Timothy Noah Quotes

I never heard the word 'compromise' used. So I'm starting to believe that these terms only come into play to try and force Republicans to do what the Democrats want.

We've seen filibusters to block judicial nominations, jobs bills, political transparency, ending Big Oil subsidies - you name it, there's been a filibuster.

We [Congress] are proving inadequate not only to our most difficult problems but also to routine duties. Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important. […] That’s not how we were meant to govern. Our entire system of government — with its checks and balances, its bicameral Congress, its protections of the rights of the minority — was designed for compromise.

Senate Republicans have engaged in a record number of filibusters and other obstructionist tactics.

We are on the precipice of a crisis, a Constitutional crisis. The checks and balances, which have been at the core of this Republic, are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances that say if you get 51% of the vote, you don't get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing, it's almost a temper tantrum.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right.

Eliminating the filibuster would eliminate the people’s voices in the Senate.

In theory, the filibuster helps whichever party is in the minority in the Senate. In practice, it is the Republicans who have disproportionately used it to engage in cynical and anti-democratic obstructionism whenever they find themselves in the minority.

In the first 50 years of the filibuster, it was used only 35 times. But the last Congress alone had 112 cloture motions filed, plus threats of more. This is the tyranny of the minority.

Democrats believe they can win at the ballot box by obstructing, and they would rather win the next election than move America forward.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

It's counterintuitive, but the most divisive arrangement is when the same party controls both Congress and the presidency, a situation encountered in eight of the past 10 years. With government unified under a single party, the minority has the least possible incentive to cooperate with the majority.

You know, the purpose of reconciliation is to avoid the filibuster. The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.

So the next thing I assume I'll be hearing from Republicans, they want to change rules some way, as they do on the House when you get a problem with ethics, they just change the rules.

We shouldn't deny the right of the minority to filibuster, but we need to do a much better job of making them own it. That way, the American people could figure out who is being obstructionist and who is willing to compromise.

Democrats' attack on the Republican majority leader is nothing but a coordinated agenda to stop an effective leader from accomplishing the people's business.

The United States Senate wasn't designed to be a majority-rule institution. It was designed to include and accommodate the rights of the minority in small states as well as large states.

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party

We should not allow the minority to control the majority by requiring super majorities on budget related votes.

The role of Senators has abruptly gone from "Advise and Consent" to "Sit Down and Shut Up"

Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important. That's not how we were meant to govern.

There's a lot of bipartisan rancor, a lot of excessive delegation of legislative power from the legislative branch to the executive branch.

Few believe Democrats will control both houses of Congress in 2021, and even if they manage to, Republicans will still be around to play spoiler on plenty of big agenda items.

The fact is that Democrats cannot stand dissent.

The Dream Act and the DISCLOSE Act, to name two, had majorities in both chambers during Obama's first term, but they were filibustered to death. They probably await a similar fate unless the filibuster is reformed.