The revolution will be supervised.
Every Democrat in the Senate except for Chris Dodd (who’s retiring) has signed a letter to Harry Reid urging him to consider changes to the filibuster rules. There’s also a move to elect committee chairs by secret vote instead of affirmation unless there’s an objection.
This bit of snotty stupidity was re-tweeted by progressive bloggers a couple of days ago, and it encapsulates the cluelessness of many of Harry Reid’s detractors:
This is typical of sniping we see from progressives who don’t understand cloture and can’t read a map. 82% of Republicans voted for cloture on the Civil Rights act. And here’s the list of majority leaders from Mansfield to today, with current PVIs noted:
Do you see a pattern? Unlike the Republicans, who pick Senate leaders from safe seats (Kentucky is R+10), the Democrats tend to pick leaders from swing states, because it’s Democrats who have to hold swing states to hold the majority. This list of PVIs by state shows that Democrats holding the Senate is an unnatural act. By voting patterns alone, Republicans should have 55 seats in the Senate. Running better candidates, and tolerating pragmatic compromise, is what keeps Democrats in control of the Senate, and that’s why Democrats there elect leaders who know how to win in swing states instead of ideologically pure, safe seat progressives.
Here are a few more ugly facts that nobody wants to acknowledge:
By the numbers, filibuster reform hurts Democrats, since they are the natural minority in the Senate. McConnell’s short-sighted abuse of the filibuster may tempt Democrats into a strategically stupid move, since it may lead Democrats to abolish the tool that they could put to good use when they’re back in the minority.
The politically smart move for Democrats was to spend political capital on DREAM, not DADT. The Hispanic vote is the key to turning the red strongholds blue. Democrats already own the gay urban centers without the gay vote.
But, hey, it’s more fun to bitch about Reid, so let’s keep that up.
Update: I misremembered where I had first heard this Mansfield quote – I thought it was re-tweeted by a progressive I follow, but the origin is actually on Talking Points Memo.
DADT and the DREAM Act both face key Senate votes today. Get on the phone and make it happen. Here are some key Senators if you happen to live in their states, courtesy of commenter Moses 2317:
Olympia Snowe (Maine) – (202) 224-5344
Susan Collins (Maine) – (202) 224-2523
Scott Brown (Massachusetts) – (202) 224-4543
George LeMieux (Florida) – (202) 224-3041
George Voinovich (Ohio) – (202) 224-3353
Jim Webb (Virginia) – (202)-224-4024
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) – (202) 224-6665
John Ensign (Nevada) – (202) 224-6244
Richard Lugar (Indiana) – (202) 224-4814
Mark Kirk (Illinois) – (202) 224-2854
Joe Manchin (West Virginia) – 202-224-3954
Even if you live in some other state, pick up the phone and yell about something.
Find your Senator here.
Switchboard: (202) 224-3121
Guide for first-timers here.
I doubt this will go anywhere, but it’s worth a try:
Senate Democrats will make a dramatic effort to reform the rules of the chamber when the next Congress begins, one of the body’s primary filibuster-reform advocates said Wednesday morning.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who has championed a weakening of the procedural mechanism that allows the minority party to hold up legislation, predicted “fireworks” on Jan. 5, 2011—the day on which the Senate can, he argued, revamp its rules by a simple majority vote.
“There could be some fireworks. There could be some fireworks on January fifth,” Harkin said at a pro-reform event sponsored by several like-minded organizations. “I’m going to be there. I’m armed. I’m armed with a lot of history, and I know the rules, and I know the procedures too, so we will see what happens on the fifth.”
Update. I see mistermix just posted on this. I think we started the same time but my internet went hinky halfway through and I had to come back to it.
A friend sends this HuffPo story where Tom Harkin talks some smack about filibuster reform:
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who has championed a weakening of the procedural mechanism that allows the minority party to hold up legislation, predicted “fireworks” on Jan. 5, 2011—the day on which the Senate can, he argued, revamp its rules by a simple majority vote.
The scenario is that Democrats propose a rule change, Republicans object, Biden overrules that objection, and 51 Democrats vote for filibuster reform.
I can’t see 51 of those cats doing anything, and I think that some are (probably reasonably) afraid that changing the Senate to a majority rule-institution will disadvantage Democrats when President Palin is in power with Republican majorities in the Senate and House. But failure to do this puts Jim DeMint in the driver’s seat for the next two years, and that’s going to be ugly.
