the consequences of 60, or, this town ain't big enough for both Harry Reid and the filibuster

The current Senate Majority Leader has just been dealt more power than any since the Carter Administration, though in truth he has both more and less than appears. Like the Republicans, the Democrats are more ideologically sympatico than they've ever been, so Reid just doesn't have to worry about major splits in the ranks and significant rebellious factions (despite Evan Bayh's threats to form the elusive agenda-less senate faction. Scary!). Sure, a handful of senators here and there can and will play contrarian for the papers, but it will be nothing like the Dixiecrat factions of old.

And yet, the smart money is on Harry Reid losing most of his battles, failing to advance Obama's agenda very far, and ultimately being unceremoniously dumped as Majority Leader. The reason is that expectations are going to be very high now for Reid to pass legislation with sheer brute force. Even people who know better are going to act as if Reid should be able to ram the president's agenda down the throats of the puny Republican minority in the same way Pelosi has been able to steamroll the House GOP delegation time and again since '06. And frankly, they aren't entirely wrong. Historically a Senate supermajority has always meant that the party in power can pass legislation at will, barring no serious internal divisions.

The de-publicized, or silent, filibuster has changed all that, however. Now a party with even just 40 senators can obstruct with impunity, filibustering every single piece of legislation that comes down the pike. Because of this change in procedure, even a party as utterly (and repeatedly) rejected by the voting public as today's Republican remnant can demand major concessions from the Majority Leader even when he can keep his entire party in line, because he must attain 60 votes to break a filibuster, and yet several prominent Democrats are too infirm to attend sessions reliably, such as Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd.

What's funny about Reid's predicament is that, as is often the case with life's problems, it is a monster of Reid's own making. There are 2 different ways in the last 8 years in which Harry Reid could have prevented either the Republicans' abuse of the filibuster or the public's assumption that it isn't a big deal, and he backed down every time. The first one lies in Reid's tenure as Minority Leader, when he had the option of obstructing the Republicans and chose not to. Frist seemed to be able to pass anything he wanted (as long as it didn't have to do with Social Security) with 5-11 fewer senators than Reid now has. In fact, it appears that Reid's Democrats engaged in fewer filibusters even than previous Republican minorities. The second Republicans found themselves in the minority, however, they began filibustering at three times the previous year's rate, filibustering some 150 times in the last congress (the previous record was 58, also a Republican minority).

The other moment came when the rules for this session were enacted by Congress at the beginning of the year, and he neglected to revisit the filibuster rule even after suffering 150 filibusters in the 2007-8 session and even after Mitch McConnell openly admitted that the primary tactic of Senate Republicans would be obstruction via filibuster.

Thus it is expected that Reid should be able to do what Frist could do with 51 senators, though the truth is that he can't because, frankly, he isn't facing Harry Reid on the other side of the aisle.

It may already be too late for Reid, because it takes 67 votes to change the rules, and I don't think Franken will be enough to secure passage in a pinch, even with the sudden, convenient metamorphosis of Arlen Specter into a reliable progressive Democrat. If he does survive to 2011, though, has absolutely must reconcile himself with one simple, irrefutable fact: the decorum and camaraderie and willingness to be a minority partner in governance that existed in the Senates of the 1980's and before is long gone. The Republican party, Mitch McConnell included, has no interest in abiding by the old mores of the Senate because they believe that the stakes have become too high to worry about things like honor and precedent. Rules without teeth will not be followed, and an across-the-board 60-vote threshold is unacceptable in the United States Congress. Reid should take note of the hell states like California and Arizona are going through right now trying to deal with unworkable supermajority thresholds.

Joe Donnelly: too weak to make the hard choices

Speaking of unserious... From the South Bend Tribune:

Indiana U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, D-Granger, has broken ranks with fellow Democrats and voted with the state's four Republican House members against President Obama's $3.6 trillion budget plan.

The House passed the plan 233-196 Thursday. Donnelly was among 20 Democrats and 176 Republicans who voted against the proposal. All four Indiana Republicans were among those voting no.

Donnelly says he voted against it because of "the growing national debt which our children are being asked to bear."

Apparently Joe wants the government to stop spending during a major recession. Or does he? We'll never know, but no one will ask him how he expects to lift the country out of the gutter. No one will tell him that there are only two ways to lower the deficit (dramatically cutting spending or raising taxes) and ask him which of those he wants to do in the middle of a recession.

Which is it, Joe? You can't claim credit for stimulus money coming into the district and then vote against the budget because it increases the national debt.

Harry Reid: a leader of vision and courage

Good job, Senate Majority Leader, your courageous caving to even the weakest opposition gives the Democratic Party another shining moment in the limelight.

Seriously, though, in his defense, who could have guessed that the guy nominated by a corrupt governor trying to sell the Senate seat might have sought the seat improperly?

Weakest Senate Majority Leader ever

Harry Reid, owned again, this time by an impeached governor and a guy who isn't even a senator yet. Perhaps it's all part of Reid's ingenious "strength through weakness" strategy.

Dems will seat Burris

I swear to God, I was telling Sap just the other day that the smart money was on Burris in this fight, that Reid's ability to get steamrolled by strong opponents is matched only by his ability to get steamrolled by weak opponents. I've never seen a boxer so afraid of a fight. Furthermore, Blago is not yet facing any formal charges, and I'm not sure what argument Reid could use in a courtroom to justify not seating someone legally appointed by a sitting, and still technically innocent, governor. I even wrote a post about it yesterday, but deleted it thinking that perhaps McConnell would figure out a way to keep Burris out just to keep the spectacle going.

