Category Archives: Pedantry

Fixing the Filibuster

A lot of liberals, progressives, hippies, and Democrats have been complaining about obstructionist tactics by the Republicans since President Obama took office. On the radio I keep hearing demands that the Democrats take a page out of the old Republican majority playbook and deploy the “Nuclear Option” (aka the “Constitutional Option” to use the Republican terminology of the time). I thought that was a bad idea when the R’s were pushing it, and I still think it’s a bad idea when the D’s are being pushed by their base to use it.

The filibuster allows for a state with a small congressional delegation to stand firm in the face of a narrow majority on issues that are of great importance. If a senator strongly feels that the country, his constituents, or his principles are put at risk, he can force an issue to be tabled until a supermajority can shut him up via cloture or his objections can be addressed. This is a good thing.

How filibusters are used currently, however is not. The barest threat of objection now leads to cloture votes, nominations being set aside indefinitely, all at basically no cost to the obstructionist senator. Please note that I don’t think “obstructionist” is a bad thing in itself. There have been lots of bad laws passed and bad appointees approved for lack of vigorous and reasonable obstruction. It is currently possible for a senator to obstruct a bill without any appreciable effort or expenditure of political capital. That’s what needs to change. If a senator really wants to stop a bill or appointment, the rest of the senate should require that he stick his neck out a bit.

A couple of ideas that attempt to balance the value of the filibuster and other delaying tactics with the problems involved in its overuse:

  • Bills and appointments should only be remanded to committee or otherwise tabled once introduced by a supermajority of senators present or on a simple majority upon a failed cloture motion. This would force a senator to stop the business of the Senate as a whole in order to stop a bill. It would probably cause more cloture votes, but less actual delay.
  • Should a senator object to considering a bill or amendment “as read” (this currently forces the clerk to read the entire bill aloud, which can be quite onerous with long legal documents), then the objecting senator is responsible for reading the bill himself. He may share the burden with other senators that volunteer to do so, but may not physically leave the Senate chamber during the reading. Should the objecting senator leave the chamber for any reason, the bill will be considered “as read” for procedural purposes. If the senator actually has not read the bill, he can damn well read it himself.
  • All requests to delay committee votes or meetings must be publicly associated with the delaying senator. Frequently there are legitimate reasons for committees to not immediately take up an item; there may be reports demanded of various agencies, experts or witnesses to be scheduled for questioning and exposition, and so forth. Anonymous holds on whole swaths of issues need to stop.

None of these measures would stop the filibuster or unduly infringe on the rights and responsibilities of the individual senators to do right by their constituents, but each attaches a risk or burden in doing so.

Some lousy ads

For the 2009-2010 season, the San Jose Sharks have a quirky series of ads. They’ve been releasing them at an irregular schedule, apparently in an attempt to keep the comedy fresh. Here are the ones I’m aware of, in no particular order:

Jody Shelley

Joe Pavelski

Joe Thornton

Rob Blake

Todd McClellan

Dan Boyle

Ryan Clowe

Clearly the Sharks are lousy actors, but happily they’re a great hockey team.

When Graphs Hurt the Argument

Global Warning, Climate Change, the AlGorePocalypse, whatever you want to call it, there sure are a lot of data floating around about it, and a lot of tempers flaring. I’ll not address the merits of the conclusions people have been drawing from these findings not only because I don’t consider myself to be a qualified expert on the topic, but because I don’t give a rat’s ass. Instead I’m just going to take a look at a graph published by NASA regarding the mass of ice in Antarctic (reproduced above).

Clearly this graph shows a downward trend. The scale on the left shows the rate of change in the mass of ice, and the scale at the scale at the bottoms shows a left-to-right chronology, so downward from left to right is clearly a loss of ice. The caption accompanying this image is “The continent of Antarctica has been losing more than 100 cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice per year since 2002.” That’s all pretty clear-cut, right?

No, not really. Actually the caption and the graph are at odds with each other. The values shown are not the sum total of ice in Antarctica, but the rate of change of the mass of ice, the first derivative of it. In 2002 we see seven points, all of them above zero. Each represents an increase in the amount of ice in Antarctica. in 2003 there are another ten points, all still above zero. The graph is showing two years of ice growth here. The rate doesn’t dip below zero until the second point in 2004, and doesn’t stay under zero for a majority of samples until 2007. The trendline generated here crosses zero in early 2006, not 2002 as described in the caption.

The following is the result of estimating the values shown to produce the integral. I was unsuccessful at finding the actual mass values on NASA’s site, so I just measured (my estimates):

Clearly I didn’t put any effort into sexing up the graph. I also started with a zero value. That is ludicrous, but we’re being somewhat arbitrary about scales here anyway; the NASA graph also gives no indication of whether 1 billion tons is a lot or a little in relation to the total ice mass of Antarctica, so I’ll just assume it’s a heck of a lot and let the graph look big.

There were 78 points on the original graph, but only 36 of them are negative values. In under half of the samples shown, there was a reduction in ice mass. There were four samples shown that I estimated at zero, leaving 38 increases, with a total change over the sample period of -678 billion tons. Bear in mind that the total change from the first sample shown through the 49th is +9587 billion tons. I seriously doubt that anybody in mid-2005 was arguing that global warming was causing a massive ramp-up of ice deposits at the South Pole, at an alarming-sounding rate of 3,200Gt per year. Because that’s what these numbers would have shown.

I don’t think the folks at NASA were malicious in their presentation of this information, but it sure as hell is sloppy. Misleading and contradictory material like this undermines the general case for anthropogenic climate change and poisons the conversation. Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s El Niño.