One of the worries about Democrats during the next Congress is that they’ll be rolled early and often. There’s a lot of discussion about negotiating tactics to avoid this outcome, but I think Kevin Drum gets it about right when he notes that better leadership won’t help much:
First, there’s a real asymmetry between liberal and conservative goals. Liberals want active change. This means they can’t just obstruct. They have to figure out a way to build a supermajority coalition for complicated legislation, and that means compromise. And everyone knows this. So compromise is baked into the cake. But conservatives, to a much larger extent, are often OK with simply preventing things from changing, either as their first best or second best position. For that, all you have to do is maintain a very simple position among a minority caucus. No real coalition building or compromise is necessary.
Second, political coalitions are simply too public to sustain an artificial bargaining posture. The problem with the Democratic caucus isn’t that they negotiate badly, it’s that the Democratic caucus is genuinely fractured. And again, everyone knows it. You can’t pretend you’re willing to go to the mat against high-end tax cuts when there are half a dozen Democratic senators who support high-end tax cuts and Republicans know there are half a dozen Democratic senators who support high-end tax cuts. To fix this, you need more liberal Democrats, not tougher leadership.
John Amato noted that the DREAM Act will knock over a billion off of the deficit, and he urges his readers to get on the phone and make it happen. Good on him.
Here are some Senators who need to hear from you:
AK-Murkowski KS-Brownback LA-Landrieu MA-Brown ME-Collins ME-Snowe MO-McCaskill NV-Ensign NC-Hagan ND-Conrad ND-Dorgan OH-Voinovich The following senators have indicated that they will not vote for the DREAM Act, but are still being targeted: AR-Pryor FL-LeMieux IL-Kirk NH-Gregg TX-Hutchison
Those of you whose Senators did not make the list should still pick up the phone and urge him or her to pass the tax cut plan as passed by the House.
Find your Senator here.
Switchboard: (202) 224-3121
Guide for first-timers here.
***Instant Update***
Oops, after 5 on the East Coast. Pick up the phone and yell at someone first thing tomorrow. I’ll repost this as an open thread then.
Any sentence that starts with “But some in the Senate” is guaranteed to contain something stupid from Democrats. Here’s today’s example from Ezra Klein:
[...]House leadership is still looking to hold a standalone vote on the tax cuts for income under $250,000. But some in the Senate—including Chuck Schumer, Bob Menendez, and Claire McCaskill—are pushing a compromise that would extend $400 billion of the $700 billion in tax cuts for income above $250,000 by extending them for everyone making less than $1,000,000. So those struggling members of the middle class making between $250,001 and $999,999 will get their tax cuts, too, and Democrats will have extended about $3.6 trillion of the $4 trillion in Bush tax cuts, or 90 percent of the total.
If that’s the ultimate agreement we see on the Bush tax cuts, it’ll be worth taking a moment to appreciate how far Democrats have backslid on this issue since BIll Clinton. Clinton, of course, raised taxes in the face of large deficits. The Obama campaign, by contrast, swore not to raise taxes on any family making less than $250,000, and Democrats might now effectively raise that to $1,000,000. In setting up the expectation that taxes can’t go up for anyone but millionaires, Democrats take most of them off the table. And given that Republicans have no interest in taxes, either, that basically removes them as a tool of fiscal policy going forward.
Also, too: if it starts with “But some in the Senate” and contains “Chuck Schumer”, it’s some kind of sell-out to the rich, corporate interests, or both.
Explaining why she has avoided mainstream media outlets where she might have to explain herself and her strange policy views more fully, the grandmotherly Angle said, “We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer, so that they report the news the way we want it reported.”—Joe Conason
If you want something short’n’hard-hitting to forward in response to the lies, misapprehensions and phony statistics circulated by misguided relatives and facebook acquaintances, Dave Johnson at the Campaign for America’s Future put together a good, succinct, link-intensive list of rebuttals, Eight False Things The Public “Knows” Prior To Election Day. No, Obama did not triple the deficit, raise taxes, or bail out the banks (that happened before the 2008 election). The stimulus did work (just not well enough), health care reform will not cost a trillion dollars, and Social Security is not a ‘Ponzi scheme’. Government spending does not “take money out of the economy”; and new hiring in the private sector depends on demand, not on tax cuts.
This stuff really matters.
If the public votes in a new Congress because a majority of voters think this one tripled the deficit, and as a result the new people follow the policies that actually tripled the deficit, the country could go broke.
If the public votes in a new Congress that rejects the idea of helping to create demand in the economy because they think it didn’t work, then the new Congress could do things that cause a depression.
If the public votes in a new Congress because they think the health care reform will increase the deficit when it is actually projected to reduce the deficit, then the new Congress could repeal health care reform and thereby make the deficit worse.
