Month: August 2009

Oh, The Things We Now Know

by dday

So let’s take a quick break from calling Obama Hitler to have a look at his predecessor. Anything new coming out?

Doop-de-do… hey, look, turns out they hired mercenaries to carry out extra-judicial assassinations!

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.’s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It’s the perfect Bush-era blend of privatization and murder.

Also, I think we know how Blackwater mercenaries react in situations where they are given guns and a measure of freedom – that would be Nissour Square. I guess we should be happy the “Blackwater in Your Corner” campaign only reached the formative stages.

So, anything else? Hmm… here’s confirmation from Tom Ridge of something we knew all along!

Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

Obviously, this is Ridge’s book, and he gets to set the history. But I don’t think you could escape the sneaking suspicion that, every even-numbered year in the age of Bush, suddenly we were told about “chatter” from terrorists and definitive plans and the raising of the alert level. I used to call it the Federal Even-yeared Anti-Terror Response, or FEAR, Unit.

Can Ridge apologize now for saying in 2004 “We don’t do politics at the Department of Homeland Security”?

My, what a trip down memory lane this morning…

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We Need To Know

by digby

Citigroup Inc.’s $301 billion of federal asset guarantees, extended by the U.S. last year to help save the bank from collapse, will be audited to calculate losses and determine whether taxpayers got a fair deal. Neil Barofsky, inspector general of the U.S. Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, agreed in an Aug. 3 letter to audit the program after a request by U.S. Representative Alan Grayson. Barofsky will examine why the guarantees were given, how they were structured and whether the bank’s risk controls are adequate to prevent government losses. The Treasury, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve provided the guarantees last November, when a plunge in Citigroup’s stock below $5 sparked concern that a run on the bank might rock global markets and impede an economic recovery. New York-based Citigroup paid the government $7.3 billion in preferred stock in return for the guarantees. “What kind of toxic assets did the Federal Reserve guarantee, and what off-balance-sheet liabilities have been pinned on us?” Grayson, a Florida Democrat who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, wrote yesterday in an e- mailed response to questions on the audit. “How much money have the taxpayers already lost? We need to know.”

link

This is a big deal. Maybe this will be the thing that wakes the Democrats up to the desperate need for systemic financial reform. It won’t be easy, but it’s absolutely necessary for both political and substantial reasons it has to be done. (Sorry, but it’s true.)

Can you believe this?

Citigroup’s guarantees are among $23.7 trillion of total potential government support stemming from programs set up since 2007 to ease the financial crisis, according to a report last month by Barofsky’s office.

23.7 trillion? And we are having a full-on political meltdown over one trillion to cover all Americans with comprehensive health care? Really?

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Paths

by digby

Mike Lux, call your office. Somebody’s been listening:

The White House and Senate Democratic leaders, seeing little chance of bipartisan support for their health-care overhaul, are considering a strategy shift that would break the legislation into two parts and pass the most expensive provisions solely with Democratic votes.

And here are three good reasons why we should hold fast to a public option and why it is still the most likely to be in the final bill — however it gets there.

Negotiations are exhausting.

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Goalposts Inching Our Way

by digby

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Villagers assume that liberals would hang tough before, but it seems to be becoming something of an article of faith. On Hardball today, Matthews asked Todd and Fineman whether or not the President is going to get a bipartisan bill. matthews mentioned Mike Enzi as being someone who they could potentially work with. Fineman said it was impossible:

The problem is that they would then pass a bill in the Senate that will be way too conservative to be reconciled with whatever the House would go for. Whatever they would get in that fashion would just not sell in the House. And even if they got to the conference committee, it would be impossible.

Todd then said that he believed the president was no longer committed to a 60 vote strategy because he believed it was crazy that he had to get more than 55 or 5 to pass legislation. I don’t know if that’s true, but all three villagers nodded their heads sagely as if that was self-evident.

