Franken: Republicans ‘Don’t Want People To Get Jobs Before The Election’

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) fired up progressive activists as the closing speaker at the fifth annual Netroots Nation conference on Saturday evening. He jokingly called the gathering “the most exciting political gathering of the year without guns” and told the gathering to keep fighting and pushing elected officials.

A few hours before the event, ThinkProgress sat down with Franken and asked him about the public’s frustration with the Senate’s gridlock. Franken told us that the new Senate will likely take up filibuster reform next year, an effort that he supports. He also discussed the need for other procedural reforms:

TP: Is there any other ideas that aren’t being talked about as much that you think would help the Senate be more productive?

FRANKEN: Well, I think there are, you know, a lot of this is procedural reform on how you offer amendments, and again, obviously, on cloture, and filibusters, and how many hours you have to have of debate even after cloture. One easy idea is, you have to wait 30 hours after a cloture vote to vote, because there’s supposedly 30 hours of debate. Well, sometimes they’ve had cloture votes where it’s — we’ve had to vote cloture on something that isn’t controversial at all, like a nominee who ends up passing 98-nothing. There’s no debate over the next 30 hours. So, you could say, I mean, one easy reform would be, say, either side or both sides can give up 15 hours. So, instead of it being 30 hours, it’s 15 hours. I mean, a lot of all of this was just to slow-foot, to slow things down.

Full Story: Think Progress » Franken: Republicans ‘Don’t Want People To Get Jobs Before The Election’.