Esquire’s Political Blog has been running a series of “What I’ve Learned” short interviews with members of the 111th Congress. Most of them have been… instructive. Sometimes depressing, but sometimes inspirational; people I knew about, and those I didn’t.
For instance, I am proud to say that I once got to vote for Representative Barney Frank (D, Mass.):
Nobody can fire anybody in the House. We’re all equal. Nancy Pelosi has more power than a freshman Republican, but she can’t fire him. Nobody can give anybody else an order. At a job, someone can say, “You will do this.” No one here can say, “You must vote this way.” They can argue with me. They can try to pressure me. But the only people who can fire us are people back home. It’s very interesting, because it means that we’ve got to get along personally in an atmosphere in which the normal rules for structuring human relationships aren’t there…
The problem today is activist elements, right and left, live in parallel universes. They don’t hear the same things. They don’t know the same things. So there is no basis for compromise. People only hear from people they agree with, they only listen to people they agree with. So each side thinks it represents a majority, which means that anybody on your side that tries to compromise must be a traitor because there’s no need to compromise because everybody knows everybody agrees with them.
There are no common facts anymore. People are not interested in information as a basis for making decisions. People now want information used as a weapon.
But I had not previously been exposed to Representative Judy Biggert (R, Ill.):
... I was very surprised that John McCain chose Sarah Palin. You know, I’m more of a moderate Republican, and I didn’t see it coming at all. I thought there were a lot of experienced women who might be asked. I remember where I was. Home in the district talking to a group of women. My aid walked up right after McCain’s announcement and gave me an envelope with a name on it. I looked at it and blurted out, “It’s Sarah Palin.” The women all started clapping and cheering. My face dropped. I tried to pretend that, Oh, this is a great thing. But I didn’t know much about her and it seemed like we needed somebody that was much more experienced and could help on the business side.
I was very honored to be chosen as one of the most bipartisan members of Congress. ‘Course, I have to say that Barney Frank was also chosen as one of the most bipartisan, too. He was also chosen as one of the most partisan. I guess he has a split personality…
I didn’t really go into politics until my last four children went off to college. I wasn’t going to leave any teenagers home alone. Then I went to a Chicago Bears football game party and was asked to run for the Illinois general assembly. They said, “You’ve got six weeks to do it, and we’ll help you.” That’s how I got into it.
I met Obama in Chicago. I was in the Illinois House and he came into the Illinois Senate. He wasn’t the messiah then.
One time, my husband caught Obama kissing me on the cheek as he was coming down the aisle to speak at the State of the Union. He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Well, he kisses everybody.”
Tom Junod at Esquire has a Modest Proposal for the Democrats to garner the votes of “independents”, under the title “How D.C. Became Hollywood for Semi-Attractive People“:
... But right now what’s most interesting about Christine O’Donnell — and the other candidates like her — is what her candidacy says about the opposition:
The Democratic Party is boring. And its women are either old or unattractive.
This is not a superficial problem in a country that has embraced superficiality. The Republicans, left for dead, are on the verge of taking back power because they of what they learned from Sarah Palin in 2008: that the values Americans care about are not family, but entertainment. Sure, it’s the party of no; it’s also the party of fun… Now the Republican Party has not so much remade itself as remarketed itself, its familiar cast of corporate shills learning to speak the language of populist outrage from the Tea Party, and its Tea Partiers rallying behind women attractive enough to allow them to forget their own grotesqueries.
Christine O’Donnell, like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and Nikki Haley before her, might not be the most beautiful woman in the world, but she has enough sex appeal for a turn on Dancing with the Stars, or for a contract with the Fox News mothership, or for a few contentious seasons on the Real Housewives of the Republican Party, if such a show ever existed, and if O’Donnell ever married or raised a family. The reality-television baseline is becoming the standard of beauty in this country: If you can say really crazy things or lead a really crazy life and become a star, well, then you must be beautiful. The Republicans have cornered the market on beauty because they’ve cornered the market on crazy, and if they’ve failed to produce a “candidate” in Delaware, they’ve succeeded in producing a star, and have made all the tut-tutting pundits look as behind the times as the newspapers they serve. Wherever populism reared its head, there used to be sweaty men; now — in country music, at Fox, and in crossover “Islamaphobe” bloggers who get their picture pasted on the Sunday Times — there are at least semi-sexy women.
