Remember the SC Senate filibuster on education? Senators OK rule to prevent that
In February of last year, the South Carolina Senate took an unusual step in voting to sit one of their own colleagues down, stopping him from derailing — through tying up debate for six weeks and counting — an education bill he hated.
The vote known as cloture — a rare procedural move senators can use to end a filibuster — stopped Democratic state Sen. Mike Fanning’s ability to file any new amendments, and started the clock ticking in a countdown to when his debate would end, more than 140 amendments later.
On lawmakers’ first day back Tuesday, the Senate changed its rules to prevent that from happening for another four years — a change that highlights the Senate Republicans’ greater grasp of power and effort this year to get the caucus’ priorities done after a year interrupted by COVID-19.
The new Senate rule, which was adopted without objection, allows senators to stop a filibuster and prohibit the introduction of any new amendments, with the exception of companion proposals from the Senate majority and minority leaders. But it also gives the lawmaker who calls to end the filibuster the ability to decide how many of the amendments already introduced should be considered and how much time can be spent arguing them.
The new rule is in part aimed at stopping what Fanning did but also potentially preventing weeks-long debates on controversial issues that include abortion, the future of Santee Cooper and, if it happens again, where chicken plants can go. Those debates — which lawmakers sometimes use to kill legislation or as leverage to build consensus on other matters — can be time consuming, keeping lawmakers from other work.
“That’s one of the things that we’re reacting to,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, the Edgefield Republican who chairs the Senate Rules Committee, said in reference to Fanning. “We can’t get into a situation where we have two filibusters, one on the front end where we went several weeks before we ever invoked cloture, but then once you invoke cloture, having a second filibuster because there’s hundreds of amendments. We’re trying to avoid that.”
The second rationale just comes down to politics. The change also could allow the majority party to have more control over the agenda in a body that, until the Nov. 3 election, had to play along with Democrats in the minority.
Democrats have less sway than they did a year ago after Republicans flipped three seats in November, giving the Senate Republican Caucus 30 members to Democrats’ 16 — more than enough of a majority to vote cloture and agree to amendment rules.
Senators say they don’t like to sit each other down. Giving colleagues their say is part of the long-observed rules of decorum in the upper chamber, considered more deliberative than the House.
“We really have not abused the cloture rule the last several years anyway. I try very hard to use it sparingly,” Massey said. “I don’t want to turn us into a simple majority body. I definitely don’t want us to be like Washington. But the flip side to that is, ... we also can’t allow the other side to be Washington and just thwart anything and everything we want to do.”
All the new rule does is help the Senate move forward, “when the Senate decides it’s time to move forward,” Massey said.
But Fanning, who as a Democrat was able to wield a lot of power over a GOP priority, said it is the public who winds up losing out in the debate.
“You heard it was mentioned today that the Senate is traditionally the more deliberative body, and the Senate is not the House,” Fanning said. “I think both sides like it. The House response is, yeah, we get stuff done, and our response is, yeah, but half of it is good and half is bad and this, unfortunately makes us more like the House which is riskier. The Senate was the place to slow down, pump the brakes and say we’re not happy.”
Now, Fanning said, it stops the public’s access to a “freight train already so far down the tracks to be able to stop it.”
