End the Filibuster Next January!

Yesterday, every returning Democrat in the U. S. Senate signed a letter calling for changes in Senate rules to limit filibusters and holds. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Carl Levin of Michigan are talking about making Senators actually recruit 40 votes to begin a filibuster and then staying on the floor to maintain a filibuster. Under current Senate rules, someone can anonymously file an objection to a vote and force a 30 hour delay.

The Democrats are also talking about forcing Senators to make holds on legislation public. Right now, holds are anonymous. That way, anybody who is single-handedly obstructing appointments or legislation would be publicly accountable.

I've got a better idea.

Get rid of filibusters altogether. Eliminate holds. It's the only way to make the federal government functional again.

Under Mitch McConnell's leadership, the strategy of Senate Republicans has been to use the most expansive interpretation of Senate rules concerning calling up legislation, filibustering, and holds to slow walk and obstruct every significant piece of legislation. McConnell's goal has been to make Democratic Party control over the White House and Congress so painful that the country will vote Republican just to escape the torment.

It's important to emphasize that McConnell and the Republican leadership didn't want to negotiate, didn't want to compromise, and didn't want any kind of horse-trading. The GOP has been responding to every defeat by becoming even more aggressive ever since the 1992 election that put Bill Clinton into office. Newt Gingich made his reputation by aggressively attacking Clinton over the gays in the military even before Clinton made office and the attacks continued right through the Republican Revolution of 1994. When Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996k, the GOP responded with impeachment charges. This time, McConnell and other senior Republicans viewed intransigence as a matter of survival. Barack Obama posed a particular kind of threat to them. By heavily emphasizing bi-partisanship as he took office, Obama, perhaps unintentionally, defined any kind of Republican cooperation and compromise as a win for the Obama administration. For Mitch McConnell, Dick Armey, John McCain, and a lot of other Republicans, cooperation with the Obama administration meant extinction and irrelevance. It was intransigence or death.

And it worked.

Until this week, Senate Republicans under McConnell's leadership have filibustered almost all legislation, slow walked almost all appointments, and generally made governance as frustrating and painful as possible. To further the overall party goal of frustrating Democratic Party governance, many Republican Senators have voted to oppose bills they personally supported, filibustered bills that incorporated many of their ideas, and even worked to block legislation they had intially sponsored.

And it worked.

Even though they got most of their major initiatives passed, the Democrats looked weak, ineffectual, and perpetually exhausted right up until last week and that's a major reason why the Republicans did so well in the 2010 mid-term elections.

If the Democrats want to make the federal government functional once again, they'll have to eliminate the means by which Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate leadership have kept them tied up over the last two years.

That means getting rid of filibusters and holds.

Instead of fiddling around the margins of the filibuster privilege, the Democrats should go for a simple, clean set of fixes. Right now, one Senator can block legislation from coming up for debate by filing a "hold" on the legislation. The Senate Democrats should eliminate that privilege altogether.

Second, minority filibusters can peventing legislation from coming up for debate at all. The Senate Democrats should eliminate that privilege as well and create a rule saying that it is a leadership prerogative to bring bills up for debate.

Finally, current rules require an extraordinary majority of 60 to end debate on a bill. The Dems should change the rules so that a simple majority of 51 Senators is required to end debate.

The effect of these kinds of changes would be to further the common good and bi-partisanship by forcing the Republican minority to negotiate with the Democratic majority if they want to have an impact on legislation.

The main objection to these kinds of far-reaching changes in Senate rules is that the Republicans would use those changes to their advantage to eliminate social security, medicare, environmental mandates, the public school systems and other things they don't like about American society.

My reply: let them.

If the Republicans want to overturn American government as we know it and are able to win majorities in future elections, they should have a right to enact their ideas into policy.

Given the disastrous outcomes likely from Republican policies, they'll probably get the extinction they richly deserve as a result.

Theda Skocpol Hits Nail on the Head

Harvard sociology great Theda Skocpol on the efforts of Congressional Republicans to undercut the economic recovery as a way to better position themselves for 2010 election.

Another Gutless Dem Plays It Safe

Beau Biden decides not to run for his father's old Senate seat, leaving the field open for Republican Mike Castle.

