In his Wall Street Journal column yesterday urging Senate Republicans not “to settle scores,” Gerald F. Seib, who surely ought to know better, wrongly asserts that the “best gauge of filibusters’ frequency is the tally of so-called cloture motions.” This Huffington Post article, also from yesterday, implicitly relies on the same misunderstanding when it claims that “Half the nominees filibustered in the country’s history, for example, were blocked by Republicans during the Obama administration.”
Borrowing from a post of mine from a year ago, let me set things straight:
1. As the Congressional Research Service emphasizes in a heading in this report on cloture motions on nominations, “Cloture Motions Do Not Correspond With Filibusters” (underlining added):
Although cloture affords the Senate a means for overcoming a filibuster, it is erroneous to assume that cases in which cloture is sought are always the same as those in which a filibuster occurs. Filibusters may occur without cloture being sought, and cloture may be sought when no filibuster is taking place. The reason is that cloture is sought by supporters of a matter, whereas filibusters are conducted by its opponents.…
For [various] reasons [that the CRS report spells out], it would be a misuse of the following data, which identify nominations on which cloture was sought, to treat them as identifying nominations subjected to filibuster. [Pp. 2-3 (emphasis added).]
2. As the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler observed in a column disputing similar extravagant claims, Senate majority leader Harry Reid “often files cloture on multiple bills or nominations at once to speed things along even if no one is slowing things down.” (Emphasis added.) Thus, claims about the high number of cloture motions filed on nominations during the Obama presidency would seem to say far more about Reid’s trigger-happy cloture finger than anything else. That impression would seem to be bolstered by a review of Table 6 of the CRS report, which shows that the vast majority of the cloture motions that Reid has filed during the Obama administration either have been withdrawn or have won strong Republican support.
In other words, the vast majority of the nominees that the Huffington Post claims “were blocked by Republicans” weren’t blocked at all.
And, of course, it was very much in Reid’s partisan interest to manufacture a high number of cloture motions when he has had so many dupes, willing or otherwise, ready to equate every such motion with a filibuster.
3. Instead of looking at filed cloture motions, let’s look at defeated cloture motions. On this count, ten Bush 43 judicial nominees encountered a total of 20 defeated cloture motions in a period of two years. By contrast, over the nearly five years of the Obama administration that preceded Senate Democrats’ abolition of the filibuster, six Obama judicial nominees suffered a total of seven defeated cloture motions. Plus, one of those six nominees, Robert Bacharach (Tenth Circuit), was defeated on cloture at the very end of July 2012 not as part of a filibuster against him but in an application of the Thurmond Rule on election-year action. (Bacharach was unanimously confirmed in February 2013.) So this data shows that ten Bush 43 judicial nominees were filibustered, versus five Obama nominees.