MGuy wrote:I don't know the process for deciding who gets what Senate committee seat. Given that the Senate is going to be 50/50 even Ruth Harris being a tie breaker was there ever a real chance for Senate dems to deny an even split on the committees?
Yes. In fact, the organizing resolution that decides committee spots is decided by just voting it up or down. So they could in fact do the normal thing of granting the majority party more seats on each committee than the minority party.
The democrats, as much as they and all their supporters want to pretend they aren't, are the majority party and could just do that.
Grek wrote:The actual rules say that the first thing the Senate has to do after swearing in its new members is to pass an 'organizing resolution' which decides (among other things) who gets to be on what committee. There's no strict requirements for this except that the resolution get passed by the Senate as a whole, a fact which has historically resulted in divvying up committee seats in proportion to senate seats, such that a 50/50 split in the Senate results in every committee getting equal numbers from each party. Technically Schumer could demand more committee seats for his party or even try to tell the Republicans to go fuck themselves and that they're not getting any committee seats this election, but that would require that he either convince 10 Republicans to agree to this resolution (good luck) or that he move to kill the filibuster and make it so Senate votes only need a simple majority to pass (he doesn't have the balls).
I'm honestly not sure what Kaelik was hoping for here other than exactly this.
The senate organizing resolution is passed unanimous consent every single fucking time that any us has been alive. In fact, 1953 was the last time it was filibustered. And this was just one dude who was mad about not getting the committee seats, not a party. So you don't actually need 60 votes which is a thing we know because republicans have never in our lifetimes had 60 senators and yet, have had a majority on committee seats with their fewer votes.
Democrats can just abolish the filibuster, a thing which every single democratic senator is a mass murderer if they do not do and should be fucking locked up in jail for life for the crime of mass murder if they do not do. But even if they were absolutely horrible monsters who are deliberately choosing to pass zero laws for the next two years, the Filibuster is only ever a BLUFF. You can call the bluff at any time! Just gather in a fucking room and do your job for as long as it takes to force them to give the fuck up. Anyone with the desire could break the filibuster at any time if they wanted. The point is they don't care enough about any laws to do it. But if they cared about the organizing resolution, they could just wait the fuckers out.
You can sleep on the senate floor and go to the bathroom in the senate bathrooms until 10 fucking republicans decide that slightly different committees are worth more than days of suffering.
If the "problem" is that republicans would straight up filibuster the organizing resolution then the solution is to give them zero seats and vote it through with Harris. Because if the problem is that they are the most obstructionist party that has ever existed in the history of the senate way worse than they were in 2011 and 2013, giving them the ability to tie a bunch of procedural votes in committees so you can't even run your own committees is not the solution.
What I expected is at least in the extremely narrow scope of advancing their own personal power democratic senate leadership would maybe once fucking ever treat republicans like the danger they are.