That's what it would be to draft a new bill to woo Republicans. Krugman:
So, House Democrats have a choice: do they pass the Senate bill, or do they go back to the drawing board and spend several months cobbling together a plan that’s worse in almost every dimension, generating thousands of stories about hapless Democrats — and almost surely find that Senate Republicans block the new plan, too.
The GOP is not interested in working with Democrats, only with subverting them. They've already said their strategy is obstruction, they've being using that strategy for 3 years now, and they believe they're winning with it. Why would they suddenly vote to fix healthcare now?
Nevertheless, Republican senators argued that the public option would bankrupt the country and lead to a single-payer system. "Government is not a competitor. Government is a predator," said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa).
To the GOP, the worst thing that could happen is that something gets fixed while the Democrats are in charge.
1. The Republicans had $900 million for pandemic flu preparedness stripped from the Stimulus Bill, arguing specifically that it had no connection to the economy. The stock market this week has already tanked because of fears associated with swine flu. Nevermind how much better prepared we'd be had that money been allocated.
In their defense, as RNC chairman Michael Steele so persuasively puts it, had they known a pandemic flu was on the horizon, they might have voted for pandemic flu preparedness:
2. Flu vaccination and medical matters are handled by the Dept. of Health and Human Services. Now would be a great time for an HHS Secretary to take point on the swine flu outbreak, right? Nope, sorry. Not that the Administration is dragging its feet: President Obama nominated Kathleen Sebelius weeks ago. She's still not on the job, though, because the Republicans have been blocking her confirmation.
1. Experience is a harsh teacher. For the last several election cycles, Republicans have been a lot dumber about primaries than Democrats, but they've never paid for it like this. When Democrats primary their incumbents, they typically have done it in districts where the incumbent is either a) corrupt and universally unliked, or b) significantly more conservative/pro-Bush than the district as a whole. You want your primary contender to have the best possible chance of winning without giving the other party an opening. This is why, for instance, the Democrats never mount serious liberal primary challenges to people like Nebraska's Ben Nelson, a very conservative Democrat in a very conservative state. You take what you can get.
In the case of Pennsylvania, however, for the second time the Republicans have floated a hardline challenger against a moderate in a moderate state. The first time Specter barely survived; this time, with a GOP electorate freshly (and heavily) pared of its moderates, Specter was dead in the water, down some 20 points in recent polls to Pat Toomey. What was their long strategy? Do they really expect Toomey to win a statewide election in a state that endured several months of thorough soaking by the McCain campaign and still voted for Obama by 10 points, a state previously won by Kerry, Gore and Clinton? Need I remind you how well the last hard right Republican performed in a senate election in Pennsylvania?
This was pure electoral strategy for Specter. He was not going to survive his primary, and Pennsylvania has a "sore loser" law that bars defeated primary contenders from running in the general as independents a la Joe Lieberman. He could have gone Independent before the primary, but would have faced significant structural disadvantages endemic to running independent campaigns. Defecting was probably his only viable strategy. It's just more proof that Specter is the most typical of politicians, utterly lacking in principles or convictions, with one very big exception: he's avidly pro-reelection.
2. This was a huge failure for one person in particular: RNC chairman Michael Steele, who thought the answer to catastrophic electoral losses is to bring the hammer down on the few remaining moderates. The last three Republican senate moderates got spooked a couple of months ago when Steele went all "yer with us 'er agin' us" on them, implying that he would seek to primary senators who voted for the stimulus. He even threatened to withhold RNC funds from them, a particularly nasty threat since the RNC is the only fundraising vehicle they have that can keep pace with the Democrats now. This signals a dramatic departure from standard party practice, and it did not go over well.
Well, Michael, what did you expect them to do?
Steele is a year and a half away from his first election as RNC chair, and he's already lost a Senate seat and a House seat, and has all but assuredly handed the Democrats their first filibuster-proof majority since the Carter Administration, just in time for the new administration to pass a sweeping agenda.
3. Here's another fun little clusterf**k for the GOP: they can't redistribute Specter's committee seats until the full Senate, including the Democrats passes a new organizing resolution. Until then, the Democrats essentially get a free seat. One of those seats is Arlen's favorite: the Judiciary Committee, which reviews Obama's judiciary nominees. It's now 12-7 in favor of the Democrats until the new resolution. Another of his seats is in Appropriations. Democrats can stall on this as long as they want, while untold important matters pass through those committees, and even better, some people are now pressuring the Democrats to refuse any resolution unless and until the Republicans drop their court battle against seating Al Franken.