I don’t know if that’s really the state of play, or if any of this has meaning, but it’s significant that these three didn’t reflexively indicate that the Blue Dogs would win the day. Baby steps, folks, baby steps.

Update: On the other hand, Amato caught Chuckie spouting some real nonsense earlier on Andrea Mitchell. Two baby steps forward, one baby step back.

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In a statement today, Sen. Max Baucus said he was committed to a bipartisan bill. “The Finance Committee is on track to reach a bipartisan agreement on comprehensive health care reform that can pass the Senate,” he said. Republicans and Democrats, and their staffs, will hold a conference call tomorrow to discuss their progress.

A White House official conceded today that Obama would have to weather anger from liberals for a while.

More worrisome, officials said, was the growing belief that Obama’s brand is being tarnished. A new Pew poll shows that voters don’t think Obama is working with Republican leaders, and that a plurality blame Republican leaders. They believe that Obama’s favorability rating declines, largely from independents (and within that group, women), can be reversed if he reminds these voters of the bipartisan instincts in his bones.

[…]

House Democrats are on a different track, and it’s hard to see how it intersects with the White House’s. Leaders plan to redouble the sales pitch for a public plan, reasoning that if they can move public opinion a few degrees — largely by exciting liberals — they can help their colleagues respond to conservative pressure. Privately, White House aides have communicated to the House leadership that the onus on changing minds about the public plan is on Congress, not on the president.

In private, White House officials are selectively attending to threats that interest groups will work to defeat Democrats who oppose a “public option” in the House and Senate. RIchard Trumka, likely the next president of the AFL-CIO, threatened over the weekend to withhold union support from those politicians. The White House isn’t scared. An AFL-CIO official close to Trumka said that no one from the administration has been in touch with him to protest his words or endorse him.

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And Why Are We In Afghanistan?

by dday

The DFHs have convinced the nation about another misguided war.

A majority of Americans now see the war in Afghanistan as not worth fighting and just a quarter say more U.S. troops should be sent to the country, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Most have confidence in the ability of the United States to meet its primary goals — defeating the Taliban, facilitating effective economic development and molding an honest and effective Afghan government — but very few say Thursday’s elections there are likely to produce such a government.

When it comes to the baseline question, 42 percent of Americans say the U.S. is winning in Afghanistan; about as many, 36 percent, say it is losing the fight.

The new poll comes amid widespread speculation that the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, will request more troops for his stepped-up effort to root the Taliban from Afghan towns and villages. That is a position that gets the backing of 24 percent of those polled, while nearly twice as many, 45 percent, want to decrease the number of military forces there. (Most of the remainder say to keep the level about the same.) […]

Should President Obama embrace his general’s call for even more U.S. military forces, he risks alienating some of his staunchest supporters While 60 percent of all Americans approve of how Obama has handled the situation in Afghanistan, his ratings among liberals have slipped and majorities of liberals and Democrats alike now, for the first time, solidly oppose the war and are calling for a reduction in troops.

Overall, seven in 10 Democrats say the war has not been worth its costs, and fewer than one in five support an increase in troop levels. Nearly two-thirds of the most committed Democrats now feel “strongly” that the war was not worth fighting. Among moderate and conservative Democrats, a slim majority say the United States is losing in Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan issue has crept to the sidelines of the national debate, but thousands of families are still directly affected. People still die; 6 more Americans fell today, and August 2009 could be the deadliest month in Afghanistan of the entire war. The President calls it a “war of necessity” and “fundamental to the defense of our people” but cannot credibly articulate what that actually means. Juan Cole identifies three main points that Obama makes about the war, which seem fine in isolation, but not in practice:

1. “This strategy recognizes that al Qaeda and its allies had moved their base to the remote, tribal areas of Pakistan.”

2. “This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war—that we also need diplomacy and development and good governance.”

3. “And our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals—to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies.”

