Ben’s not going to support any tax increase, ever:
Sen. Ben Nelson said Tuesday that he will not support tax increases in any budget proposal — a stance that could make Senate Democrats’ chances for reaching agreement on the issue even more difficult.
And he supports oil company subsidies:
Technically, last night’s vote was on the motion to proceed on the bill. Supporters outnumbered opponents, 52 to 48, but with Republicans filibustering the measure, Dems needed a 60-vote supermajority just to initiate a debate on the proposal. They fell eight votes short.
Two oil-friendly Democrats, Mary Landrieu (La.) and Mark Begich (Alaska), voted with the GOP, as did Nebraska’s Ben Nelson who had previously said he opposes filibusters on motion to proceed.
Ben is infuriating, but he’s just the pus-filled chancre, not the underlying disease. With rural states getting progressively redder, there’s just no way Democrats will ever have a reliable 60 vote majority in the Senate. As long as the filibuster is painless, Republicans will be able to strangle progressive legislation there. It’s tedious and dull to repeat that fact, but it does bear mentioning on occasion.
OzoneR
How about we do something to stop that from happening?
WyldPirate
Funny how there was really no move to change the rules in the Senate on the filibuster. It would seem that both parties like the fact that it is a stalemate if they wish for it to be one.
Not that the “will of the people” really matters to a US Senator. That’s not who they are representing. “mere voters” don’t count if they can’t direct cash at you in large volunes…
Citizen Alan
The filibuster won’t be with us for much longer. I believe the very next time it is ever used against a Republican majority, it will be abolished, as the Republicans, the Blue Dog Dems and the MSM will unanimously agree that it is an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of the majority.
lacp
@Citizen Alan: Somebody would use a filibuster against a Republican majority? Whoever might that be?
cmorenc
The one (sometimes only one) huge benefit of having jackwads like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman caucusing with the Ds rather than the Rs is to keep organizational control of the Senate; the ability to name committee chairs is a huge lever of power. Think of James Inhofe running the Environment & Public Works Committee instead of Barbara Boxer.
Citizen Alan
BTW, remember when a lot of people got mad when Rahm Emmanuel referred to progressive activists as “fucking retarded” and a lot of other people here came to the defense of poor widdle Rahm because apparently progressive activists in general are “fucking retarded” or something like that? IIRC, the specific incident that triggered the “fucking retarded” crack was the decision to run ads in Nebraska urging voters to call Ben Nelson’s office and urge him to vote with Obama in favor of HCR.
Ben Nelson’s an asshole. So what? What are any of us supposed to do about it given the fact that Democrats in his home state aren’t even allowed to call his office to complain about his voting patterns for fear that it will hurt his fee-fees and make him an even worse? Democrat.
ppcli
@Citizen Alan: True, but then if the Democrats subsequently regain power in the Senate, the Republicans, the Blue Dog Dems and the MSM will immediately agree that the constitution *demands* the reinstatement of the “time-honored, traditional, 100% American” filibuster, and act as if it was the Democrats who did away with it in the first place.
lol
@cmorenc:
But but, both sides do it and are equally bad.
So vote Nader.
p.a.
Hate to go OT, but anyone else having problems accessing the web with firefox? I am, and when i run ‘diagnose problem’ I either get ‘reset network adapter’ or ‘check windows firewall’. running vista, and I DO NOT want to go back to using ie. Any ideas?
Baud
I don’t think anyone thinks the GOP will ever go for increasing taxes on Big Oil. Some votes are held just to demonstrate where the parties stand on the issues. The problem is this strategy never works for Democrats because (1) the small number of Democrats who vote with the GOP is always seen as tainting the party as a whole and (2) when the Dems do it, the only thing our political culture focuses on is that the vote failed, rather than where the parties stand.
ppcli
@p.a.: Google Chrome?
Baud
@Citizen Alan: Look, I’m as frustrated by Nelson as anyone, but health care reform was extremely unpopular in Nebraska, and Nelson took a big hit in the polls there for voting for it.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@OzoneR:
The last time the rural areas went progressive was after the collapse of the entire economy. I’m up for ideas on how to do it now, beyond disenfranchising blacks and hispanics to get them to vote for Democrats.
mistermix
@OzoneR: What, truck in Democrats from the cities?
