The Majority Controls the Calendar

I think I’ve made this point before, but it’s worth making again:

Two months after insisting that they would roll back broad eavesdropping powers won by the Bush administration, Democrats in Congress appear ready to make concessions that could extend some crucial powers given to the National Security Agency.

Administration officials say they are confident they will win approval of the broadened authority that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed toward recess. Some Democratic officials concede that they may not come up with enough votes to stop approval.

This isn’t how Congress works, and a reporter from the New York Times should know better. If the leadership of the majority party in Congress doesn’t want a particular piece of legislation to come to the floor, it’s extraordinarily difficult for other members of Congress to bring it to the floor. As I understand it, the primary mechanism in the House is a discharge petition, which requires the signatures of the majority of members of Congress. According to Wikipedia, only 47 piece of legislation have received the required majority in the last 70 years, and only two of those have become law. In other words, by and large if the leadership doesn’t want a piece of legislation to move, it doesn’t move.

And then there’s the Senate, where in addition to the usual prerogatives of leadership, any 41 members of the Senate can stop legislation with a filibuster. I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that the Democratic leadership couldn’t find at least one of these mechanisms to stop a bad FISA bill. The more likely explanation is that the leadership simply doesn’t consider this issue important enough to risk giving Republicans a campaign issue next year. Which is fine; that’s the sort of political calculation the congressional leadership is supposed to make. But if that’s what’s going on, then reporters should call a spade a spade, and not let the leadership get away with making lame excuses.

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