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Chris, don’t let the door hit you on the way out

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Chris Dodd appears determined to prove his critics right: he has been in Washington way too long. As his final act as a Senator, he has chosen to lead the charge among Democrats to assure the survival of the filibuster and the continued dominance of the Republican party, no matter who is in the minority. Yesterday he met with freshman Senators who are a bit fed up with this little bit of Senatorial privilege and tried to set them straight:

“I made a case last night to about ten freshman senators, you know, you want to turn this into a unicameral body? What’s the point of having a Senate? If the vote margins are the same as in the House, you might as well close the doors,” Dodd told reporters in the Capitol.

The Senate has served as a counterpoise to the House since the beginning of the Republic. It was designed that way by the Founders, who clearly envisioned that the “vote margins [would be] the same as in the House”. Longer terms, larger constituencies and a smaller body all operate to make the Senate a far different institution than the House.

For all but a sliver of the time since the Republic’s founding, the Senate has operated on the majority vote principal, the filibuster being more or less relegated to a tool used by Southerners to deprive blacks of their constitutional rights, and to preserve sacred American traditions like lynching. Somehow the Republic survived (though not some of the black victims of this sacred institution), and the Senate thrived, despite the fact that the norm was that only a majority was required to pass a bill and filibusters were rare. Yes, even the bigots of the past, who at least were up-front about their bigotry, were more restrained than the Republicans of today.

There are 49 bicameral state legislatures in this country, and the states have managed to survive, despite the fact that “the vote margins are the same” in both houses, although we must caveat by pointing out that California has effectively destroyed itself by enacting a super majority requirement to pass budgets, effectively holding itself hostage to a determined minority, driving itself into bankruptcy in the process.

There are, in addition,many ways in which you can assure the minority plenty of time to debate while still requiring that at some point, it end. But Chris, apparently, thinks it’s important that McConnell and his ilk be able to stop anything, the unemployed, uninsured, and uneducated be damned.

This type of stuff from Chris would not be so infuriating if there were examples of any substantial good the filibuster has ever done when the Democrats were in the minority. The Republicans demand up or down votes and the Democrats cave. In any event, the filibuster is an inherently anti-progressive institution, and at the present it is positively reactionary. It’s purpose is to stop things from getting done, and its continued existence guarantees that this country will move ever rightward, no matter what the people want.

I hate to say it, but so far as Dodd is concerned, good riddance.

UPDATE: A commenter suggests that a rule change now could help the Republicans if they win in November. That’s true, except for procedural reasons, the Democrats can’t change the rules until the new session. If they are in the minority, they can’t do it, nor can they stop the Republicans from changing them, as, at that point, rule changes can not be filibustered. The Republicans are unlikely to change them, should they take over, because with a Democrat in office they will not be particularly interested in actually trying to pass anything. They will spend two years investigating Obama, everyone will get disgusted with them, and he’ll be re-elected in 2012 and the Senate will go back to the Democrats. But that’s not going to happen because the Republicans are not going to take over. Were the present situation reversed, you can bet the Republicans would be threatening to abolish the filibuster right now, in order to make Democrats stop using it. We know that’s true, because it’s exactly what they tried to do when they were in the majority with a Republican president, and they intended to do it by breaking the rules. Of course, the Democrats cowered, they always do, so the Republicans did not have to follow through on their threat, so the (in this case, judicial) filibuster survived so they could use it against Obama’s appointees.


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What I tell you three (or three million) times is true

Monday, August 2, 2010

This morning’s New London Day has a puff piece about the three Republicans vying to get crushed by Joe Courtney in November. This sentence caught the eye of my vigilant spouse, and impressed me as well:

Along with fellow Republicans, they want to reverse Democratic policies like the health care reform bill, enacted by Obama and Democrats in Congress earlier this year, decrease federal spending and restore the Bush tax cuts to reduce the federal deficit…

Now I realize that we are living in an age where many journalists consider themselves mere stenographers, but isn’t this a bit much? There’s not a word in the article that questions the efficacy of balancing budgets by reducing revenue.

Perhaps Joe should tell the Day that he proposes increasing spending by a trillion dollars (roughly the cost of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy over the next 10 years) over the next 10 years in order to reduce the deficit. Would the Day swallow that whole without gagging, or would they point out that Joe was losing his mind? I should add here, parenthetically, that unlike the three Republicans, he does have a mind to lose.

The ironic thing is that, given present conditions, increased spending now would mean lower deficits over the long haul, depending, of course, on what you are spending the money on. Giving tax breaks to those least likely to spend the money is a proven deficit creator. Those seeking further proof are referred to the 1980s and the Bush years, respectively.

This all reminds me of these lines from Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark:

“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What i tell you three times is true.”

The Republicans have told us that tax cuts lower deficits about 3 million times, and apparently, at least for the Day, that makes it true.

By the way, I can’t supply a link to the Day’s article, because as I write, the Day’s website is down. You’ll have to trust me on the quote, and my assertion that the reporter, Matt Collette, expressed not a word of wonder at the arithmetically absurd position of all three candidates.