PeakVT
With rural states getting progressively redder
[pedant] Most states are majority urban, in that most of the citizens live in a MSA. Vermont is actually the most rural state, and only 3 others fall below 50% urban (as of 2000).[/pedant]
That said, I’m sure most of the suburbanites in those red states think of themselves as good-ole country folk even though their lives are entirely urban/suburban. Anti-urbanism in America is just as strong as anti-intellectualism.
OzoneR
@lacp:
the same people who used it to stop Social Security privatization and attempted to use it to stop Samuel Alito and the Bush tax cuts.
OzoneR
@mistermix: dunno, but if it’s true that rural areas are getting progressively redder, then there will be no progressive anything eventually, filibuster or not.
OzoneR
@Citizen Alan:
Then they are fucking retarded. HCR was very unpopular in Nebraska. Even the public option was unpopular in Nebraska. Nelson took a major courageous step by voting for it. He is to HCR what a Southern Democrat was to the Civil Rights Act. How many brave Southern Dems voted for the CRA? Like one.
In any sane political society, Nelson’s vote would have been made up by a Republican; Snowe or Collins.
Paula
Nelson is representing a very red state. It’s frustrating but he has has to thread a very fine needle. I’m not sure he will survive the next election and that would bring a tea party republican – yuck!
We turned Omaha blue for Obama! Since then, the some in our state legislature want to change our electoral apportionment (sour grapes). They have not got it yet, but I’m sure they will kept trying.
p.a.
@ppcli: I shut down Windows firewall and ffox works fine. I still have McAfee firewall so I should be safe when I hit the pron sites! ;-)
Joey Maloney
@OzoneR:
Since there’s no way to convince latte-slurping gay-married coastal elites to have fewer abortions and drive their Priuses out to colonize Real America ™, I’m staking my hopes on the New Madrid fault letting go in a big way. I’m pretty sure if Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Tennessee are underwater at the bottom of the new inland sea, that they will lose their representation in Congress.
NobodySpecial
I love watching OzoneNick simultaneously argue that Something Must Be Done and yet that Nothing Can Be Done.
thruppence
@p.a.: Are you using the new Firefox 4? I’ve found it very buggy. Revert to 3.6 or 3.7 if possible.
mk3872
I’m sure we’ll hear on HuffPo blog posts and FDL about how Obama has let them down again.
The “painless” part of today’s lightweight filibuster is that corporate cronies like Nelson and Landrieu get away with this with NO ACCOUNTABILITY.
OzoneR
@mk3872:
Obviously, he should’ve twisted arms or something. Certainly he could’ve gotten the three Democrats (and five Republicans) to agree to a bill that’s unconstitutional anyway.
mk3872
And the next time that liberals have a freak-out about Obama cutting deals to make small incremental changes in their direction, this fact needs to be pointed out. Even Dem majority cannot pass Dem ideas as bills.
mk3872
@OzoneR: If only Obama would use the “bully pulpit”, am I right?
OzoneR
@Baud:
Republicans never had unity in their bills. McCain and Chafee voted against the Bush tax cuts, a handful of Republicans voted against the Iraq war. Hell, Butch Otter voted against the damn Patriot Act.
The problem is (2)- we hear the great big failure and how the bill was awful anyway because it was partisan or whatever.
jibeaux
It kills me when the media starts talking about the possibility of Dems “losing control” of the Senate because the R’s might get to 51. It takes 60 to do any goddamthing because of the filibuster, and I think even creatures as dim-witted as Senators can figure out that gridlock cuts both ways. For the life of me, I just really don’t see any practical difference between Democrats having 59 seats and having 49 seats. If there are any, point ’em out.
OzoneR
@jibeaux:
who controls the agenda, what gets to the floor, suponeoa (sp) power.
boss bitch
@Citizen Alan:
Running ads is not the same as making a phone call. No one stopped Democrats in that state from picking up the phone. And no one stopped those progressive groups from calling Dem voters themselves to make them aware of the issue.
Chris
@WyldPirate:
Change the rules of the filibuster, and it becomes harder for Democrats to block Social Security or Medicare privatization the next time Republicans have control of both houses. I can understand why people would worry about that.
