The feminist filibuster defense

LIMBAUGH: “Forget the Senate for a minute,” he said on his radio show. “Let’s say, let’s take ten people in a room and they’re a group. And the room is made up of six men and four women. Right? The group has a rule that the men cannot rape the women. The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six votes of the 10 to change the rule.”

Limbaugh continued his analogy by saying that “every now and then some lunatic in the group proposes to change the rule to allow women to be raped. But they never were able to get six votes for it. There were always the four women voting against it and there was, you know, two guys.”

“Well, the guy that kept proposing that women be raped finally got tired of it,” Limbaugh told his listeners. “He was in the majority and he said, you know what, we’re going to change the rule. Now all we need is five. And the women said, ‘you can’t do that.’ ‘Yes we are, we’re the majority, we’re changing the rule.’ And then they vote. Can the women be raped?”

All it would take at that point, Limbaugh said, “is half the room. You can change the rule to say three. You can change the rule to say three people want it, it’s gonna happen.”
“There’s no rule when the majority can change the rules, there aren’t any,” he said.
And the only reason behind the Senate invoking the “nuclear option,” according to Rush, is that President “Barack Obama can’t get what he wants democratically.”

If the Senate, which has the constitutional right to make its own rules, decides that it wants to require a super-majority vote to pass certain bills such as tax bills -- and they can do that. They can write those rules all day long -- such a rule would not infringe on presidential power. But to do so when it affects a presidential power, which takes us into a separation of powers issue, like the appointment of judges, that is unconstitutional, in my layman's view.