UPDATE: Here’s the link.


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Friday Night Music

Friday, July 30, 2010

I try not to repeat myself on this feature, which is getting harder and harder. I checked, and, surprisingly, I haven’t put up Jefferson Airplane/Starship before, at least not since I moved from .Mac to WordPress lo those many years ago.

A couple of decent clips of some of their best songs, White Rabbit:

And Somebody to Love:


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Irony free zone

Friday, July 30, 2010

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen are on the attack against Wikileaks, particularly its founder Julian Assange. While they are unable to point to any specific deleterious effect of the leaks (other than the exposure of the morass in which we find ourselves), they nonetheless are claiming that he has blood on his hands.

Just a couple of days ago, the Defense Department disagreed with its head guy:

The Pentagon is telling NBC’s Michael Isikoff that a special assessment team looking over the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war logs has found nothing that could damage national security.

What’s amazing is that these two can accuse someone else of having blood on their hands with respect to the war in Afghanistan, a war whose needless continuance they have overseen and defended, while many American soldiers, and of far less moment, but still worth pointing out, many Afghans have died needlessly. All the perfumes of Arabia can’t wash the blood from their hands, but without a hint of irony they accuse Assange. Perhaps they’ve taken a lesson from the bloody handed Lady MacBeth, with Assange playing the role of the hapless grooms:

I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal; For it must seem their guilt.


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Trickle down

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Colbert on extending the Bush Tax Cuts:


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This time I mean it

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

A hapless fund raiser from the DSCC just called me, and I lit into her about this (via Americablog):

“It won’t happen,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said she would “probably not” support an effort to lower the number of votes needed to cut off filibusters from 60 to 55 or lower.

Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) echoed Feinstein: “I think we should retain the same policies that we have instead of lowering it.

“I think it has been working,” he said.

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) said he recognizes his colleagues are frustrated over the failure to pass measures such as the Disclose Act, campaign legislation that fell three votes short of overcoming a Republican filibuster Tuesday.

“I think as torturous as this place can be, the cloture rule and the filibuster is important to protect the rights of the minority,” he said. “My inclination is no.”

Sen. Jon Tester, a freshman Democrat from Montana, disagrees with some of his classmates from more liberal states.

“I think the bigger problem is getting people to work together,” he said. “It’s been 60 for a long, long time. I think we need to look to ourselves more than changing the rules.”

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who is up for reelection in 2012, also said he would like the votes needed for cloture to remain the same.

“I’m not one who think it needs to be changed,” he said.

I’ve said it before that the only vote that will matter next year, if it ever takes place, is the vote to change the filibuster rules. Apparently the Democrats in the Senate put Senatorial privilege in our House of Lords above the public good. We will be condemned to live in a country that slides ever farther to the right (while we slowly get basted as the world warms) because a few Democrats can’t see their way clear to letting the majority rule, the way our sainted Founders intended. What’s truly galling is that the majority does rule when the Republicans are in charge; it’s only the Democrats that let the filibuster stand in their way.

The DSCC gets no money from me so long as a dime of it goes to any of the above, or their ilk. And if, or I should say when, they fail to reform the filibuster, then I will give up on them totally. There are probably only 40 Democrats in the country that think the filibuster is a good thing, and every one of them is in the Senate.

UPDATE: A commenter asks where Blumenthal is on this issue. I was at a meet and greet at which he was asked this question by someone who beat me to it. He said he wanted to see the issue addressed, though he didn’t say exactly what he favored. I might point out that it would be just like the Democrats, with a reduced majority, for settling on reducing the 60 vote requirement to some other number that everyone knows they can never reach.


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Jarjura slime machine

Monday, July 26, 2010

We received the deeply offensive anti-Lembo mailing, courtesy of the Jarjura campaign today. It is frightening to think that in a race in which neither candidate is well known, and to which few voters pay much attention, this vile garbage could have a significant impact.

What’s deeply ironic is the fact that Jarjura (you have to look hard to see that he is responsible for the thing) attacks Lembo for having worked for someone who was anti-abortion, when he himself is exactly that.

A truly disgusting piece of trash which makes me wonder how this man and I can be a member of the same party.


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Echoes of the Pentagon Papers

Monday, July 26, 2010

Atrios suggests, in this tweet, that the ultimate reaction to the documents released by Wikileaks, about which Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the New York Times reported today, may be primarily about the propriety of the leak rather than the contents of the papers and what they say about our involvement in Afghanistan.

That may, in fact, seem to be the case in the short term, but long term these documents can only have a corrosive effect on this already justifiably unpopular war. The Obama administration will make a mistake, win or lose, if it attempts to either stop publication of the papers or prosecute the leakers, if it can find them. That’s the tack that Nixon took with the Pentagon Papers, which might have worked during WW II, but didn’t during the unpopular Vietnam War. They certainly tried to make it a fight about the leak and the publication. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which back then was a court of substance. It’s quite possible that today’s court would back even an effort to quash publication, though the fact that it would be Obama that was asking them to do it might be enough to stay their hand. They would certainly have no problems with criminal sanctions against the leakers, but convictions would be a Pyrrhic victory. The war is asymmetric in the extreme. We are spending ourselves into bankruptcy in pursuit of a victory we can’t even define. The American people can sense that. Obama will find himself on the wrong side of history if he continues to pursue this war. Truly time to declare victory and get out.

