GOP Obstructionism

John Deeth noted this little factoid this morning...

"This year Senate Republicans are threatening filibusters to block more legislation than ever before. Nearly 1 in 6 roll-call votes in the Senate this year have been cloture votes. If this pace of blocking legislation continues, this 110th Congress will be on track to roughly triple the previous record number of cloture votes — 58 each in the two Congresses from 1999-2002, according to the Senate Historical Office."

Matthew Yglesias posted this graph and analysis of what all the fillibustering means.

It's really pretty surprising to see this kind of record being broken at the present time. Abstractly, you'd think that the most filibustering would happen at a time more like 2005-06 when 40-odd Senators might see their use of the filibuster as the only possible way to stop legislation. Alternatively, you might see a lot of filibusters aimed at preventing a first term president from needing to veto legislation, as Senators agree to take the hit in order to help their president secure re-election.

It seems, though, that the GOP has decided that if they use filibusters to obstruct congressional action that the press will keep reporting this in a "congress fails to do X" kind of way rather than a "GOP obstructionism" kind of way, which makes filibusters a win-win for Republicans.

So will the media keep reporting about how congress is failing to accomplish anything or will they see it as the GOP obstructionism that it is?