Republicans already have a strong candidate in the race, Rep. Mike Castle, who has held the state's only House seat since 1992, and was governor for eight years before that. With a strong Republican in the race and currently no Democrat, this race has to be seen as a likely GOP takeover for now.

That's the same kind of gutlessness that kept Ben Chandler out of the Senate race in Kentucky. We need our blow-dried politicians to have the same courage as Republican blow-dries like Scott Brown.

Health Reform--Out of Harry Reid's Office

A Health Reform bill finally got out of Harry Reid's office today. I still think it will be passed with a public option--probably a public option with an opt out clause.

But it looks like conservative Dems are going to take out every last pound of flesh they can.

Conservatives think that health reform is a kind of Rubicon and that America will be a different kind of society if Congress passes a public option.

Maybe that's the case.

But, really, the Rubicon was crossed when Barack Obama was elected president. The question is whether Obama is going to maintain his position on the new side of the river.

Health Reform Has Crossed the Crossroads

There's so many stories coming out about health reform that the relentless spinning is making everybody's head spin. My own sense continues to be that the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are going to pass health reform legislation with a public option this year. I don't know whether Arlen Specter is right in claiming that there are 60 votes to bring a public option plan to a vote if the GOP throws up a filibuster. But I wouldn't be surprised if he was. I also don't know if it's going to be a straight public option, a public option with a mechanism allowing red states to opt out, or a public option with a trigger to go in effect if the health insurance companies continue to conduct their business in a predatory manner. Today's flavor is a public option with an opt out for the benefit of moderate and conservative Democrats who want to hide behind the idea of "choice." However, momentum can shift quickly and I think there's a slightly better chance that the final legislation will contain a straight public option.

My own preference is that the public option be adopted as national legislation. The weakness of the "opt out" is that the states likely to take it are states like Texas and South Carolina that have large minority populations and even larger white populations determined to screw minorities as much as possible. Allowing these states to opt out of the pulbic option is monumentally unfair to large group of working poor among the Hispanic and African-American population. It's unfair to the working white people who can't afford health insurance as well. The politics of a nullification state like South Carolina might militate against accepting a public option, but that doesn't mean that the higher numbers of working poor people in these states should not get the same benefits as people in a wealthy state like Connecticut or Illinois.

But if the public option with opt out is adopted, I believe that it would be politically beneficial to the Democrats. The reason for this is that the acceptance or rejection of the public option would be a powerful wedge dividing the Republicans. This could be seen with the fate of the stimulus package in South Carolina and Alaska. Teaparty governors like Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin wanted to reject stimulus money but this led to howls of outrage among orthodox Republicans in state legislators who wanted the money and were willing to fight their governors over the issue. Health reform is even more unpopular with the teaparty folks and the conflicts among Republicans over opting out would be even nastier. As the fight over Dede Scozzafava in New York's 23rd District shows, the teaparty faction is determined to eliminate moderates from the Republican Party. If a public option "opt out" passes, the teaparty folks are going to start going after "sissy conservatives" as well.

Teaparty activism is part of the dynamic among the Democrats as well. That sound everyone hears in Washington these days is Democratic backbones snapping into place. No one would know this from reading the "progressive media" which over-dramatizes every twist and turn from potential "turncoats" like Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu. But the Democratic and membership in the Senate and House have responded to the Teaparty Movement by tuning out the right-wing. Ben Nelson desperately wants to vote for something Olympia Snowe can support, but Snowe and Susan Collins have become practically the only Republicans on the Democratic radar. When Republican senators like Charles Grassley started going along with the "death panel" lie, the Democrats began to ignore them. People like Nelson and Kent Conrad still have loyalties to the insurance companies, but the Republicans haven't given them anything credible to consider and Democrats in general have closed ranks with the intent of negotiating something among themselves.

The teaparty movement has bee successful in generating grass-roots conservative opposition to health reform, but disgust over tea-party rhetoric among the Democrats has solidified support for large-scale health reform and guaranteed that the public option is going to be passed in some form. America owes the teabaggers a big thank you. As a result of revulsion over the teaparty movement, health reform has "crossed the crossroads" and is on its way to approval.