I might add that the only thing that might diminish the inevitable repercussions against Obama, for what is now truly his war, is the fact that for many Americans the war is an afterthought, with an acceptable level of casualties, particularly considering that the dying are not the sons and daughters of the middle class, but increasingly the cast-offs of our society, who “volunteer” for service because they have no hope of finding work anywhere else. This is not universally so, but it is increasingly the case.

But even the fact that the war is no direct threat to the average American young person, like it so directly was during Vietnam, will be enough to save it and its defenders from its eventual fate. Besides costing those expendable lives it is costing a lot of money; it is dragging on and it is becoming increasingly clear that it will drag forever unless we manage to disengage ourselves. Americans are rightfully tired of being mired down in un-winnable wars. I am 60 years old, and this country has been bogged down in unwinnable wars for half my life and counting. Obama has promised to disengage, but he’s promised a lot of things. He’ll be doing himself a favor if he keeps this promise, but those are the type of promises he seems to have the hardest time fulfilling.


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A prediction for the fall

Sunday, July 25, 2010

From Political Wire:

President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress “are setting the stage for a high-stakes battle over taxes in the final weeks before the November congressional elections, betting that their plan to eliminate tax breaks for the wealthy will resonate with voters who have lost houses and jobs to what many see as an era of Wall Street greed,” the Washington Post reports.

“Raising taxes is usually a perilous move. But Democrats, facing the potential loss of their majorities on Capitol Hill, believe that the strategy will both force Republicans to defend tax breaks for a tiny, wealthy minority and expose GOP hypocrisy on budget deficits.”

Here is what will happen. The Blue Dog Democrats, among whom are many recruited by Rahm Emanuel, will undermine the narrative in the House, and join a unanimous Republican caucus to extend the tax breaks, assuming Nancy Pelosi doesn’t pull an embarrassing about face and pull it from the floor. But she won’t do that, because the Republicans, without a hint of embarrassment, aided and abetted by the media that has never had a problem with Republican obstruction, will demand an up or down vote, because that’s the democratic way.

After the tax cut passes the House, it must pass the Senate, where, surely, one would think, even if it gets to the floor, there would at least be 41 Democrats with spine enough to filibuster it. But no, the Republicans, without a hint of embarrassment, aided and abetted by the media that has never had a problem with Republican obstruction, will demand an up or down vote, because that’s the democratic way.

The Democrats will cave, and the Republicans will get their tax break for the rich. Perhaps Obama will veto it, but don’t bet on it. Remember, this is the Bush tax cut for the rich, which will expire if Congress does nothing, which is precisely what Congress will not do. The Democrats will allow themselves to be manipulated into making this massive transfer from the middle class to the rich permanent.

All this, of course, will further dampen Democratic turnout (see, 2002, spineless Democrats voting to give Bush his war and consequent low Democratic turnout) turning the election into a blowout, and ushering in perhaps the most radical and irresponsible Congress in the history of the Republic.

The Democrats will learn the lesson that they are always learning: that they are not far enough to the right.

I hope and pray that I’m wrong. Only the Democratic Party could pull this off, but there’s no reason to think that they won’t.


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A mystery explained

Saturday, July 24, 2010

I love the Washington Monthly’s blog (Political Animal). I consider it required reading, and I think Steven Benen does some great reporting. Still, I marvel that a guy who has been following politics so long seems constantly mystified at the fact that neither the press nor politicians behave rationally; that politicians so often say things that are demonstrably untrue and the press so often covers stories with a mixture of ignorance and bias. Here’s the latest example:

I continue to marvel at this scandal. Here we have John Ensign, a “family values” conservative Republican, who had an extra-marital sexual relationship with his friend’s wife, while condemning others’ moral failings. Ensign’s parents offered to pay hush-money. He ignored ethics laws and tried to use his office to arrange lobbying jobs for his mistress’ husband. The likelihood of Ensign being indicted seems fairly high.

And yet, there’s no media frenzy. No reporters staked out in front of Ensign’s home. No op-eds speculating about the need for Ensign to resign in disgrace. Instead, the media’s fascinated with Charlie Rangel.

Rangel is facing a probe from the House ethics committee, while Ensign is under scrutiny from the FBI.

Why would Rangel “tarnish his whole party” in an election year, while Ensign’s sex-ethics-corruption scandal be deemed irrelevant to the Republican Party?

The answer to Benen’s question is really quite simple. Rangel is black. Rangel is a Democrat. Or, we might express it as follows: there is an unwritten, but rigidly observed rule: It’s (especially hypocrisy) okay if you’re a Republican.


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