These three are praiseworthy points in themselves, but the question is how they work together. I couldn’t catch the significance of al-Qaeda’s move to northwest Pakistan for US military operations in Afghanistan itself. I agree that the key to success in Afghanistan is diplomacy, development and governance, but worry that the major emphasis being is put on sending more troops there and on highly kinetic military operations? And I’m not sure that the Taliban can be effectively disrupted by military means; why isn’t diplomacy being mentioned in this third part?

I’d expand on this critique. The goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda has almost no place in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, where many Al Qaeda leaders are now stationed. Gen. Petraeus admitted back in May that Al Qaeda is no longer operating in Afghanistan – we’re fighting a home-grown Taliban insurgency more nationalist than religious extremist in nature. You could make the argument that a Taliban able to take over the country could usher in Al Qaeda safe havens, but the Taliban insurgents are small in number, and have been unable to gain acceptance in anything other than the Pashtun areas. I agree with Steven Walt on this:

First, this argument tends to lump the various groups we are contending with together, and it suggests that all of them are equally committed to attacking the United States. In fact, most of the people we are fighting in Afghanistan aren’t dedicated jihadis seeking to overthrow Arab monarchies, establish a Muslim caliphate, or mount attacks on U.S. soil. Their agenda is focused on local affairs, such as what they regard as the political disempowerment of Pashtuns and illegitimate foreign interference in their country. Moreover, the Taliban itself is more of a loose coalition of different groups than a tightly unified and hierarchical organization, which is why some experts believe we ought to be doing more to divide the movement and “flip” the moderate elements to our side. Unfortunately, the “safe haven” argument wrongly suggests that the Taliban care as much about attacking America as bin Laden does.

Second, while it is true that Mullah Omar gave Osama bin Laden a sanctuary both before and after 9/11, it is by no means clear that they would give him free rein to attack the United States again. Protecting al Qaeda back in 2001 brought no end of trouble to Mullah Omar and his associates, and if they were lucky enough to regain power, it is hard to believe they would give us a reason to come back in force.

Third, it is hardly obvious that Afghan territory provides an ideal “safe haven” for mounting attacks on the United States. The 9/11 plot was organized out of Hamburg, not Kabul or Kandahar, but nobody is proposing that we send troops to Germany to make sure there aren’t “safe havens” operating there. In fact, if al Qaeda has to hide out somewhere, I’d rather they were in a remote, impoverished, land-locked and isolated area from which it is hard to do almost anything. The “bases” or “training camps” they could organize in Pakistan or Afghanistan might be useful for organizing a Mumbai-style attack, but they would not be particularly valuable if you were trying to do a replay of 9/11 (not many flight schools there), or if you were trying to build a weapon of mass destruction. And in a post-9/11 environment, it wouldn’t be easy for a group of al Qaeda operatives bent on a Mumbia-style operation get all the way to the United States. One cannot rule this sort of thing out, of course, but does that unlikely danger justify an open-ended commitment that is going to cost us more than $60 billion next year?

There’s more at the link. As Cole says, nobody disagrees that Al Qaeda may want to attack America, but we should wonder about their capability, and seek to thwart that. And that’s not a fight that can be had in Afghanistan anymore – they have no presence there.

Actually, we have morphed our goals in Afghanistan, from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency, without anyone really challenging it. The commanders on the ground have decided that making America safe from potential safe havens in Afghanistan means ensuring the legitimacy of the government at every level, as if we can replicate this in every unstable government in the world or even in Afghanistan, a tribal society that has not really known centralized leadership. Indeed, we’re only getting a minimal competence from the current government by allowing it to create laws that harm women and court Uzbek human-rights-abusing warlords to gain votes. If we really want to involve ourselves so deeply with a government like this, we should at least gain some semblance of a national security benefit, and yet none really exists, especially relative to the costs incurred in lives and treasure.

This, over everything else, is why public support is sapping. As long as this is a back-burner issue, that may not hurt the President. But I would argue it should. We have been in Afghanistan eight years, and at this point nobody can credibly explain our presence.