Omnes Omnibus
@jibeaux: Committee chairs. Control of legislative scheduling. Things like that. They can make a difference at the margins.
Mike S
Why aren’t progressive Dems in congress screaming against Bailouts for greedy price-gouging oil companies with record breaking profits? when someone says
?????
Mudge
Nelson doesn’t care about oil. He believes in the domino effect that if oil subsidies are cut, agriculture and ethanol subsidies are next. Keep in mind that one of the slight of hand promises by Ryan is to eliminate tax deductions to help lower the deficit. Now, thanks to the Republican position on oil supports, that amounts to a tax increase and won’t fly.
But, then again, Republicans don’t need to be consistent. If they open their mouths, a lie emerges.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@jibeaux:
The difference is that Republicans are willing to go full bore monolith to stop just about anything they want in the Senate. Democrats can’t even monolithically agree that they’re Democrats, forget maintain a willingness to filibuster and stop anything up in the Senate to the extent of the GOP. Plus, most aren’t willing to send things to a screeching halt just for political points, where the GOP sees governance as a hostage, not as as a goal.
In other words, if the GOP gets the senate by even one vote, they essentially get at least 70% of what they’ll want, unlike the Dem Majority which gets about maybe….20%. And that’s with major teeth pulling concessions made to the GOP to water every fucking thing down.
Baud
@OzoneR:
All those examples are of things that passed Congress. More to the point though, those dissenting GOP votes are not viewed as detracting from what the GOP stands for. For example, you’ll never hear anyone say that the GOP as a whole isn’t really for cutting taxes because McCain and Chafee voted against the Bush tax cuts. Bush and the GOP controlled the government for several years last decade, yet we still have an income tax in this country. If they were treated like Democrats, there would be nonstop kvetching about whether the GOP really stands for anything. That doesn’t happen.
Chris
@PeakVT:
Bingo. The actual rural populations is fairly small, but the myth is strong and the number of people wanting to pretend that they’re the new Daniel Boones or [snerk] Davy Crocketts is huge.
cleek
@jibeaux:
the majority controls the agenda and gets the majorities in committees. even if noting passes, being able to control the bills that get put up for a vote is better than not.
mining city guy
I am not sure how the vote of Ben Nelson can be used to support the proposition that with rural states getting redder nothing progressive can ever be accomplished in the Senate.I don’t hold the Senate in very high regard but this was a vote on a single issue and I don’t have any evidence that his vote represents the view of the views of the rural inhabitants of his state. I don’t know but I suspect that his vote might be more closely tied to campaign contributions from oil companies. I will note that I live in Montana,a more rural state I think than Nebraska, but that both of our Democratic Senators voted in support of the motion to proceed on the bill.
p.a.
@ppcli: I’ve been using firefox for years, am really comfortable with it. I have to use ie to access my employer’s websites, and I hate it. Don’t know much about Chrome. Is Opera still around?
Bulworth
What about the DeficitDebt Crisis?! What about the heroic “Gang of Six”?! Bipartisan! What about compromise?
Oh well.
Deb T
@p.a.:
Try Chrome – the Google Browser. I use it all the time.
OzoneR
@Mike S:
Kirsten Gillibrand is
rickstersherpa
The organizational control of the Senate (and the House) are very important just to let the New Deal and Great Society institutions we have to continue. Issa is having a hard time fighting his way out of a paperbag, but we can’t always depend on Republican incompetence. At least now nominees get out of committee in the Senate. That won’t happen if it turns Republican.
A good book can be written about the decline of the Democratic Party in the Mountain West and Great Plains, and much of it is due to the decline of mining industry and its unions, the transition to industrial agriculture from the small farmer, and the Wests transition to a place of more conservative social values while the Democratic Party became the symbolic home for us DFHs. And of course there is always race and the Civil Rights revolution. (Before the 1960s, Mormons (hence Utah) were reliably Democratic, Scott Matheson was elected to the Senate in 1970, but six years later was defeated by Orrin Hatch. The splitting and splintering of Nixonland had done its work.)
