GOP filibusters; Dems ‘fill the tree’
WASHINGTON — Nobody thought the bill sponsored by Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio and Democratic Sen. Jean Shaheen of New Hampshire was anything more controversial than a modest effort to encourage energy savings in new homes and older commercial buildings. • Yet despite having more than enough votes to pass, the bill collapsed last month because of a lethal blend of Republican delaying tactics and Democratic reluctance to cast unpopular votes. By evening’s end, a discouraged Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., complained it was a “shame” that the bill died.
It was yet another example of why the Senate seems so paralyzed. On the same floor where extraordinary lawmakers once approved epic laws guaranteeing equal rights for AfricanAmericans and cleaning the nation’s air, today’s Senate features acrimonious debates about such opaque phrases as filibuster, cloture, unanimous consent and fill the tree.
Taken together, those phrases add up to one thing: a Senate that does not function very well.
For everyday Americans, the dysfunctional Senate affects their lives in many ways. The Senate has failed to approve bills to extend emergency unemployment benefits, build the controversial Keystone pipeline from Canada or extend for another year about $85 billion in tax breaks, including the $250 deduction for teachers who foot the bill for classroom expenses and mortgage-debt forgiveness for people with negative equity in their homes.
“I’ll be frank with you,” Portman said. “When I go home and talk about this issue ... there’s not a whole lot of interest in this, because people’s sense is D.C. is so messed up.
“They don’t really understand that this is a big deal to Ohioans who don’t have a chance to have their point of view expressed sometimes because they’re shut out of the process.”
Each political party accuses the other of firing the first shot. “Republicans are filibustering on steroids,” said James Manley, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. By contrast, Walt Riker, a one-time adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., said, “This version of the Democratic Party is the most-partisan political force in my lifetime.”
But a quarter-century of slippery steps to the bottom by both political parties has led to the current impasse, prompting Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, to say, “There is no innocent party.”
So instead of legislating, both parties tend to shadowbox. As majority leader, Reid can place a bill on the floor. Republicans often threaten to delay or kill the measure by offering scores of amendments, many of which have nothing to do with the bill.
Reid has responded by using his unique authority to prevent Republicans from offering amendments. It is a parliamentary maneuver called “filling the tree,” a phrase most Americans have never heard.
First, he introduces a series of amendments. Next, he offers second-degree amendments that propose minor changes in his original amendments. Under Senate rules, by “filling the tree” and using up the maximum number of amendments allowed, Reid blocks Republican amendments from a vote.
Finally, Reid files for a cloture vote, a maneuver designed to end a delaying tactic known as a filibuster. By doing so he forces Republicans to choose: Vote for cloture, which ends floor debate and allows lawmakers to vote on the bill, or vote against cloture, which essentially kills the bill.
In the past, filling the tree was rarely used. According to Senate Republicans, Reid has filled the tree 85 times in the past four years compared with 40 times for the previous six majority leaders combined. The result is a fundamental change in the Senate. Traditionally, it was easier for any senator to get a floor amendment — even if it had nothing to do with the bill — compared with the House, where the speaker controls all floor votes.
But since July, only nine Senate Republican amendments have received a floor vote, compared with 134 House Democratic amendments allowed by House Speaker John Boehner, R-West Chester.
To Reid’s Democratic defenders and some independent analysts, the GOP is to blame. “Reid’s behavior has been a reaction to (Republicans) blocking so many things,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
Barbara Sinclair, a professor of political science at UCLA, said, “Right now, it’s pretty obvious the Republicans in the Senate don’t want to make the Democratic senators look good.”
Because of GOP threats to filibuster any bill, Reid has held 408 cloture votes since 2007 compared with only 84 from 1969 through 1976 when Democrats controlled Congress and Republicans held the presidency.
“The spike in Republican filibusters ... started before the spike in filling the tree,” said Adam Jentleson, a Reid spokesman.
In a meeting with reporters last month in Washington, former Sen. George Mitchell, DMaine, said Reid “has said that he has to do it because he’s been left no choice by the Republican tactic of offering hundreds and hundreds of amendments as a way of delaying legislation. Republicans have said they have to try to offer amendments because the majority leader won’t let them offer any.”
Republicans counter that Reid simply is protecting Senate Democrats by not forcing them to vote on many GOP amendments that are popular with voters.
The Portman-Shaheen energy bill provides a textbook example of how both parties sabotaged the measure. The bill would have helped create a voluntary national building code to save energy in new homes while offering federal grants to states to improve energy efficiency in older commercial buildings.
The bill swept through a Senate committee in May 2013 by a 19-3 vote.
But when it reached the floor in September, Senate Republicans “emptied the inbox” on offering amendments, Portman said. Among the proposed amendments was one by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., that would slash federal subsidies for congressional staff members forced to buy individual health insurance through the federal exchanges created by the 2010 health-care law.
“There were amendments on all sorts of things that had nothing to do with energy,” Portman said. “I’m fine with having a vote (on Vitter’s proposal), but it has nothing to do with energy.”
With Reid unwilling to hold a floor vote on Vitter’s amendment and other GOP amendments, the bill collapsed. Portman and Shaheen tried again in April with a revised version. This time, Portman said he told Reid he would encourage Republicans to offer no more than “four or five energy-related amendments.”
The GOP amendments included approving construction of the controversial Keystone pipeline and scrapping the Obama administration’s plan to impose new restrictions on carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-fired utility plants.
Reid rejected the offer, proposing instead a floor vote on the Keystone pipeline, which Landrieu, a vulnerable Democrat from an oil state, supported. When the Republicans balked at an apparent effort by Reid to help Landrieu, he filled the tree.
How? He offered a modified version of the bill as an amendment. Then he introduced a series of amendments that made minor changes to the bill.
One amendment declared the new law would become effective “one day after enactment.” Another deleted one day and made it two. A third changed it to three days. Yet another changed three days to four. By the time Reid had finished his work, he had blocked any GOP effort to have its own amendments considered.
Reporter Jessica Wehrman of the DispatchWashington bureau contributed to this story.