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by ceejayoz 1456 days ago
This is bad methodology. Laws blocked by a threatened filibuster don’t necessarily make it to a vote and thus don’t show up in this list.

Legislation passing with less than 60 votes still had to pass the 60 vote threshold. Some senators vote for debate but against the bill.

Note also how many are just confirmations of Senate-approved roles.
1 comments
CWuestefeld 1456 days ago
No. The parent comment claimed "Congress has been purposefully broken by Republican's new requirement that all legislation must receive supermajority approval in the senate." If you follow the link you'll see that lots of things passed with fewer than 60 votes. That claim is false on its face.

Further, for your criticism of my methodology to hold water, it would be necessary to see the total number of votes decreasing over time. That's not what the record shows. Using the same resource, I looked at each of the last few years, and then took a few steps back in 4-year steps thinking that maybe there's something corresponding to the point in the presidential election cycle. Either way, I don't see it going down at all. Quite the opposite.

  2021....528
  2020....292 (not hard to explain the drop in this year, I think)
  2019....428
  2018....274
  ...
  2014....366
  ...
  2010....299
  ...
  2006....279
The number of votes per year is clearly growing. And in the current session, at least, there's still a high proportion of votes passing, and of them many have a "yeas" count below 60.
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ceejayoz 1456 days ago
> If you follow the link you'll see that lots of things passed with fewer than 60 votes.

Yes, I very specifically mentioned that; that means some Senators voted for cloture, but not for the bill. Not unusual. It still needed 60 Senators to get to a vote, but only 50 to pass that vote.

> The number of votes per year is clearly growing.

Votes per year isn't the whole story. More votes on smaller-scope, less meaningful legislation isn't an improvement. You're not going to get any program like Obamacare, Social Security, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, etc. through this sort of Senate. Obama couldn't even get a SCOTUS nominee past McConnell.

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