The Democrats didn’t think they had to worry about any of this. They weren’t looking for stars because they had the biggest star in the world as their president. He didn’t have a populist bone in his body, but he was a deeply thoughtful man and a galvanic speaker both, and he promised to transcend the bone-grind of American politics. With his promise of one-man racial reconciliation, he was transfixing, but the independents who were transfixed by him needed to keep being transfixed, and on this, he couldn’t deliver…
... And the Democrats… deeply misjudged what the American electorate wants and is capable of. They thought that after the trauma of the Bush years, we would want a no-drama president; a regal First Lady; endless pages of necessary legislation, achieved at a political cost that proves the party’s commitment and courage; and a few more women on the Supreme Court who prove the party’s emphasis on excellence and ethnicity over eros. They didn’t realize that what we want is drama and nothing but, and so the Democrats became the CNN to the Repubican Fox, clueless in their competence, bewildered by their own best intentions…
You’ll have to click the link to read Junod’s tongue-so-firmly-in-cheek-as-to-protrude-from-the-vulgar-bodily-orifice solution, but I’m afraid he may be correct in his argument that a certain percentage of our fellow citizens may have given up on citizenship (hard) in preference for entertainment (easy).
Too good not to front-page (h/t commentor Trollhattan). Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly got together with filmmaker Bill Simmon to remind us what’s at stake. Great clip for email forwarding to the faint of heart:
Russ Feingold is one of the ten candidates highlighted on Balloon Juice’s very own ActBlue page, linked over in the right-hand column——>
Jonathan Cohn at TNR posted a link to this Feingold ad on YouTube over the weekend, under the headline “Playing Offense on Health Care Reform“:
Cohn’s verdict:
... A few things about this ad stand out. It touts the elements of reform that are most likely to resonate with independent, middle-class voters. It makes clear that repealing the Affordable Care Act, even partially, would mean taking away benefits that Americans are already starting to get. And it frames health care reform as an explicitly populist cause. It’s all about the ways the little guy is at the mercy of big insurance companies—and which candidate is on whose side.
I really have no way to know how these ads are playing or will play. Maybe talking about health care reform, even in this way, simply alienates voters who want to hear about the economy. But my gut tells me that Democrats are better off fighting the attacks on health care than ignoring them—and that pitches like these will help, rather than hurt.
If you can afford it, this might be a good time to show Feingold (or any of his ActBlue fellows) a little negotiable affection.
I’m going to argue that it’s not quite Friday yet on the other side of the Mississippi, because I can’t honor my own “Green Balloon Juice No (Overt) Politics Fridays” pledge until I’ve urged everyone to go read Charlie Pierce’s excellent Esquire takedown of The Guy from SC:
Just this week, Senator Jim DeMint settled the basic historical issue once and for all: the Civil War was a massive waste of time, money, and human life — at least as it pertains to the great state of South Carolina.
OK, so we’d have missed out on some good songs, and that Ending Slavery thing was a good deal, and Ken Burns wouldn’t be as rich and famous, and a lot of grizzled men who like to play soldier-man dress-up would have to go back to the Star Trek conventions where they belong. I will grant you all that. But, at the very least, we would have been spared to piteous spectacle this week of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body — and, through that the World’s Greatest Republic — being seized entirely by a slick, Leviticus-mumbling grifter. DeMint is what Jesus would have been had He gone into real estate, hustling swamp properties outside Capernaum to various Galilean suckers.
This week, DeMint announced that he would employ his senatorial privileges to put a hold on virtually all legislation until after the midterm elections. After which, he anticipates giddily, the clown car will stop at the steps of the Capitol and disgorge its contents, all of whom will have the propellers on their beanies spinning in the same direction as his. This is what democratic self-government has come down to in the 21st Century — a coup DeMint.
He doesn’t really have a grip on the etiquette, though. Usually, when you seize control of the government, the first thing you do is grab the radio station, so you can explain why you did it, and then you blockade the airports to make sure you have an audience. Of course, Jim DeMint hasn’t had to bother with all that. He has the Senate Rules, and he has the will to use them, and he is, after all, from South Carolina, which has always considered its membership in the United States of America to be largely honorary. [...]
Yes, there’s more. By all means, go read the whole indictment!
There’s a link to Balloon Juice’s very own ActBlue page over there on the right-hand column——>, and we’re making good progress towards what Cole labelled “a very ambitious goal”. As a jumpstart, here’s an ad from one of the candidates we’re targetting, Scott McAdams:
Thanks to commentor Linda Featheringill for the link. I admit to a bias in favor here, because my mother-in-law is Norwegian-born. In the thirty-plus years we’ve been acquainted, she has never actually cursed me out, because she doesn’t need profanity to obtain compliance. But I will attest that the experience builds character.
