MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

MERKLEY: Oh, you"re welcome. It"s great to be with you.

MADDOW: Both you and Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, who you"ve worked with on this, made appearances on this show recently. And the last we heard, the plan was to bring up filibuster reform on the first day of the new Congress, when you"d be able to fix it with a simple majority vote. What happened to that plan?

MERKLEY: Well, that was the plan. It was based on how the Senate had operated historically, where all sides agree to put the resolution on the floor and debate it.

And then, down the line, after it"s been debated a certain period of time, someone would move to close debate. And at that point, you would have constitutional option, and that is simply that if 51 affirm the ability to close debate, you could get to a final vote.

It might take a lot of maneuvering along the way, but the Republicans found a way to filibuster the filibuster. They found a way to say, "Hey, we are not going to go along with the way things always have been done, and you"re going to have to go through this complicated protocol that involves mourning hour, something that"s never been done. And if you try it, we"ll talk it to death, because you"re way down at the end of the agenda."

And it turns out there"s no real way to get something on to the floor once you strip away the collaboration, the belief that we should debate in the U.S. Senate. Once you strip that away, the rules never took into account that the Senate would go that far. So we ran into an obstacle we didn"t anticipate.

MADDOW: Well, you know, when people talked about the likelihood of this reform actually happening, nobody ever debated the popularity of reforming the filibuster.

All Democratic senators serving in this current Congress signed on to a letter saying it should be changed. In some way, it should be improved. Nobody debated the merits.

What was debated was whether or not it could get adequate support and whether or not the rules are so fungible that they could ever be tacked down enough to be changed. But you think that this was ultimately defeated by the rules just being used against you, not by a lack of support.

MERKLEY: Well, certainly, we never got to that point where people had to show all their cards about using 51 under the constitutional option.

And there was some concern about us exercising that door, and thereby giving the Republicans additional encouragement to use that pathway two years from now or four years from now.

My argument had always been, look, if we responsibly report on the rules to help deliberation for the minority and majority, that"s our best protection against abuse in the future.

But whether - we never knew how many votes we would have, because we never got to that point. On the substance issue, you say, I think we had very strong support. On the constitutional pathway, we wouldn"t have known until we got there.

MADDOW: What are you going to do next? I know you"re committed to these reforms because you"re committed to the Senate as an institution. I know that you think this would not be something that would lend partisan advantage to either side.

But you think this would be the right thing for the legislative branch. I know we"ve talked about this before. How are you going to keep pursuing this?

MERKLEY: Well, first, we went to the floor and Tom Harkin and Tom Udall and I made the case. You showed some footage of that. We said, "Listen, the Senate is broken. So let"s work together to fix it."

And we get unanimous consent, amendments to try to get things on to the floor, to get past that logjam that I was referring to that the Republicans that put in place.

Well, at least, Republicans are now on record that they"ve turned that down. Then, tomorrow, we will have a debate on several rule changes. We will have votes.

And unfortunately, it"s under these very high totals that make it virtually impossible to make change happen. But I see this as a path on a very long battle. We always knew in a single cycle, you weren"t going to make the Senate over completely to a functioning institution of deliberation.

But having had these debates for 35 years, having the debate, having people have to cast a vote, having voters give feedback, it is - it"s a step forward but it"s going to be a longer journey than we hoped.

MADDOW: Well, I will happily rescind the name the Tarantino, which did not help in your efforts, and try to come up with a new one when you get back out there. Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, thank you for your time today, sir. Good luck with this.

MERKLEY: Thank you so much. Take care.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source