chapotraphouse

The dumbass filibuster. Basically you need 60 votes in the senate to tell someone to shut up, so in the old days minority parties could indefinitely stall legislation by just blabbing on and on indefinitely and never allowing for a vote. Now they dont do that anymore, but have the same effect by just saying they filibuster.

Now passing the budget is obviously important because the government shuts down without it, so they made a rule that budget legislation can’t be filibustered. This is how whatever they tried to pass that got killed by the parliamentarian, they tried to argue that bc whatever it was (I don’t remember) affected the budget so therefore couldn’t be filibustered but the parliamentarian said they couldn’t do that, essentially killing the bill. This is dumb bc the parliamentarian can be fired and reappointed but gotta be bipartisan.

This is why the public healthcare option got killed by Lieberman voting no even though the dems had a 60 seat majority.

TLDR 51 seats isn’t enough you need 60 and even then you have to get everyone on board