Why can Canada’s parliament vote (on gun laws), but even when a single party controls both the U.S. House and Senate a change is all but impossible?

Question

An article today discusses the difference between the U.S. and Canadian political systems and claims to answer a simple question, but the main issue remains unanswered.

Why can Canada’s parliament vote for a change (in gun laws), but, even when a single party controls both the U.S. House and Senate, a change (in gun ownership laws) is all but impossible?

Is this, for example, one of the cases when the bar for a Senate vote is not simply 50% + 1 (VP, in the current Senate), but 60% or even two-thirds (66 or 67?)?

If two members of the House of Representatives sponsor a law (such as a background-checks law), the vote passes the House (assuming unanimous vote among representatives from the Democratic Party), and the vote is ratified by 50 Senators + VP vote (for the current Senate split at 50-50), does that not suffice for the law to pass (barring a presidential veto, which wouldn't be a concern here)?

Update

If the answer can be summarized as "If a few US Senators are opposed to a legislation then they can discuss it endlessly (filibuster)," please write that simply and explicitly. But why then does it matter whether 51 Senators or 80 Senators approve a bill, if in either case the remaining 49 or 20 Senators could filibuster it? How does endless debate suddenly become not viable as a tool for political paralysis if only 20 Senators disapprove?

Update 2

The intended stress in the question is not "why does the Canadian system work?". It works by a simple majority. The question instead seeks to understand how the U.S. system can be bogged down by procedures even when both branches of Congress have majorities that pursue an objective (whatever that objective might be; today it's no guns; tomorrow it may be no abortions).

Answer 1

The biggest single difference is that in Canada the House of Commons is unequivocally the highest power in the land. If the House of Commons votes to do something then it will happen.

The Senate can impose a certain amount of delay, but ultimately it cannot override the wishes of the House of Commons. This approach was built into the constitution of Canada deliberately from the start, and in the views of many historians was deliberately designed like that as a contrast with the US approach of two equal chambers, after seeing how that system worked. It's worth noting that the House of Commons is the only elected legislative body, and it is from that that it derives its mandate, unopposable by the unelected Senate.

Under normal circumstances the government party will have a majority in the House of Commons, which means they can pass whatever legislation they want, unless there is significant opposition from their own party. If the government does not have a majority then they have to work out some kind of deal with other parties - either a formal coalition where parties share government, or (as in the current state) a less formal agreement where a small party agrees to support government legislation (provided they don't contain anything the smaller party disagrees with too vehemently) in return for the government putting forward measures the smaller party is advocating for.

The situation is made worse in the US by the strange setup of the US Senate where actual progress in practice takes a supermajority to be in agreement, a situation that occurs with increasing rarity. The Senate rules were set up with the assumption that the Senators would all be reasonable people who would lay aside party differences in order to pass necessary legislation.

Answer 2

Is this, for example, one of the cases when the bar for a Senate vote is not simply 50% + 1 (VP, in the current Senate), but 60% or even two-thirds (66 or 67?)?

Most proposed legislation only needs a simple majority to pass in both the House of Representatives and Senate. There's a catch, however, specific to the Senate. The Senate needs to get a chance to even discuss a proposed piece of legislation (e.g., a proposed gun law) before they can begin discussing it, and later it needs to get a chance to vote on the proposed legislation before they can do so.

Both motions (bringing a bill forward and later voting on it) are subject to endless debate. Being the more deliberative body of the two bodies of Congress, the Senate allows endless debate on most legislation and on rule changes.

The only way to stop these endless debates is to invoke cloture, which puts an end-time on the debate over a bill. A cloture motion on most legislation needs 3/5 of the sitting Senators (60 Senators) to pass and put an end to the endless debate.

Nowadays, an endless debate (aka a filibuster) is not needed. All that's needed is for 41 Senators to indicate they would filibuster some proposed piece of legislation. In that case, that piece of legislation is typically tabled or withdrawn. The end result is that proposed legislation needs 60 Senators to be in favor of it.

Aside: Rule changes need 2/3 of the Senators who are present to approve a cloture motion to end debate on a proposed rule change. Senators would filibuster a rule change that would effectively end the filibuster.

Answer 3

I'm not familiar with the system in Canada. However, the one in the United States is sufficiently convoluted to know that it is the 'problem' in this comparison.

The Constitution of the United States instates a Congress holding legislative power; Congress is divided into two (mostly) equal chambers called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Constitution spells out that the House be composed of members from each state according to their population and elected every two years while the Senate is composed of two members per state elected on staggered terms. The Constitution makes no further mention about how bills are to be voted on except that the Vice President holds the power to cast a tie-breaking vote in an equally divided Senate. However, for a bill to pass Congress both the House and the Senate most vote in favour.

