We at FBD recall with mortification the day during the third grade when we were humiliated by a math trick in front of our entire class. The lesson of the day was multiplication and the class was engaged in a King-of-the-Hill type competition in which our teacher presented the champion and his/her challenger with a double digit problem. The student who solved it first was the winner. We were enjoying a long ride at the top and, having defeated all of the other "smart" students in the class, were confident that we would end the day with our perfect record intact and thus would be installed as defending champion for the next day's lesson. 'Tis Good to Be the King!
There was one remaining problem and the teacher called for our final opponent, a young lass whom our third grade eyes immediately discounted as a threat. Not in the clique of smart kids. Check. Well behind us in reading skills (we could spot her progress on the wall chart behind our teacher's desk). Check. She's, ah, a, you know, a girl. Check. Nothing there at all to cause concern.
Chalk in hand, we awaited our instructions and quickly they came: Fifty six times thirty three. GO! Um, okay. That's three times six is eighteen eight carry the one plus fifteen gives us one sixty eight that's good next row zero and three times six is eighteen carry one is one six eight zero good eight and zero are eight six plus eight fourteen carry one plus one plus six is eight and one for a total of, "ONE THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED FORTY EIGHT". Done. We threw our chalk down, the Winner and Still Champion, and turned around...
...and turned around to see our opponent grinning at us, chalk already down and 1,848 written on the board in front of her in perfect penmanship. What?! That could not be. We looked at her answer, then at ours, certain that they must be different, thus exposing her error. Our answers, oddly, oh horrors, were the same. We looked to our teacher, searching for the source of this malfeasance. The Fix Must Be In! What did that even mean? We were eight years old, we did not know. But surely we were cheated somehow. This was happening so fast, we needed time to think. We simply could not have lost. Especially not to her. Think. Aha! Our teacher must have decided that a girl should be the champion for a while. But, but that would mean...
"Did you show her the problem earlier?", we blurted out at our teacher. "You did, right?" "No", we were told. "Now go sit down. And class, let's applaud our new champion!" It was with that applause ringing in our ears that we trudged the long trudge back to our seat. How did this happen? How? Apparently that last part was spoken aloud, for one of the other "smart" kids turned to us and said, "You did the whole thing twice. She did it once for 56 times 3, wrote it again for the other 3 and added it up."
Huh? What? Let's see, fifty six times thirty three is three times fifty six plus Oh God It's the Same Thing! We only needed to perform half of the mental arithmetic that we had actually done. We could see it clearly now, why oh why had we not seen it earlier? Curse you, our third grade intellect!
Just as we cursed our third grade intellect then, for being slow to see the trick, we cursed our middle aged intellect recently while contemplating the cloture procedure for the United States Senate. Cloture, you may recall from your high school civics class, is the process in which debate on a topic is brought to an end, a mandatory step before the Senate can actually bring a bill to vote. Without a procedure to end debate, a single member of the Senate has the ability to block legislation from passing, theoretically forever, simply by commandeering the Senate floor and refusing to stop speaking, an action known as a filibuster. For a senator opposed to a particular bill, the ability to filibuster is a great thing - having a bill die on the Senate floor is just as good as having the bill fail to win approval after a vote. For a senator who supports a bill, the filibuster is evil and he needs cloture to save the day. Cloture is the Montague to filibuster's Capulet. The Hatfield to filibuster's McCoy. The Itchy to filibuster's Scratchy. The Notorious B.I.G. to filibuster's... well, you get the picture. And whoever is the hero in these stories depends upon one's point of view. We at FBD are not going to discuss particular legislation or side with any political ideology that has been impacted by the cloture versus filibuster battle at this time. That will be material for a later post. We would, however, like to explore exactly what cloture means. To do this, we must step away momentarily from Mathematics and have a History Lesson.
And since no history lesson is complete without a timeline, here goes...
1917 - President Woodrow Wilson urges the Senate to change its parliamentary rules to put an end to the nonstop filibustering that was choking the Senate. In response, the Senate passes Rule 22, which requires a super majority of 66% of "present and voting" senators to end debate. 66% may appear to be a challenging number to achieve, far more than the 51% necessary to actually pass a bill, but this is the first time that the Senate has a process that would bring to vote bills that had otherwise stalled on the floor.
1919 - Cloture is invoked for the first time to end a filibuster on the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of Versailles is the peace treaty that ended World War I, for those of you who are keeping track of such things.
