A federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily blocked a key Biden student loan forgiveness and repayment plan. The order could have significant ramifications.
A couple things. First, you might need to freshen up on your Schoolhouse Rock, because this is not true:
The 60 vote thing is true. It’s referring to the filibuster and cloture procedures in the Senate.
When a bill comes up for consideration in the Senate, first it gets brought up for debate. A filibuster is when someone usually opposed to the bill makes this debate go on as long as possible to delay a vote on the bill. This process has been shorthanded a lot in recent years so senators merely need to indicate intent to filibuster so that the Senate can still attend to other business such as committee hearings and the whole chamber isn’t locked in by the filibuster.
Since the entire GOP is bent on obstructing the Democratic party agenda this means in practice that you need to use Cloture to end the filibuster and bring the bill up for a vote. This is why we see so many things crammed into the Budget Reconciliation bill. It’s one of the only bills that can’t be filibustered like that. For pretty much all other things if you don’t have 60 senators willing to vote for Cloture the bill is dead on arrival.
The 60 vote thing is true. It’s referring to the filibuster and cloture procedures in the Senate.
When a bill comes up for consideration in the Senate, first it gets brought up for debate. A filibuster is when someone usually opposed to the bill makes this debate go on as long as possible to delay a vote on the bill. This process has been shorthanded a lot in recent years so senators merely need to indicate intent to filibuster so that the Senate can still attend to other business such as committee hearings and the whole chamber isn’t locked in by the filibuster.
Since the entire GOP is bent on obstructing the Democratic party agenda this means in practice that you need to use Cloture to end the filibuster and bring the bill up for a vote. This is why we see so many things crammed into the Budget Reconciliation bill. It’s one of the only bills that can’t be filibustered like that. For pretty much all other things if you don’t have 60 senators willing to vote for Cloture the bill is dead on arrival.