As far as I am aware, the House conducts most of its business by simple majority vote; including motions on whether to vote on a bill. By contrast, the Senate's Standing Rules include Rule XXII (Precedence of Motions) which includes a very lengthy text that I shall not quote. The consequence of that text is that debate on a bill does not end until 60 senators (three fifths) vote to end debate in a motion for cloture. After cloture, a bill is voted on regularly and the usual 50+ % or tie-breaking VP vote come into play.

The Senate can vote to override these rules (effectively giving itself new rules) by simple majority vote as specified in Article 1 of the Constitution. It has not done so and it does not seem like there is a majority for such a rule change.

Until such a time, a bill effectively needs a supermajority of 3/5 of all senators to pass; as the current majority is only 50 % plus the Vice President, as the current minority is strictly opposed to any gun control (or many other policies the majority might want to implement), and as there is no majority for a change in rules, the Senate is effectively gridlocked.

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tl;dr:

As per Senate rules, 60 of 100 Senators must agree to end debate before a bill is voted on. 41 Senators disagreeing with the content of a bill is enough to kill it by not ending debate.

Answer 4

Two problems with that idea. The first being that different countries hold different beliefs and will have a different idea on things like gun control.

Second being that one party does not control the all 3 parts of the government (both chambers and the white house) as there are 48 democrats, 50 republicans and 2 independents. At best you can say with the support of both independents they have half of the chamber and the tie breaking vote from the VP. While they can force things through if it comes to a vote not every democrat is going to supp0ort gun control for various reasons. Though regardless of that they still would need 60 votes to end the filibuster and they have no chance of getting that.

Answer 5

In Canada, control of guns is not controversial in the same way as in US. In effect the laws can be debated and changed.

If gun control was less controversial in US the laws could be changed even if it might take a bit of time and effort to pass through the process. I find that NRA and their lobbying work has been very successful in making even a discussion difficult. The situation is quite different in most other countries, as well as in Canada, where no pro-gun group has similarily strong political power.

Changing gun laws might require a change to the constitutional 2:nd amendment. The interpretation of the this amendment done by the supreme court sets limits to other laws. But changes has been done before as witnessed by the 18:th amendment beeing repelled (technically, by the 21:st amendment). This shows that if the political will is there laws can be changed.

Answer 6

An aspect not yet mentioned is that political backlash from legislation that gets enacted is often much stronger than the backlash politicians face when voting for legislation that does not get passed. Politicians often know, before voting, whether a piece of legislation will pass in their chamber, and will often have a pretty good idea of whether it would get enacted if their chamber passes it. The mid-term elections that followed the 1993 enactment of the Assault Weapons Ban resulted in a rather dramatic shift of the house/Senate balance against the people that had voted for it, and even if the Democrats might have the power to ram legislation through if they pushed sufficiently hard, doing so would likely cost them politically.

What matters in the poltiical balance are not Democrat-leaning voters who would support such legislation, nor Republican-leaning voters who would oppose it, but rather how the number of voters who would lean Democrat, but oppose anyone who enacts such legislation, compares to the number of voters who would lean Republican, but oppose anyone who blocks such legislation. If both numbers of people are high, then many politicians will favor an outcome where they can appear to support legislation but not have it actually get enacted. While it's true that procedural obstacles may block some legislation that would otherwise pass, not all legislation that is blocked by such obstacles would have been enacted in their absence.

Answer 7

A number of answers focus on procedural issues — filibuster, separation of powers, and so on. These issues are irrelevant. If the US had a unicameral legislature run on simple majority, no additional gun laws would come into effect.

The reason is two-fold:

First, we are a Constitution republic: the power of the legislature is tightly constrained by our Constitution, and that constraint is taken quite seriously by both the courts and the electorate. Firearms are specially called out for protection.

Recently, during a debate about gun control, a frustrated representative from Rhode Island, David Cicilline, blurted out, “Spare me the bullshit about constitutional rights.” This clip is likely to run on-loop during the campaign this summer.

Second, gun control is simply not that popular. Hundreds of millions of Americans own guns, hundreds of millions more support the gun ownership. In a country of only 330 million people, that means that a gun-control law would have to be very narrowly written to have any hope of passage.

The “assault weapon ban“ of 1994 forbade the sale of the type of weapon involved in perhaps 1% of all crime — and was itself so unpopular it was allowed to expire. A bill that covered any serious fraction of weapons actually in use would never pass in the current legal and political environment.