1927 - 1962 - The Senate tries to invoke cloture 11 times and fails each time to achieve the required super majority.
1939 - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
1975 - The Senate amends the cloture rules, reducing the required super majority from 66% to 60%. As a compromise to senators who want to maintain the 66% requirement, the "present and voting" language is changed to "duly chosen and sworn", thus ensuring that even if some senators are absent from a cloture vote, no fewer than 60 votes are necessary to end debate.
And that is where the Senate remains today, requiring a 60% super majority to end debate, or, in other words, 41% of the Senate must support continued debate to prevent a bill from coming to a vote. Except that... except that...
Curses! We learned the hard way, through the crushing of our oversized childhood ego, to spot a math trick when we see one. And a math trick, Good Ladies and Gentlemen, is what we have before us now. Let us break this down. Our congress is a form of representative government, with our Representatives and Senators filling in for the country's citizens and sparing us the need to vote ourselves on every issue before the country, be it big or small. This was done out of practicality. We cannot convene a national election every other week, nor can we afford to wait for the second Tuesday in November to come around while legislation of national importance piles up.
In order to ensure that all U.S. citizens were reasonably represented in the newly conceived Congress, our forefathers created the House of Representatives and proportioned its membership according to the population of the states. They also created the Senate and proportioned its membership in a manner that affords each state equal representation, with two senators each.
What, we hear our readers wondering, does this have to do with anything? You're back to Civics. Where is the math trick we were promised? Well then, here it is. The Senate's parliamentary process of cloture requires 41 votes to extend debate indefinitely and preventing a bill to come to vote. That is, 41% of senators duly chosen and sworn can band together and effectively stop a particular piece of legislation from moving forward. But the Senate's votes have been allocated without regard to the population of the individual states. And here comes our math trick - in order to achieve the 41 vote cloture-proof super minority, senators from at least 21 states must vote together. But it does not matter what those 21 states are. They can be the 21 states with the smallest populations in the country.
Say what? Let's go to the numbers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 2008 population of the United States was 303,947,734. The population of the 21 smallest states, in aggregate, was 34,730,882. That is slightly over 11% of the total United States population. In other words, if senators representing a population base smaller than that of the single state of California (pop. 36,756,666) vote as a bloc, they can bring the government to a halt.
Stated another way, the states of Iowa, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming, with just 11% of the country's population in aggregate, have the power to control the legislative agenda of the entire United States. For some perspective, these states have populations similar to cities. Iowa, the largest of them, has a population roughly equivalent to that of the city of Chicago (pop. 2,836,658). Most of the others are about the size of Phoenix or Philadelphia, with populations of 1,500,000. The smaller ones are closer to El Paso or Milwaukee, with populations of 600,000. Some of these states are so small that they are allocated only one member to the House of Representatives. Although they have populations smaller than a single congressional district, they are still entitled to two senators.
We at FBD ask our readers to indulge us one more unruly list: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, Arizona, Massachusetts, Indiana, Tennessee, Missouri, and Maryland. Acting as a group and with 74% of the country's population, those states would be powerless to filibuster anything. Let us take a moment to ponder that. The representatives of 74% of the population of the United States cannot impact the Senate's legislative agenda, while the representatives of 11% of the population can bring our government to a halt.
It is undeniable that our forefathers did not intend the votes of the Senate to be allocated according to population. That is why every state receives the same two votes. However, the two votes granted each state in the constitution are intended to be used to address specific legislative bills at the time they are brought to a vote. Cloture requirements and filibustering are nowhere to be found in the constitution, which simply allows the Senate and the House of Representatives to set their own parliamentary rules. Certainly our forefathers never expected a future in which the two-votes-per-state distribution of power would be used to allow such a small a minority to exercise this much control over the majority. And it is our belief that there is little practical difference between allowing a lone senator to filibuster a bill and allowing 11% of the population to do so. We encourage our readers to consider this the next time they become frustrated at the gridlock in our nation's capital. It could be considered miraculous that any legislation at all makes it through Congress.
We at FBD now congratulate the young lady who whupped us at math in the third grade. She deserved the win and we are better for it, having learned some humility and to show respect to others. Also, that girls can be really smart. It was quite a trick she spotted that day in class. But it was not as good as the Senate math that allows 11% to triumph over 74%.
