibuster and get to the merits of the bill. Doing so required 60 votes rather than a simple majority.
Three members of the Democratic caucus joined Republicans to get on with what senators are supposed to do, legislate. Sinema, who cites bipartisanship with every breath, wasn’t among them. The attempt to end the virtual filibuster came up five votes short.
In a statement explaining her refusal to allow deliberation on Scott’s bill, Sinema, true to form, cited the need for bipartisanship. But her rationale doesn’t stand up to even light scrutiny.
Sinema’s statement proclaimed: “This moment in our history is too important for political games. Passing legislation to reform policing and save lives requires a genuinely bipartisan approach. A process without bipartisan negotiations from the start will not pass the Senate . ... ”
Now, we have a divided Congress. Republicans are nominally in charge of the Senate. Democrats are firmly in charge of the House.
In such circumstances, nothing on police reform will pass Congress and become law that isn’t bipartisan.
Scott’s bill is generally supported by Republicans. The Democrats have crafted a different bill that has already passed the House. Bipartisanship would involve trying to meld and resolve the differences between the two bills. But Sinema voted against the Senate even considering Scott’s bill.
Note her sine qua non for moving forward, “bipartisan negotiations from the start” in the Senate. In other words, Senate Republicans first have to make concessions to Senate Democrats. After which, they have to make additional concessions to House Democrats.
This isn’t good-faith bipartisanship. It’s a tactical move to give Democrats the upper hand. And perhaps a cynical political maneuver to give Democrats an election issue, although I think that would be a miscalculation.
It is true that nothing that is not bipartisan will pass the Senate, even though Republicans have the majority and are pretty unified in support of Scott’s approach. That’s because of the virtual filibuster.
The way the Senate now operates, every bill is assumed to be filibustered, even though no one actually filibusters. Rather than debating and then moving to cloture if the debate gets too longwinded, cloture is now required to begin debate.
A real filibuster, in which dissenting senators seize control of the floor and refuse to shut up, has a long history in the Senate. The virtual filibuster is relatively new. As a practical matter, the virtual filibuster means that legislation can no longer pass the Senate with a simple majority, as the Constitution contemplates. Instead, all legislation, with narrow exceptions for some budget matters, requires the extraordinary 60 votes.
Supporters of the virtual filibuster, which include Sinema, claim that it facilitates bipartisanship. There’s scant evidence of that. There is considerable evidence that, instead, it facilitates inaction and congressional dysfunction.
The police reform bill is a good illustration. There is a lot of overlap between the Scott bill and the Democrat bill. Both would tie federal funds for police departments to the adoption of best practices as defined by the federal government.
There are differences. The Democrat bill would ban chokeholds. The Scott bill would ban them except in instances in which the use of lethal force is authorized. The Democrat bill would ban noknock warrants. The Scott bill would collect information about their use. The Democrat bill would make it easier to sue cops for violations of federal constitutional rights. The Scott bill doesn’t.
These do not appear to be unbridgeable differences. If the legislative process were allowed to progress as the Constitution contemplates, by majority rule in each chamber, at the end of the day, a bipartisan bill might be passed.
But the virtual filibuster has brought the legislative process to a halt. Something might pass the Senate with 51 votes. But, today, nothing on this subject can pass it with 60 votes. So, rather than the legislative process proceeding step-by-step, it’s at a dead stop.
In her statement, Sinema intoned: “Today’s vote must be the beginning, not the end, of this process.”
But it was likely the end of the process. And Sinema’s vote, and her support of the virtual filibuster, will have made it so.