SmartRemarks

As the health care reform debate enters what appears to be the home stretch (albeit not for the first time), what Washington is offering us (the citizenry) boils down to a choice between bad and worse. The legislation now under consideration, both the Senate bill and the slight variation on same presented as “Obama’s bill,” is the end result of a process that has methodically stripped away almost everything that made this reform effort worth undertaking in the first place. They’ve thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater.

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Tags: Alan Grayson, Bart Stupak, Blue Dogs, Congress, Democrats, Dick Durbin, health care, insurance, Max Baucus, Obama, Pelosi, progressives, Rahm Emanuel, Reid, Republicans, Senate

So, where did I leave off?

…That’s right, there was a speech Wednesday night. A pretty significant one, in fact, for reasons I described at some length.

What of it, then?

I can’t deny that it was a very, very good speech. Rhetorically powerful. And yet, what it says about the direction of health care policy, and thus about Obama and the Democratic Party itself… still remains substantially up in the air.

(Even as every pundit who can string three words together attempts to read the tea leaves and tell us otherwise.)

I’ll try to avoid that kind of divination. But opinions? Analysis? I have those.

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Tags: Blue Dogs, Congress, Democrats, government, health care, insurance, Obama, progressives, Rahm Emanuel, Reid, Republicans, Senate

Finally. After six months of tedious delay, Al Franken will be sworn in to the U.S. Senate seat once held by Paul Wellstone. The fact that he beat incumbent Norm Coleman (albeit by the slenderest of margins, roughly 0.01%) was confirmed unanimously by the Minnesota Supreme Court, Coleman finally conceded the inevitable, and Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed the election certificate. Hooray!

Thus the Senate Democratic Caucus will finally have the magic 60-vote margin necessary to defeat obstructionist filibuster attempts by the GOP minority. It’s the highest number of Democratic seats since 1981.

Which leaves one obvious question…

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Tags: Al Franken, Reid, Senate

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

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Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but sometimes an item is worth sharing whether I have much to add or not. So…

Quoted for truth:

From Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com

User B.R. writes in:

“…everyone (media and blogs alike) are treating the filibuster as a far more commonplace occurrence than it should be. Part of the reason for this is that the GOP has learned to use the procedural filibuster (as allowed for them by Senate Rule 22 from 1975) for everything, and Reid gives in and calls for cloture…”

B.R. raises several interesting points, but they ultimately point back to one thing: Harry Reid has been exceptionally ineffective as the Democrats’ majority leader.

The number of cloture votes skyrocketed in the 110th Congress following the Democratic takeover of the Senate and Reid’s assumption of the majority leader position. The Senate voted on 112 cloture motions in the 110th, exactly double the number (56) of cloture votes in the 109th Congress, and two-and-a-half times as many as the average number of cloture votes (44) over the previous nine Congresses.

…a majority of these cloture motions were in fact triggered by Republican floor action, and the vast majority of them were also procedural filibusters — the actual filibuster, in which Mitch McConnell wets his pants while reading from the phone book for 19 hours, is now exceedingly rare.

There are basically two mechanisms that a majority leader can employ to limit filibusters: firstly, he can threaten to block votes on certain of the opposition party’s legislation (or alternatively, present carrots to them for allowing a vote to proceed), and secondly, he can publicly shame them. Reid managed to do neither, and the Senate Republicans did fairly well for themselves considering that they were in a minority and were burdened by a President with negative political capital.

So long as Obama’s approval ratings remain strong, it’s somewhat likely that he will exact enough public pressure on moderate Republicans like Susan Collins to force a majority vote on broadly popular issues like health care, whether or not Collins ultimately votes ‘aye’ on the underlying measure. In those cases, the 60 vote threshold may be overrated. On other issues like the Employee Free Choice Act on which Democrats have been less effective at framing the public debate, the 60-vote threshold may be more tangible.

The bottom line, however, is that the Republicans are filibustering more and more often because they can get away with it. If Reid can’t get them to pay a greater public price, then the Democrats ought to find somebody else who can.

Damn straight. Take it to heart, folks. This is why people say leadership matters.

Tags: filibusters, Obama, Reid, Republicans, Senate

As the Obama administration and the new Congress set about choosing priorities and strategies for policymaking, an important consideration will be the political attitudes of the electorate. That, however, is often as much a matter of perception as reality.

It therefore comes as no surprise that even before Election Day (and with increased fervency once the results were in), status-quo-oriented opinion makers were spreading the meme that “America is a center-right country”:

Jon Meacham in Newsweek:
“America remains a center-right nation… [Obama] will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril.”

Joe Scarborough on MSNBC:
“This country is more conservative than it was when we took over in 1994 after two years of calamitous Democratic rule. It is a center-right country.”

Karl Rove in the WSJ:
“It is a tribute to his skills that Mr. Obama, the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, won in a country that remains center-right.”

John Boehner in the WaPo:
“America is still a center-right country. This election was neither a referendum in favor of the left’s approach to key issues nor a mandate for big government. Obama campaigned by masking liberal policies with moderate rhetoric to make his agenda more palatable to voters.”

Rich Lowry at NRO:
Republicans are consoling themselves by telling anyone who will listen that we still live in a ‘center-right country.’ They’re right.”

And there are countless others. As David Sirota has documented, media usage of the term spiked dramatically right after the election, and is still going strong.

The problem here is, it’s just not true.

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Tags: Congress, conservatism, history, media, Obama, Pelosi, polling, Reid, Republicans

Sorry about the last few days without new posts. Been preoccupied. Stuff happens. Anyway…

With a lame-duck Congress in session (and busily accomplishing little other than upsetting Wall Street at the moment), it’s an opportune time to look ahead to the new 111th Congress we’ll have as of January 6th.

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Tags: Congress, House of Representatives, Pelosi, Reid, Senate, Waxman