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“Third Sex”

by digby

We brought them freedom. Or at least some of them:

“They Want Us Exterminated”

Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq

This 67-page report documents a wide-reaching campaign of extrajudicial executions, kidnappings, and torture of gay men that began in early 2009. The killings began in the vast Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, a stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, and spread to many cities across Iraq. Mahdi Army spokesmen have promoted fears about the “third sex” and the “feminization” of Iraq men, and suggested that militia action was the remedy. Some people told Human Rights Watch that Iraqi security forces have colluded and joined in the killing.

This makes my heart hurt.

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The Politics Of Policy Destruction

by digby

Read it and weep:

One of the reasons why it has become tougher is due to misperceptions about the president’s plans for reform.

Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants; would lead to a government takeover of the health system; and would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions — all claims that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress.

Forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly.

45%of the American people actually believe the government will be euthanizing the elderly. What the hell is wrong with these people?

I wonder if the media has any sense that they might have gone wrong someplace here? This same phenomenon occurred during the post 9/11 period, but I think many of us attributed it to a unique set of circumstances. This proves otherwise. The right has once again proven that their orchestrated smear operations work on policies just as well as it works on politicians. The politics of personal destruction are now the politics of policy destruction.

Boehlert writes:

Recall August 2004, when the right-wing Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (egged on by corporate interests) stole a month’s worth of campaign headlines by propagating all kinds of smears and misinformation in an attempt to derail an important Democratic campaign. Yet they were treated as deeply important newsmakers by the press during a slow summer news month. Honestly, the only thing missing this time around is a crackpot, best-selling book. In 2004, the Swifties used the release of Unfit for Command to launch their media-based smear campaign. This summer, it could have been something like ObamaScare: How Liberal Health Care Will Destroy America. (The Swifties’ right-wing publisher must be kicking itself over the missed marketing opportunity.) But what has been perfectly consistent is the way the press has, again, fallen for a right-wing smear campaign and dressed it up as news. Just as with the Swifties, the press has turned over its summer coverage to a band of agitators spreading misinformation. Five summers ago, the Swift Boat Vets helped hijack the election. They lied about documents, they lied about eyewitness, and they lied about their partisan affiliations and connections. For several crucial weeks during the campaign, journalists turned away from the pile-up of Swift Boat falsehoods and contradictions, rarely daring to call the Swift Boat attack out for what it really was — a hoax. Too spooked by the GOP Noise Machine and its charge of liberal media bias, the press propped up the Vets as serious men and showered them with attention. This year, the press has handed over untold hours of free airtime to mini-mob members whose sole purpose seems to be to spread as much fear as possible. (The ones who show up toting guns and Nazi posters make that point rather emphatically.)

All they have to do is get enough money together to mobilize their crazies and they can change the world.

This has some very important implications for the administration as they figure out whether or not to govern through Blue Dogs or their own base. I hope they take the right lessons or we are in deep trouble.

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They Should Be Thrilled

by dday

Anonymous wankers in the White House expressed surprise in the WaPo this morning about the intensity of feeling about the public option in the health care debate.

President Obama’s advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president’s top legislative priority […]

“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.”

“It’s a mystifying thing,” he added. “We’re forgetting why we are in this.”

If the public option gravitated to the center of the debate and the White House never wanted it there, it’s their own damn fault for talking like CPAs about “cost curves” and “risk adjustment” and arguments that could be plotted on a graph for six months without being specific about the moral case of covering millions of people who have no choice and no hope, and beating back the unrivaled greed of the insurance industry. The only element of health care reform as set out by the White House with a beating pulse has been the public option, and humans being emotional creatures as well as rational ones, that’s where progressives gathered.

But I want to focus in on this element of “surprise,” which is silly, since the public option was the compromise down from the policy with the most intensity on the left in the health care debate, single payer. Beyond this anonymous staffer being clueless for his surprise, he’s not even understanding that the revolt on the left is the only thing saving health care reform at this point.

