DENVER—A health care impasse in the U.S. Senate has sparked political sniping in Colorado.
An outsider Democrat seeking to unseat an incumbent Democrat in the Senate has called for abolishing the filibuster from the U.S. Senate, a bold proposal Andrew Romanoff is making as he paints senators as a do-nothing crowd.
“We ought to eliminate this filibuster altogether,” Romanoff, a Denver Democrat, told reporters Tuesday. Romanoff, a former speaker of the Colorado House, is challenging Sen. Michael Bennet in a primary race. Romanoff made similar arguments last month against the Senate filibuster.
Romanoff’s idea targets an objection by Republican Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, who has single-handedly blocked the Senate from extending unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless.
Frustrated Senate Democrats have decried Bunning’s tactics. But on the left, progressives like Romanoff say the ability of single senator to block legislation must be ended.
“Americans are dying as the debate over health care lingers,” Romanoff said Tuesday. “The U.S. Senate acts as if it has all the time in the world.”
Romanoff concedes his idea is a long shot. Changing Senate rules requires a two-thirds vote, or 67 senators, an unlikely scenario given that the Democrats don’t have that many seats. Even senators frustrated by slow progress jealously guard their debate prerogatives, and abolishing the filibuster is a debate nearly as old as the Senate itself.
“The majority party always wants to do away with the filibuster, and the minority always wants to keep it,” said former Sen. Hank Brown, a Republican who represented Colorado in the Senate for six years in the 1990s and now teaches political science at the University of Colorado.
Bennet was planning his own response to the Bunning impasse. The Democrat planned to announce a proposal Wednesday to change Senate debate procedures, along with campaign finance changes and stricter ethics rules.
“The senator believes that what’s broken about Washington goes much deeper than Senate procedures,” Bennet spokeswoman Adrianne Marsh said Tuesday.
Republicans in Colorado were paying attention to the Bunning standoff as well. In a statement, former Republican lieutenant governor Jane Norton this week decried legislative maneuvers used to advance bills such as the health care proposal.
“In the House, the minority party enjoys few rights. But Senate rules permit the minority to stop or moderate bad legislation,” Norton said.
Romanoff insisted that the U.S. Senate should work like the Colorado Senate, which has no formal filibuster procedures. Indeed, the state’s upper chamber dictates that debate on a matter end at midnight.
However, Romanoff did not mention the fact that the Colorado Senate has no debate limit beyond the midnight deadline and that procedural rules can be easily tweaked by the ruling party to cut off debate.
