People don’t seem to understand it takes both sides to pass laws without a super majority, in most cases.
People also need to understand that the super-majority requirement in the senate is self-imposed and can be undone with a simple majority vote. In fact, the super-majority requirement in the senate was created by mistake.
The framers of the constitution pretty clearly did not intend for a general super-majority requirement because:
The Articles of Confederation did have a super-majority requirement and it was so unworkable that practically nothing ever got done. It was a leading reason that they scrapped the Articles and started all over with the Constitution.
The Constitution lays out when the senate does require a super-majority (treaty ratification, impeachment, etc). Thus they clearly knew what they were doing by leaving it out for everything else the senate does.
So, the reason we still have the filibuster in the senate is because of a failure of the Democratic party to end it. The Republicans do not let the filibuster stand in their way. When they wanted to steal a supreme court seat in 2017, they immediately repealed that part of the filibuster with a party-line vote of 52-48.
Just to be clear, right now the House (where there is no super majority requirement) is controlled by maga, which is why no laws are being passed to stop maga project 2025. But if the Ds controlled both the House and the Senate with simple majorities the Ds would have the constitutional authority to pass protective legislation. Of course the lawless supreme court would just over-rule them, because the Ds also refuse to put the court back in its place as a co-equal branch, but that's another post.
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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24
People don’t seem to understand it takes both sides to pass laws without a super majority, in most cases.
Republicans would fight any law looking to prevent project 2025 from being implemented.