Reid really is the poster child for Democratic spinelessness.

is Hillary in trouble? maybe...

So you've probably heard by now that Hillary had a hell of a time in the debate the other day. She got caught faking a position on an admittedly complex immigration issue, and Dodd, Edwards, and Obama ripped her a new one (and are continuing to today). And worst of all, it actually got media coverage; Brian Williams made time to show it, as did Katie Couric, as well as our local news.

On the other hand, I'm always talking about made-up scandals and traditional media values that predispose them to harping on certain (unimportant) issues while glossing over or not even noticing other (actually important) ones. Is this all smoke, just more b.s. from the same Beltway crowd that spent 8 long years deriding and wagging their fingers at her husband because, as David Broder famously put it, "he came over here and trashed the place, and it's not his place?" Will this matter a wit in the primary?

That depends entirely upon whether voters decide it matters. I know, that sounds like a cop-out, but we've seen rhetorical stumbles derail presidential campaigns before. Anyone remember "Actually I voted for it before I voted against it..."? I'm tempted to conclude that the reason that line succeeded so mightily and stood out from all the rest of the chatter so much is because it was something 1. out of Kerry's own mouth that 2. got widespread media coverage when people were listening and 3. perhaps most importantly, fed an already existent, if inchoate, narrative about John Kerry (in this case, the "flip-flopper").

Comparing the two, notice that Hillary's gaffe is similar, but not perfect. It was words that she said herself, and it feeds an emerging narrative about Hillary that she has no core values, but has incredible ambition, and thus will "say anything to get elected." She was confronted with a case where the more popular position was not apparent, and she couldn't find a position. I think that she's vulnerable to such a narrative (as are, frankly, all Democrats simply because they are Democrats), and there is still time to fall.

In fact, I think Hillary is more vulnerable to this narrative because of her electoral strategy. The reason that Hillary is favored among both liberals and centrists, among big business dems and pro-regulation dems, among anti-war voters and defense contractors, is because she's opted to become a cypher. People ridicule Obama for being too vague on policy, but the fact is that Hillary has made it a point to talk big about how the Iraq War should be stopped, or how we need a new health care system, or we need to stop climate change, and then she releases a plan that wows with detail but leaves all the big doors open.

Will Hillary stop the Iraq War? Hillary wants to keep a residual force there; how big would that "residual force" be? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? She won't say, and that's the $64,000 question that decides whether she is pro-war or anti-war, isn't it? If 100,000 troops remain in Iraq past 2013, in what way has she "ended" the war?

And what about health care? She says she'll set up a government-run alternative health insurance for the poor, but how good will it be compared to private health insurance? That is the central question, because nationalized health care is capable of being far more efficient and negotiating lower prices, which would make it an attractive alternative even for those with private insurance. But if she's had it vetted by the insurance industry, which she says she has, how would they allow such a thing unless it was kept artificially shitty so that no one would actually opt for it unless they had no other choice?

Hillary talks a big talk, talks about change and reform and whatnot, but on every position she's left herself an out to avoid the reformist position if she so chooses, and that makes people able to see in her whatever they want to see. Anti-war democrats will tell you with a straight face that Clinton is the candidate to end the war, and no matter how many times you throw that residual force nonsense in their face, they continue to press the issue because they only see what they want to see. Meanwhile, several prominent hawks have said they support Hillary because she's the one least likely to end the war, and claim she's never said anything about ending the war. They see in her what they want to see because Hillary gives them both options.

That's why this moment in the debate is trouble: she tried to do the same thing here, to give people both options so that everyone thinks she took their own position, but she flubbed it and got caught. I think Edwards' attack was the most damaging ("I think I just heard Hillary give 2 different positions in 2 minutes") because it highlighted her actual strategy. That's exactly what she did.

Hillary's actually lucky that no other moments from the debate went viral, because not long at all before the immigrant driver's license snafu, she was asked to pledge that "Iran would not get nuclear weapons during her administration," and she resorted to dissembling so juvenile that the audience actually laughed at her answer:

It was a stupid move. She should've just pledged.

But I digress. "Will this actually damage her campaign?" is the issue. There's a big reason to believe it won't: the number 2 above--getting widespread media coverage when people are listening. Yeah, Brian and Timmy and Katie and John Stewart all covered it, but there's reason to believe that very few voters have really started paying attention to the race yet. How little attention, you may ask? Well, only 59% of Americans-- slightly over half-- can name even one single Republican running in the primary. And "most" are unable to even name any Democrats other than Hillary and/or Obama. Furthermore, it is still 2 months until the first primary, and 3 or 4 months until most of the country actually votes. Not to mention, the debate itself was on MSNBC, not exactly the most watched primetime spot.

If people did notice, however, I think this could get out of hand for Hillary pretty quickly. Suddenly li'l Timmy (not to mention actual voters!) would be focused on getting specifics out of her that slam the door on all those little outs, and as she's forced to take actual positions on everything, many will become less pleased with her, but any attempts to hedge, even the slightest bit, would further legitimize the narrative and undermine her credibility and perceived integrity.

Then, and only then, will we have ourselves a race.

It is the sense of the Senate

that American citizens, even when organized into massive grassroots groups, have no business criticizing the military leadership.