SmartRemarks

It’s been far longer than I intended since my last post. Sometimes time just runs away from you. So let me just toss off a few ideas that have crossed my mind in recent days, and get caught up…

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First off:  the wrangling in Washington over the new “economic stimulus package” has been interesting to watch. Obama has gone out of his way to be as “post-partisan” as promised, extending an olive branch to Republicans the likes of which Dems never saw under eight years of Bush, wining and dining them, inviting input… and in response they basically gave him the finger. (Although, anxious not to alienate a public who likes him, they tried to shift their ire toward the Democratic leadership.) And the usual suspects in the punditocracy backed them up.

Basically, the GOP’s goal right now seems to be to shrink the stimulus bill down to something so small and weak that it won’t be effective… and then to blame their opponents for its ineffectiveness. All while the country at large continues to suffer, of course.

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Sorry I haven’t posted for a few days. But the holiday interregnum is now well and truly over, and the ordinary part of winter has commenced. Kids are back in school, the full staff is back in the office, and as of today the new Congress has been sworn in.

(Of course, that last part took place absent the junior Senators from Minnesota—although Franken’s win in the long, long recount, finally certified yesterday, is heartening, Norm Coleman’s legal challenge will delay things further despite being almost certainly doomed to fail—or Illinois—one can’t help but feel a little bit sympathetic to Roland Burris, but rejecting him as a symbol of Blago’s hubris is the sensible thing to do, and Burris certainly knew what a minefield he was stepping into. From Delaware Joe Biden is actually still there, until his successor is formally appointed on January 20; and likewise New York and Colorado will need new appointees Very Soon Now too, when Hillary Clinton and Ken Salazar move on to the cabinet.)

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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.

Well, despite some optimistic tea-leaf reading earlier in the day about turnout, the voters of Georgia have returned Republican Saxby Chambliss to the Senate in today’s run-off election, defeating challenger Jim Martin by a wide margin.

Disappointing, but I guess even in a remarkable year, you really can’t win them all.

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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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Tomorrow night, we’re going to have a president-elect. That means, of course, that he will vacate his seat in the U.S. Senate. There’s been remarkably little mainstream media coverage of this—everyone’s attention has been focused on more immediate matters—but Obama has no heir apparent for that seat, and it’s an open question who’s going to replace him.

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