Party of No, Pt. 2

Here is another busy graph.  For a simpler version see here.

 

This is all prompted by a comment from J at the link, above.  The snakey lines show the number of senate seats held by each party over time.  Red is Republican, blue is Democrat.  Purple line at 50 shows where the even split would be.  Broken Red/Blue line at 40 shows Rep (Red) or Dem (Blue) president.  The cloture vote line is now similarly coded red-blue, indicating the (minority oops!) majority party.  The yellow dot indicates the number of cloture votes in the current congress  with about a year to go.  Lovely.

Three things jump out.

1) The growth of forced cloture has its roots in a long term Republican senatorial minority.  They owned it from the beginning.

2) The Democrat's skirts are not clean.  From '81 on, at times when they were in the minority, they have been about as involved as the Republicans in forcing cloture votes.

3)  Since 2007, we are in a new realm of filibuster and cloture.  This is clear - and the reactions of the Repugs at the SOTU last night bear it out - all they are interested in is making Obama fail.  To hell with the country.

What a bunch of god-damned corporate-internationalist traitors.
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