5. Specter's jump appears to have profoundly affected Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican who's probably the most liberal Republican in the Senate, and actually quite close ideologically to the Blue Dog Democrats. She isn't under any electoral threat (she's not up until 2012), but she's clearly voicing some serious discontent with the GOP right now. After Judd Gregg retires next year, she and fellow Mainer Collins will likely be the only Republican senators between Quebec and North Carolina. You've gotta think she's wondering right about now what exactly she has in common with all these southern-fried hateful bigots.
I didn't watch the GOP's rollout of their "budget," but from how it sounds, I'm imagining John Boehner and Mitch McConnell hopping out of a clown car on the way to the podium. From Ezra Klein:
Bush, famously, described his first budget by saying, "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." Indeed it was, and did. This isn't. There are no numbers. Let me repeat that: The Republican budget proposal does not say how much money they would raise, or spend. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a "budget" as "an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time." This is not a budget. It talks about balancing the budget but doesn't explain how. It advocates tax cuts but doesn't estimate their costs. It promises to cut programs but doesn't name them. The threat going around the Capitol is that some impish Democratic chairman will ask the CBO to try and score the Republican proposal. ... The Republican proposal, as you might expect, doesn't actually have a health care plan. But it does have this: "Republicans will be on the side of quality versus mediocrity, affordability versus unsustainable debt, and freedom of care versus bureaucrats in control. And we will be on the side of patients, doctors, and the American people." They are also in favor of good things rather than bad things, moving forward rather than going backwards, the hobbits rather than the orcs, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
I have to keep beating this drum until they do something, anything to prove me wrong: the Republicans just are not serious about governing. An honest, sober, diligent personality could really take the administration to task on a number of issues (the knee-jerk dismissal of nationalizing banks and reluctance to overturn Bush era policies on secrecy are two that come to mind), but these Republicans just don't have anything productive to contribute.
Conservatives target "tattoo removal" budget item for scorn. Turns out it's actually a program from Providence Holy Cross Hospital in the San Fernando Valley for reintegrating ex gang members into society. The money is used to remove gang-themed ink on their faces, necks, and hands so they can get a job. Says a probation officer in the local police dept.'s gang unit:
“It can get the kids jobs — if you have gang tattoos, you can’t get a job,” Gold said. “This program is one of the best life-saving and life-changing programs out here. I am about as right wing a conservative as you would ever find.”
What a bankrupt party. Here we are facing some of the worst crises in a generation, and the Republicans are picking out words in the bills to snicker at like teenagers in the back of the classroom. What a useless, spent, intellectually and morally bankrupt party.
The byproduct of the cloture rule changes in 1917 and 1974 is you need to invoke cloture to proceed to a bill. Senators don't have to speak to vote against cloture. If you can't get 60, you can't move it to the floor. On the motion to proceed, if a Republican chose to get up they can speak about any topic they want, or they can sit down and begin an endless series of quorum calls. Or they can begin motions to proceed on their own set of bills.
Basically there is no way to force a Senator to speak or vote on any particular bill and if you can't get 60 you can't proceed to final passage.
No. This did not become a staple of the legislative process until 2006, when the Republicans adopted a policy of obstructionism. In abnormally combative years before the Democratic takeover, there would 50 cloture votes over the life of the congress; in the 2006-7 congress, there were well over 100, which ground the Senate to a near halt.
And now, with the largest majority any party has seen in decades, the Senate is still stopped dead in its tracks.
This cannot continue. If the Majority Leader does nothing, it will become normal for the Senate to require 60 votes to pass anything, and will permanently write gridlock into the rules of the government. It will become normal for our increasingly ideologically homogeneous parties to derail each other's entire agendas with this one rule change unless they achieve a senatorial supermajority, which we haven't seen since the Carter Administration (and the Republicans haven't seen in a hundred years).
First of all, I think people will notice, and the papers will cover it, if a Republican has brought the Senate to a standstill and is sitting alone in the chamber calling quorums all day and night. It's not like CNN is going to keep the cameras on an actual speechifying filibuster except at certain brief moments, so what difference does it make if they're speaking or not?
Second, this rule has got to be changed. Filibusters are supposed to entail risk for the acting party in the form of the citizenry seeing them hog the stage and stop the government rather than allow the Senate to vote on bill X. Without that, there is no disincentive for the minority party to filibuster everything that comes across their desks, and suddenly you have an absurd 3/5 majority requirement for virtually every vote, no matter how mundane, if it offers even the slightest benefit to any party. I'm not saying the filibuster should be abolished, but some equalizing factor, some disincentive, has to be reintroduced (like, gosh I dunno, making them speak!). This is insane.