When town hall crazies and conservative misinformation dominated the debate, health care was on a losing trajectory, if not dead in the water. Since Kathleen Sebelius’ statement on Sunday on CNN, the nature of the debate has shifted so much away from that and toward actual policy you’d think it was intentional on the part of the White House. Noam Scheiber captures this at TNR.

Around the conference table at TNR, we’ve been saying for weeks that what Obama really needed was a group of equally vocal, equally zealous critics on the left, pulling the debate’s center of gravity in the other direction. And, wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what’s happened over the last 48 hours. We’ve now got a pole on the left to match the intensity of the pole on the right. (Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting a moral equivalence between the two. As far as I’m concerned, the critics on the left are basically right and the critics on the right are either insane or deeply cynical.) From a sheer tactical perspective, I think the White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress have dramatically improved their position.

You now have 64 House Dems who have raised over $100,000 and counting from over 1,600 Democrats in 24 hours since they took the pledge of not voting for any bill without a public option. You have House Democrats strongly behind the public option in their weekly caucus meeting, with everyone in support of it because their constituents had pressed them on it. You have labor warning Democrats that they’ll sit out specific elections if any members oppose a public plan. There’s a vital energy to the debate now that was simply missing when Obama was offering vague principles and playing an inside game trying to frame health care reform as entitlement reform. And it’s actually doing more to get a health care bill passed than anything the White House has done all year.

Elites who reflexively kick the left will retreat to the familiar ground of the Washington Post editorial page to demand that liberals “give up on the public option”. And they can make their case for that on the policy – the currently administered public option on offer, by firewalling those who get insurance through employers, will struggle to survive because it cannot capture enough of the market to force competition on price and quality of care (though historically, governments build on what gets enshrined into law gradually over time, so the policy of the moment matters less than what can be done with it eventually, and having nothing, or weak co-ops that experts have shown cannot work at all, would be disastrous). On the politics, liberal elites are dead wrong. They will lose health care completely if they alienate the base. And the base wants competition against for-profit insurance CEOs with a public option, at the very least. Because they understand that a properly administered version of this competition would save people and the government money, with more savings the more popular it is. That’s only something to fear if you want to protect insurance company profits.

As Chris Bowers says:

However, the current fight over the public option is a perfect demonstration of why such left-wing criticism is absolutely essential to any attempts to pass progressive legislation by the Democratic leadership and the Obama administration. If there had been no left-wing revolt to Sebelius’s statements on Sunday, it would be far more difficult for the Democratic Congressional leadership and the Obama administration to justify not giving into right-wing demands. Lacking any Progressive Block demanding more progressive legislation, the Democratic leadership and administration would be practically forced to offer up even less progressive legislation than even the compromises they were floating over the weekend […]

It is understandable that some progressives who worked very hard to elect President Obama get irked by left-wing criticism. Not all Democrats are on the left, not everyone buys into the same strategies as me, and criticism toward someone you personally identify with is irritating […]

No matter these objections, in order to pass progressive legislation, both prominent left-wing criticism and powerful, Congressional Progressive opposition to a Democratic trifecta is absolutely necessary. In the current health care fight, the lack of such criticism and the lack of such a block would mean that the public option was dead in the water right now. Not everyone is going to like it, and some party higher ups like Rahm Emanuel may call it “f*ckng stupid,” but any progressive ecosystem lacking such criticism and left-wing organizing is only a short time away from suffering a mass extinction.

I would go further, and say that without progressive organizing around the public option, there wouldn’t be any health care reform legislation. Period. The band of hippies is saving the Democrats from themselves.

Please thank those who have stood up for their efforts. Let’s get to $200,000 today.

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As If They Had A Choice

by dday

The NYT reports that “Democrats Seem Set to Go It Alone on a Health Bill”. In plain English, this means that “Democrats want a health bill.” There was never going to be Republican support for anything calling itself health reform that Democrats and the President would support. You could whittle and whittle and whittle the bill down to nothing and it wouldn’t matter. Somebody in Washington finally figured this out:

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said the heated opposition was evidence that Republicans had made a political calculation to draw a line against any health care changes, the latest in a string of major administration proposals that Republicans have opposed.