Steeling the Jelly-Spines of Moderate Democrats

Marc Ambinder writes for his Atlantic blog that President Obama survived the teabagging offensive by offering the "public option" as a bargaining chip to conservative Democrats.

Initially, given the GOP success . . . in framing the option as essential to health care, its putative failure and demagoguery seemed to be a significant blow to the White House. But -- and here is the key point -- it became something for the Blue Dogs to "oppose" and thus satisfy their constituents' concerns about reform in general. Sen. Max Baucus's health care plan has been derided by many liberal activists because it seems to be a compromise upon a compromise.

This is about right. Republican senators Charles Grassley of Iowa and Mike Enzi of Wyoming might be the only two people in the country who changed their minds as a result of the townhall eruptions. Obama stuck to his guns and progressives stuck to their guns. So did moderate Democrats from conservative districts in the South. If anything, teabagger rudeness and intimidation might have put some steel into the jelly-spines of moderates.

Ambinder didn't see a single Democrat in Congress changing their mind as a result of aggressive conservative tactics. I didn't see any either.

Actually, the political process has now been simplified. There are only four real players right now: Obama administration, the Democratic leadership, Democratic moderates like Max Baucus, and Maine Republican Olympia Snowe. The Democratic players will try to work out a compromise and they'll try to keep Snowe on board. But Snowe representing herself, her policy interests, and her Maine constituents. The Republican Party has rejected health reform so completely that they're not going to be a party to any negotiations.

And the legislation is going to pass one way or another. If the Democratic leadership can't get 60 votes, they'll pass a bill on budget reconciliation with 50 votes.

It's really that simple at this point.

Concerning the public option. Ambinder thinks it's dead, but I'm not so sure. Today it looks like the wind is blowing toward some sort of "trigger." But what happens when conservatives demagogue the "trigger" for the public option. Obama and the Democratic leadership might decide that they won't lose any more votes by keeping the public option than they would by compromising it away.

What's going to be the political fall-out of the health reform debate. In my thinking, health reform is one more item that's killing the Republican Party. Obama's popularity might be down but the Republicans have sunk much further. Republican strategists think they have an opportunity for big gains in 2010, but my impression is that the Republicans still don't have the candidates, message, or money needed to win hard-fought campaigns.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans didn't lose a couple more Senate seats while only scoring minor gains by defeating a few Blue Dogs in the House.

In other words, Republicans are still on the path to being displaced as a major political party.

Brian Williams Still Sucking Up to Power

It's reassuring to know that guys like NBC's Brian Williams know how to suck up to power even though President Obama is a Democrat.

Williams talks of "walking through the West Wing and Secretary [Hillary] Clinton drops by to see the president. To be in the hallway when the president walks by with a handful of M&Ms, popping them in his mouth as he goes to visit his chief of staff — it was unbelievable."

Talk about nauseating. All the same, I was pleasantly nauseated because Williams was sucking up to Obama rather than Bush.

Sarah Palin: Agent of Liberalism?

According to campaign manager David Plouffe, Sarah Palin was a dream come true for the Obama campaign.

Here is Plouffe on Gov. Sarah Palin: "Vice presidential picks rarely but sometimes make an electoral difference. Our view was it probably wasn't going to matter that much . . . . This was the one exception to that. It did have an effect."

"She was our best fundraiser and organizer in the fall."

Given that Sarah Palin was as an inspiration for the Democrats, it may turn out that she was a double-agent all along. In other words, Democratic leaders might have surrepticiously promoted Sarah Palin for the vice-presidential nomination and steered her toward the worst sort of "red-meat" conservatism as a way to motivate Democratic voters.

If they did, it was brilliant. Sarah Palin was Obama's biggest asset over the final six weeks of the campaign.

The Expansion of Health Insurance Begins

Good news on health policy--

The Democratic-controlled Congress moved a step closer to handing President Barack Obama an early health care victory Thursday as the Senate passed a bill extending government-sponsored health insurance coverage to about 4 million uninsured children.

The Republicans worry "that Democrats are using SCHIP to increase the government's role in providing health care."

And they are right.

Of course, expanding the government's role in health care is both a good thing and long overdue.