
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, October 10, 1994                   TAG: 9410110043
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SENATE ABUSE

ON THE USE of filibusters, a certain U.S. Senator in the early '70s had this to say: "It is one thing to provide protection against majoritarian absolutism; it is another thing again to enable a vexatious or unreasoning minority to paralyze the Senate and America's legislative process along with it."

The Senator was right, of course. If you guessed it was Robert Dole who said it, you're right, too.

Doubtless, Dole would not describe his recent obstructionism in the Senate - armed with the repeated threat of filibuster - as vexatious or unreasoning. But it is both.

The point, pretty clearly, has been to deprive the Clinton administration of legislative victories, no matter the cost to the country.

And so gridlock, already nurtured by special-interest machinations, political cowardice and conflicting signals from the public, has been aggravated in the Senate by the filibuster rule, according to which debate can only be cut off by a vote of 60 of the 100 Senators.

The result is that 41 members can hold the Senate hostage simply by threatening to filibuster, which is precisely what Republicans led by Minority Leader Dole have been doing with increasing frequency.

Not only are Senate majorities thereby obstructed. As Elliot L. Richardson, a former Cabinet official in the Nixon administration, noted the other day in the Los Angeles Times: If the Senate operated by majority rule, America would have won in just the past few months a reform of campaign-finance rules, an end to taxpayer-financed giveaways to corporations mining public lands, the most comprehensive telecommunications reform law in 50 years, and possibly health-care reform.

Instead we have, well, a lot of legislation with majority support but nowhere to go. "At stake," wrote Richardson, "is our government's ability to make decisions and take action."

Enough certainly is at stake to warrant rules limiting the use of filibusters. Perhaps Dole will be more favorably disposed toward such rules if the Republicans gain a Senate majority.

by CNB