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February 06, 2007

Point of Order

Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere is a atwitter over the failure of the Democrats to get 60 votes to end debate on the nonbinding resolution on Iraq. The media is portraying the vote as Republicans trying to block debate on Iraq. I can only assume that the reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post are not remotely familiar with Roberts Rules of Order, the standard for parliamentary procedure.

The media's line is simple: the Republicans are blocking debate by voting against cloture. Cloture, of course, is the process through which debate is closed so the body can vote. In other words, the Democrats are the ones attempting to end debate, not the Republicans. The Republicans are voting to keep debate open, the Democrats are voting to end it. It's really a quite simple point, and it's a little embarrassing to see the media so openly shilling a line that is so far from the truth.

Before the Republicans get overly pleased about this demonstration of the liberal media, the fact the media is getting the story wrong doesn't mean that the Republicans are in the right here. As hilzoy at Obsidian Wings points out, the Republicans are filibustering because they want to force a vote on four different Iraq bills, all requiring a 60-vote majority. The Democrats are willing to let all four bills come to the floor, but only for a majority vote. So what we really have here is a bunch of silly parliamentary procedure that masks the facts: there's a majority in the Senate for the harshest of the bills, but not a filibuster-proof majority. The vagaries of politics mean that many Democrats will vote for less harsh bills in addition to the harsher bill because they don't want to face a commercial explaining how they voted against such-and-such a bill to support the troops (even though all the resolutions are non-binding), so if all four measures go to the floor, the odds are the less harsh ones will do the best. This is a tough problem to resolve in our system: if you allow votes on all four resolutions and they all pass, what becomes law (granting that, in this case, none of them do)?

But while that's an interesting theoretical question, it's not relevant to the broader point here, which is that the media has, once again, done a lousy job of explaining what's really happening in favor of a facile and inaccurate summation built around its biases.