Mario Piperni dot Com

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.This piece by Matt Yglesias needs to be read in its entirety.

Here’s some abject nonsense from Judd Gregg as he tries to foster the misperception that the de facto supermajority created by routine filibustering is part of the Framer’s vision of the constitution:

Why did they choose that bill called reconciliation to do this? Or why will they? Because under the Senate rules, anything that comes across the floor of the Senate requires 60 votes to pass. It’s called the filibuster. That’s the way the Senate was structured. The Senate was structured to be the place where bills which rushed through the House because they have a lot of rules that limit debate and allow people to pass bills quickly, but they don’t have any rule in the House called the filibuster which allows people to slow things down.

The Founding Fathers realized when they structured this they wanted checks and balances. They didn’t want things rushed through. They saw the parliamentary system. They knew it didn’t work. So they set up the place, as George Washington described it, where you take the hot coffee out of the cup and you pour it into the saucer and you let it cool a little bit and you let people look at it and make sure it’s done correctly. That’s why we have the 60-vote situation over here in the Senate to require that things get full consideration.

It’s true that the Founding Fathers wanted checks and balances, but this is why we have bicameralism and presidential veto power. Those are the checks. The filibuster rule is not in the constitution. But since the Founding Fathers did specify supermajorities to override a Presidential veto and to ratify a treaty, presumably there would have written a supermajority rule into the ordinary legislative process if that’s what they’d wanted to do. I don’t think “the Founders wanted it this way” should carry a ton of weight in our arguments, but it’s very clear that the Founders didn’t intend the Senate to vote by supermajority; if they’d wanted that, they would have written the constitution that way.

Meanwhile, just to point out that Gregg is an idiot, where on earth has he gotten the idea that the Founding Fathers “saw the parliamentary system” and “knew it didn’t work?” There were no countries operating on a modern parliamentary system when the constitution was written. And why doesn’t it work? It seems to work in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Korea, etc.

Arguably what history has shown is that the “strong president” system used in the United States doesn’t work. It’s worked out okay for us (despite that Civil War business) so far, but the vast majority of enduring stable democracies go parliamentary or semi-presidential systems.

Pure presidential systems … tend to be associated with periodic collapse into dictatorship. Considerable disagreement exists, however, as to whether this is a causal relationship or not. Certainly I think it’s noteworthy that US occupation forces in postwar Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan left parliamentary systems behind and that we urged parliamentary systems on postwar Iraq and Afghanistan (though in Afghanistan Pashto elites ultimately forced a presidential system). In practice, US officials seem to know better than to indulge in the patriotic myth that our constitution is the greatest system of government ever devised.

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Eugene Robinson on Evan Bayh’s decision to not seek Senate reelection.

“Anyone who wonders why there is such anti-incumbent fervor in the land ought to have a chat with Evan Bayh. I didn’t agree with him on every issue, but on the dysfunction in Washington he’s absolutely right. This city is broken because too many of our leaders confuse politics with service. Americans know the difference.”

And then there is this from Steve Kornacki…

“Evan Bayh inherited all of his father’s drive for national office but none of his progressive backbone. From his father’s defeat, he seemed to draw a lesson: You can dream big dreams if you’re a Democrat from Indiana — you just can’t be proud to be a Democrat. And that has been the defining principle (to the extent there’s been one) in Evan Bayh’s quarter-century political career, which began with a successful 1986 campaign for secretary of state in Indiana and which now may be ending, with his stunning decision to exit the Senate after two terms.”

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“This has always been Bayh’s way – to position himself as every Republican’s favorite Democrat. It’s how he stepped out of his father’s shadow back in 1986. It’s how he won election as Indiana’s governor in 1988 (even as the Bush-Quayle ticket was carrying the state in a romp) and re-election in 1992.

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“…when George W. Bush launched his “war on terror” and turned his focus to Iraq, no Democrat cheered louder than Evan Bayh. And even when the tragic folly of that war and of the broader neoconservative agenda became apparent, he learned nothing. A confrontation with Iran? Sign Senator Bayh up.”

Another conserva-Dem bites the dust. Good riddance.

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Tough guy John McCain has begun his reelection campaign with all guns a blazin’.