How do we get these people back? I don’t know, especially since so many of the people who would vote Democratic leave. The people sign up for fundamentalist churches are making a commitment where they now see the world in a manichean way, split between the “saved” (and one of the requirements of “the saved” is apparently a white skin), and the “damned” and their preachers tell them that Federal Goverment and all its supports outside the military is part of the “damned.”
ruemara
I’ve seen many an email telling me to tell Obama to end oil subsidies. This is why we lose. Where’s the organized effort by Nebraska’s Democratic voters to tell Ben Nelson to end oil subsidies. And CS, OZ, et al of the Obamabot/Firebagger Brigade 4th Division, can y’all focus on the issue at hand, instead of your pet war? The supposed organizing forces of progressives are always blowing their ammo at the WRONG. FUCKING. TARGET. Senatorial seats and the filibuster reform. Plus, remove Reid from the leadership role, he’s been mostly an obstacle by allowing the filibuster to be abused this way, he does have some control.
jibeaux
Those are all good points, but I guess still seem somewhat marginal to me. I’d just as soon get rid of the filibuster, regardless of who’s in the majority. I can’t shake the feeling that our number 1 obstacle to having a government sufficiently responsible to tackle the demands of the 21st century is the US Senate. It’s going to be our lead pipes.
Gus diZerega
The Senate may yet help destroy the country.
When we consider that a tiny percentage of our population, the most subsidized and out of touch part of our citizens, live in enough red rural states to destroy democratic government when we have a filibuster, the prospects for solving our problems are poor.
The Senate needs to get rid of the filibuster, or we need secession so that the most civilized parts of the US can become self-governing. It’ that simple.
Luthe
@p.a.:
IE Tab add-on for Firefox. It switches the rendering engine for pages to IE while never having to leave the confines of FF. Good for when you encounter pages optimized for IE and don’t want to open another browser.
Paul in KY
@jibeaux: I was surprised the amount of shit McChimpy & Darth Cheney were able to get through when they had a majority of 51 or so.
Or maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised…
Alan in SF
Strange that the man who wrote the most progressive health care reform bill ever is now acting like an unprincipled right-wing corporate stooge.
Steve M.
Fuck the filibuster and fuck the constitutional compromise that gave every state two senators no matter what. Look at the numbers: in 1790, the most populous state (Virginia) had about 21 times more people than the least populous state (Tennessee). Now the most populous state (California) has about 70 times the population of the least populous state (Wyoming). The disproportion has metastasized. It’s too much. It gives small states way too much power.
OzoneR
@Steve M.:
I always thought the Senate was the result of God’s attempt to tell us that these 13 states do not belong in the same country.
mds
@lacp:
@OzoneR:
Social Security privatization wasn’t stopped by a filibuster, but by the failure to get even majority support in the Senate, thanks to massive popular backlash. Sam Alito’s cloture vote was 72-25, which means it was a complete waste of time. And Alito is now on the Supreme Court, and the Bush tax cuts were enacted. So with none of these examples am I seeing what the filibuster actually gained. On the other hand, they do illustrate lacp and The Snarkist’s point, which is that Republicans will gladly keep the filibuster, since they are the ones predominantly benefiting from its use.
@Chris:
Again, the last time Social Security privatization came around, it couldn’t get a majority in a Republican-controlled Senate. Yet rarely a day goes by now where Dick Durbin isn’t announcing Democrats’ willingness to put Social Security and Medicare on the table. McCaskill-Corker’s hard spending caps would absolutely gut entitlement programs if enacted, doing more long-term damage to Medicare than the Ryan plan. On the other hand, the filibuster means that Republicans would need to clean up in the 2012 Senate elections, or they’d have to line up enough additional support beyond Manchin, Nelson, Warner, and a hypothetically-reelected McCaskill. The thing is, unless Senate Democrats stop publicly shooting at their own feet and start lining up behind Max Baucus(!) in asserting that Social Security should be left out of any deficit deal, it’s not clear to me that there would be forty votes left to block a “responsible” attempt at deficit reduction on the back of SS. In which case the veto pen is more valuable than the filibuster.
OzoneR
@mds:
Pretty sure it had majority support in the Senate and a threatened filibuster was able to keep the debate going long enough for Republicans to peel off one by one.