“The Republican leadership,” Mr. Emanuel said, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.”

Ya think? Jon Kyl said yesterday that “There is no way that Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar-plus bill.” Chuck Grassley admitted that he wouldn’t vote for his own compromise and legitimized the “death panels” smear despite having voted for it in the past. You’re just figuring out that Republicans view their jobs as blocking any legislation at all costs?

We’re starting to hear this meme from the right that liberals are interested in negotiation and compromise with Iran and North Korea, but not with Republicans. Well, we’ve done the negotiations. They led to nothing for months. And the meme itself is false.

In foreign policy, liberals often believe that disputes with foreign actors can and should be settled through negotiation and compromise. That’s because international relations isn’t a zero-sum affair. Conflict is costly to both parties, good relations bring benefits to both parties, so disagreement is generally amenable to compromise. Ideological disagreement isn’t zero-sum either. Neither conservatives nor progressives are wedded to principles that require defense of wasteful Medicare spending. But partisan politics is zero-sum. A ‘win’ for the Democrats is a ‘loss’ for Republicans. And the predominant thinking in the Republican Party at the moment is that inflicting legislative defeats on Democrats will lead to electoral defeats for Democrats. That makes the GOP hard to bargain with.

I would say “impossible.” They’re convinced it’s 1994, and they’re not needed by virtue of the numbers.

So where to go from here? Well, Democrats in the Senate could demand that their members join no Republican filibuster of any health care measure supported by a majority of their ranks. They can choose to not support the final bill if they wish. They should not keep it from a final vote. That’s the simple solution. If that process winds us up with a public option in the House and a weak co-op option in the Senate, the conference committee could actually produce a positive result, provided Harry Reid puts the people on the conference with jurisdiction over the bill, like health subcommittee chair in the Finance Committee Jay Rockefeller (strong public option supporter) and retirement and aging subcommittee chair in the HELP Committee Barbara Mikulski (supporter).

That bill would easily pass the House. The Senate is trickier. But the conference report can’t be amended. It can’t be changed, or held up in committee. It can be filibustered, and it can be voted against. Those are the options. If three Democrats opposed the legislation and wanted to kill it, they would literally have to filibuster it (this is assuming that Democrats have 60 votes, which is not certain given Kennedy’s health). That would be a very hard thing to do at that stage in the game. It would isolate the obstructionists, ensuring funded primary challenges and the enduring enmity of the Senate leadership and the White House. Kent Conrad can say that there aren’t enough votes for a public option and imply that he’s just protecting the final bill from defeat. But is he willing to be one of those “no” votes? Is he willing to filibuster? That’s a different game indeed.

At this point, no Democratic Senator has committed to joining a Republican filibuster, an important distinction. The conservaDems should be asked if they plan to do so.

If that fails and President Nelson (who likes to shout at public option supporters in the media off camera) or some other newly elected President tries to torpedo the bill, there’s the option of splitting reform into two bills, with the filibuster-able stuff in one bill, and stuff relevant to the budget packed into a bill that can be achieved with 50 votes in budget reconciliation. That makes those provisions likely to be subject to a sunset, but once a public option, expanded Medicaid, increasing subsidies and other budget-relevant things get enacted, I submit it will be hard for any Congress to allow them to expire. Failing that, there’s the straight reconciliation path, which contra Chris Matthews is not “blowing up Senate rules” but part of them (someone who’s never talked a word about Senate rules in his whole career should probably not start now), but which could get messy if elements not relevant to the budget got excised.

Or, Democrats could behave like Republicans and rule by fear and questioning opponents’ patriotism. But that’s, er, unlikely.

The point being, there are options, and lots more open up when you recognize the large majorities in both houses of Congress cancel the need for bipartisanship inside Washington.

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