“President Obama is leading an extreme, left wing crusade to bankrupt America. I stand in his way every day. If I get a bruise or two knocking some sense into heads in Washington, so be it. I’ll keep fighting for jobs and economic growth for Arizona as long as I’m in the Senate.”

The voice-over closes with…

John McCain is Arizona’s last line of defense.

Against what?  This is the jerkoff who chose Sarah Palin as his running mate not because he loved America but because he thought his only chance to the White House was by way of a physically attractive woman with supposedly solid conservative core values who just happened to have the intellect of a soggy cabbage roll.  Any man who would willingly place an inept, totally unqualified self-serving fraud like Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency deserves to have his ass kicked hard.

Hopefully we’ll all get the chance to see it happen this November.

Radio ads here.

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Senator Dodd…

“There’s nothing more pathetic, in my view, than a politician who announces they’re only leaving public life to spend more time with their family.”

Dana Milbank explains…

His 4-year-old daughter, in her mother’s arms, reached out to touch his shoulder during the brief speech, and his 8-year-old daughter stood on his other side as he admitted that “these young ladies are not the reason for my decision.”

Everybody knew the real reason: The old bull had turned bearish on his own prospects for reelection. And Dodd, to his credit, did not pretend otherwise. He allowed that he was “in the toughest political shape of my career,” sailing in “stormy political waters,” and “very aware of my present political standing.”

There were other reasons, too: his sister’s death, his prostate cancer, the loss of his longtime friend and drinking buddy Ted Kennedy. But, while saying that it would be “absurd” to make confident predictions about this year’s election, he didn’t try to challenge the view that his prospects for winning a sixth term hovered between dismal and hopeless.

Dodd’s departure leaves the seat open for Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and the GOP retooling it’s election strategy.  Digging up making up dirt on a new opponent always takes a little time.

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Senator Tom Harkin is planning on making the filibuster an issue in the new year by introducing legislation which would reform it.

You’re supposed to filibuster something that is a deep seated issue. But in September, we had an extension on unemployment insurance. We had a filibuster that lasted over three weeks. They held up everything. And in the end, the vote was 97 to one. Filibusters are no longer used to debate something, but to stop everything.

Harkin’s reform bill…

Well, I introduced that first in 1995, when we were in the minority. I’m going to reintroduce that again in January. And people are going to say I only worry about this because I’m in the majority. But I come with clean hands! I started when I was in the minority!

The idea is to give some time for extended debate but eventually allow a majority to work its will. I do believe there’s some reason to have extended debate. If a group of senators filibusters a bill, you want to take their worries seriously. Make sure you’re not missing something. My proposal will do that. It says that on the first vote, you need 60. Then you have to wait two days, and on the third day, you need 57 votes. And then you need to wait two days, and on the third day, it’s 54 votes. And then you’d wait another two days, and on the third day, it would be 51 votes.

Makes total sense to me.

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There is something wrong with this.

At 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon — nine hours before the 1 a.m. vote that would effectively clinch the legislation’s passage — Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) went to the Senate floor to propose a prayer. “What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight,” he said. “That’s what they ought to pray.”

It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Coburn was referring to the 92-year-old, wheelchair-bound Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) who has been in and out of hospitals and lay at home ailing. It would not be easy for Byrd to get out of bed in the wee hours with deep snow on the ground and ice on the roads — but without his vote, Democrats wouldn’t have the 60 they needed.

Actually there are a couple of things wrong with this.

A) When  an issue as important as health care reform hinges on a 92-year-old man showing up to vote at 1 AM with a pile of snow on the ground, there’s something seriously flawed with the system.

B) There should be no 92-year-old Senators.

The finale…

Byrd was wheeled in, dabbing his eyes and nose with tissues, his complexion pale. When his name was called, Byrd shot his right index finger into the air as he shouted “aye,” then pumped his left fist in defiance.

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With the Senate 60-40 vote last night to move the health care bill forward, it appears that the final vote is slated for Christmas Eve.  The Senate bill in its current version is a compromise position which was stripped of the public option, Medicare buy-in as well as abortion insurance coverage. It’s a bill which was hijacked by the likes of a Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson…a bill which Republicans are still attempting to block with ever procedural trick in the book.

Paul Krugman looks at what is quickly becoming an ungovernable situation.

Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward.

It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional.

After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.

Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?

