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Super-Majority Requirements Specified in Senate Rules and Precedents
The Senate has a number of rules or precedents that require either a two-thirds or a three-fifths vote.
Constitutional Super-Majority Requirements
In the judgment of several of our Founding Fathers, among the infirmities of the Articles of Confederation was a super-majority requirement for deciding such questions as coining money, appropriating funds, and determining the size of the army and navy.
As Alexander Hamilton declaimed in Federalist No. 22, “To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.” Overall, the Framers generally favored decision-making by simple majority vote.
This view is buttressed by the grant of a vote to the Vice President (Article I, Section 3) in those cases where the Senators are “equally divided.” On the other hand, the Framers also recognized the virtue of super-majority votes in certain circumstances.
In Federalist No. 58, James Madison (like Hamilton a proponent of majority voting for most things) noted that super-majority votes could serve as a “shield to some particular interests, and another obstacle generally to hasty and partial measures.” Hamilton, too, in Federalist No. 73 highlighted the benefits of requiring an extraordinary majority of each chamber to overturn a president’s veto. “It establishes a salutary check upon the legislative body,” he said, “calculated to guard the community against the effects of faction, precipitancy, or of any impulse unfriendly to the public good, which may happen to influence a majority of that body.”
Majority
A majority, also called a simple majority to distinguish it from similar terms, is the greater part, or more than half, of the total.
What is a strict majority?
The strict majority rule, also called non-minority rule, is defined by: An alternative x is considered to be socially at least as good as some other alternative y iff a majority of all individuals do not prefer y to x.
2. the requirement to be a justice
2. 2/3 of the state legislatures call a Convention to amend the Constitution
2. 3/4 vote of the Convention
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