Bruce Bartlett’s op-ed in The Fiscal Times on May 18, 2012 calls for ending the Senate filibuster.
“One of the things people constantly complain about is the tendency of the media to treat Republicans and Democrats as equally complicit on issues such as the deficit, even if one side actually deserves the bulk of the blame. However, there is one area in which both sides truly are almost equally to blame and that is in abusing the Senate filibuster. This means that the solution will necessarily have to be bipartisan.
“Politicians aren’t the only hypocrites favoring the filibuster when it is good for their side and opposing it when it benefits the other. In 1995, when Republicans controlled Congress and there was a Democrat in the White House, The New York Times said the filibuster had to go. It had become ‘the tool of the sore loser’ and ‘an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.’“Fast forward 10 years to 2005. There is now a Republican president and Democrats in the Senate were using the filibuster liberally to frustrate his agenda. Now, suddenly, the filibuster had become “a time-honored Senate procedure” the Times editorialized. Eliminating the filibuster, as Republicans proposed, threatened the Senate and democracy itself.
“Fast forward again to today. Once again there is a Democrat in the White House and Senate Republicans have forgotten all about filibuster reform. Indeed, they have escalated its use beyond any other period in American history, according to Senate data.
“Predictably, the Times has forgotten that the filibuster is time-honored and essential to democracy. Expressing sympathy with those who argue that the filibuster is unconstitutional, it now says that the filibuster must be eliminated for judicial and executive nominations, and curbed in other cases.”
In addition to ending the filibuster, most important is taking issues to the public for widespread national discussion. The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