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But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

The key to this whole thing is that with the 60 vote requirement in the Senate, every bill passed will be seriously flawed. When a single member of Congress can wield the power that a Lieberman did, then what more can one expect. The greater good of the nation is forfeited in favor of the self-serving wants of a single politician. Not good.

Krugman sums it up.

Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option — not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.

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The Nation argues that the filibuster is not what democracy is supposed to look like.

When Americans vote, by overwhelming majorities, to place control of the executive and legislative branches in the hands of a party that has promised fundamental change, they are supposed to get that change. They are not supposed to watch as a handful of self-interested and special-interested senators prevent progress by exploiting the arcane rules of the less representative of our two legislative chambers–rules requiring that not a majority but a supermajority be attained in order even to discuss necessary reforms, and that a similar supermajority be in place to thwart a filibuster.

Yet this is where America, a nation often inclined to tell other nations how to practice democracy, finds itself as the debate about healthcare reform reaches its critical stage. We have a president who is prepared to sign legislation to expand access to healthcare while establishing at least some controls against profiteering by insurers. We have a House of Representatives in which a majority has voted for imperfect but real reform. We have a Senate in which a majority is ready to vote for what could be even better reform. Unfortunately, that majority is sidelined as a few wavering senators game the system.

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The filibuster is not constitutionally mandated. It was established by rules that have been repeatedly altered over the years. Besides, as Thomas Geoghegan recently noted …, the proper reply to the history buffs is, “Yes, well, slavery and segregation are also part of our history, and that’s what the filibuster was used to defend. I’m all in favor of history and tradition, but I see no reason to go on cherishing either the filibuster or the Confederate flag.”

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No matter where the healthcare debate takes us, Reid and Senate Democrats should commit to getting rid of rules that stifle debate and prevent action, and they should eliminate the filibuster and implement majority rule. That, after all, is what democracy is supposed to look like.

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The more I watch the Senate screwing around with the health care issue, the more convinced I get that Senate Majority Leader (I use the term ‘leader’ lightly) Harry Reid needs to get the hell out of there. He is screwing this thing up big time.

Daily Kos…

Bill Frist never had 60 votes. Bill Frist never cared. Republicans ran the Senate as if they owned the place, even when enjoying razor-thin majorities.

Yet when Democrats took the chamber, the first thing Harry Reid did was complain that he couldn’t do anything because he didn’t have 60 votes.

Then voters delivered 59 votes. And Harry Reid whined that he still couldn’t do anything. In fact, nothing would ever get accomplished unless they had 60, and to do that, they had to bring turncoat Joe Lieberman back into the fold, even though he had spent the previous year making common cause with John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Reid is selling his soul in hope of getting bipartisan approval for a H/C bill…any bill. Why? He either believes in true health care reform or he doesn’t. Time has run out for trying to play nice with Republicans who have no interest in seeing health care reform materialize.  Reid’s bigger concern should be getting conservative Democrats on board and therein lies the problem. To do so takes leadership and conviction, two traits which Reid has convincingly demonstrated he lacks.

Harry Reid’s office came out with a statement which read in part,

Senator Reid is focused on crafting a health care bill that will overcome a Republican filibuster.

Kos…

Republican filibuster? Democrats have 60 votes. There is no Republican filibuster, just a Democratic one. The problem is Reid’s inability to keep his caucus together. His office can’t even be honest about Reid’s leadership failures. Fucking liars.

I’ll take a Chuck Schumer-run Senate with 57 Democrats (bye bye Reid, Lieberman, and Lincoln) than a Harry Reid-run one with 75 Democrats.

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Roland Burris and the Blagojevich Effect

Democrat Senator Roland Burris has made it clear he is unwilling to resign his senate seat.  Burris, who was appointed to the position by impeached former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, has been adamant in declaring his innocence despite reversing his statements on the contact he had with the former governor.

On January 5, Burris claimed he had not spoken to Blagojevich or his office regarding the Senate seat left vacant by Barack Obama.  This week he stated he did indeed speak with at least 5 people in Blagojevich’s office and had attempted to raise money for the then governor all the while expressing his interest in the senate seat.

I don’t see any way for Burris to escape the entrapment of his own words.   He will eventually step down but we’ll have to see how long he’s going to drag out this ridiculous melodrama.