votes which can be very technical as to whether or not that is a filibuster or not. most of those cloture votes had to do with judicial appointments, not legislation. and then he was counting all the way back to 2007 when he himself was a senator casting the very votes that he decries when he says filibusters. so it was it was he was off by a factor of at least 10 when he used that number. let me translate for the people at home. no bueno. now, here is another guy. oh boy, a little bit of a loose relationship with the truth, huh? president putin. so he said that in a speech there was a referendum held in crimea. right. and he said it was completely acceptable with international norms and perfectly fair and pristine. actually, you had a choice where you could vote for yes or basically yes plus. oh my gosh. there was no no vote
there s a republican president trying to get nominees through providing you re willing to accept that republicans will able to get people with big personalities, that s the part a little bit more of the bad news. this was played in both ways and pushed us towards the center and in the future we will be less pointed to the center when it comes to presidential especially judges. ari love it when i get random, but filibuster comes from a term from pirates, people who used to steal treasure or booty and now for people who steal time and power. it s been happening how much more frequently this is for cloture votes because we can t quantify because it s sometimes we re going to make 60 votes and sometimes we won t even bother. it doesn t explain how bad the use of filibusters has been. two questions to you, how far
courts. when under the circumstances to the point of one after another turned down, you re left with no option. harry reid did today what i m sure was hard for him to do as a man of the senate but also required of him as a man of the senate to make it work. cloture votes protect minorities. democrats may be in the minority after 2014. there s no doubt about it. in a sense, i would argue any president, they are blocking nominees right now. i don t know it will materially change this president s situation. you will go back and forth like this. but i think the american people are tired of gridlock. they want to see the system work. they elected a president. the president ought to have the appointees of his choice within reason. we have qualified people and everybody agrees they are
thad cochran has a primary charge, lamar alexander has a primary challenge. all add up to the make something happen as someone who has spent the last longer than 15 years watching this, i would not have said five years ago that this was a possibility. it was sort of the thing they always invoked to make things happen, but that it might not ever really happen. but i think it marks we re in a different time, a different able, andrea, historically in terms of partisanship and what is and what is not possible. i think today s vote is a reflection of that. there have been hundreds of cloture votes for routine matters in this senate as compared to previous senates. so that s the harry reid argument. we can t get anything done. that s right. and i would say, andrea, i think the reason that we haven t seen the nuclear option invoked until today is probably harry reid. democrats have controlled the
we ve had frim getting cloture votes on moving to bills, much less closing off debate, but today this is too important a time in our in the fiscal situation of our country. we need to get on this bill. i would simply like to think that ted understands that, and that s why he agreed we need to go to the bill. now we get into the redebate. do you think that senator cruz, with all the theatrics that we went through over the past several days and the attention he s gotten, is he the future of your party? well, you know, everybody that comes to the senate come with the idea of running for president. haven t you always heard that? bob and i are the two exceptions. or maybe there s an anounszment you want to make. let s don t kid ourselves. there are aspirations on the part of the number of members on both sides of the aisle.