Lawnguylander
@mds:
It’s hard to find, but there is actually research and data out there showing how often Democrats have used the filibuster or derailed legislation with the threat of it. Quite often it turns out. Why make authoritative statements without bothering to find out if the facts back them up?
OzoneR
@Lawnguylander:
Democrats used the filibuster alot, the different was Republicans were far more successful at getting Democrats to peel off until they reach cloture.
Gus diZerega
@OzoneR:
SOUTHERN Democrats, now Republicans, used the filibuster a lot.
Chris
You know, Republicans primary *their* own members of Congress for less significant acts of partisan disloyalty than this, and you see how effective of a political party *they* are (at getting what they want, that is; that’s why there’s a “59-41 minority” tag here).
And yes, I realize Nelson may be the only Dem who can win/hold a Senate seat in Nebraska. But if Nebraska’s that conservative, maybe we should let them have a real Republican.
Also, if Nelson won’t even consider raising taxes on anyone, he’s not a deficit hawk, he’s a deficit chickenhawk.
El Cid
This just reminds us we all need to focus and stop talking about all this stuff and dedicate ourselves to getting 90 Democratic Senators so that there could be some more moderate legislation passed.
DFH no.6
@jibeaux:
This.
The deeply undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate (along with its pro-conservative bent, due, yes, mainly to the overall conservative makeup of the small population “rural” states) is the single greatest obstacle to even preserving progressive political gains, let alone dealing progressively with current and future national challenges.
The media’s conservative bent is also a huge problem, of course, but the U.S. Senate is the larger problem in actually getting things done progressively (progressive Democrats need unobtainably huge Senate majorities, while Republicans don’t actually even need a majority for much of their agenda).
And, OzoneR is correct about the filibuster.
Despite what Lawnguylander may believe, the fact is that the filibuster (and related Senate operations like “holds”) in modern times have been used far more often to derail progressive legislation and appointments than they have been used to block the conservative agenda. Republican blocks in the Senate the past two years alone blow away anything progressives have done in similar manner going back a generation.
As Gus diZerega put it, SOUTHERN Democrats (now Republican) used the filibuster for things like opposing civil rights.
I don’t have a solution. Politically, I don’t believe there is one, feasibly. We are stuck with this, just as we are stuck with the undemocratic and anachronistic Electoral College (though the Senate situation is far, far worse).
Judas Escargot
@Gus diZerega:
I wish the Dems had the cajones and skill to turn the tables wrt the debt ceiling, and triangulate against the Red states in the Senate. They’re the one’s sucking at the teat while lecturing the rest of us on how “the math demands it”.
Fuck the Red states: It’s time to starve them.
“We’ve been listening to all your GOP talk on fiscal responsibility, and have taken it to heart… so we Dems have decided that WE will only vote to raise the debt ceiling if you help us get rid of oil subsidies, agricultural subsidies, and the Iraq war. If not, oh well, we’ll make sure everybody knows who let it all burn, and it wasn’t US. It was YOU. And it was for Big Oil.”
The emotional/intellectual infants in the GOP are going to play chicken with the global economy anyway. Turning the tables on them would throw them into even further disarray. IMO, going full-on Crazy Ivan with the debt ceiling might be a good tactic.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
This is why President Obama is going to make Senator Nelson’s decision as personally painful as possible, by using the presidential bully pulpit and actively and fiercely campaigning against, and denigrating, every blue dog obstructionist, every day, all day long, in every media venue. And if he takes a well-deserved day off, his presidential posse will continue the fiercenessisity.
.
.
El Cid
@Judas Escargot:
But then, angry Southern and Western whites would stop voting for Democrats. And that would be totally different.
maus
@OzoneR:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#By_party_and_region
Still, many more than the Republicans.
Lawnguylander
@DFH no.6:
What I or anyone else believes is not of any importance when there’s a public record of filibusters, and threats of filibusters that made actual filibusters unnecessary, to look at. And I didn’t say that past Democratic minorities have done anything close to what the Republicans have done over the past few years. Just that it’s fiction to state that Democrats didn’t use the filibuster when in the minority. Despite what you believe, this is the kind of thing people should know when they’re advocating abolishing it.