Colbert on the Rand Paul filibuster
by digby
The Colbert Report
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This piece from Pro-Publica is useful for understanding just how much we don’t know about the drone doctrine.
How to succeed as an opposition party without really trying
by digby
This Politico piece has got to be the oddest analysis of the sequester yet. Hopefully it’s way off the mark because it’s tremendously depressing:
President Barack Obama used to want a grand deficit deal because he philosophically believed it was best for the country, and politically believed it was best for him.
Now he needs it because he has no choice.
Obama’s failure to avert $85 billion in spending cuts known as the sequester underscored the limits of his outside strategy and signaled that he could not persuade Republicans to raise revenue again without a comprehensive agreement to overhaul the Tax Code and entitlements.
A lull in the deadline-driven budget battles could soon give way to a fresh round of fiscal crises — from rising public pressure to lift the sequester to a looming summer deadline to increase the debt limit. If the president is to have any hope of resolving either fight to his liking, he’ll need more revenue. But Republicans won’t even consider it unless entitlement reforms are on the table.
So after more than two months in hiding, talk of a grand bargain has suddenly resurfaced in Washington.
Huh? It’s not as if the President isn’t offering entitlement cuts for crying out loud. Why is it so hard for the Villagers to grasp this point? He’s been offering entitlement cuts since 2011, signaled he wanted to do it since before he was inaugurated the first time. It’s not that he hasn’t put them on the table, it’s that the GOP refuses to take him up on it. Moreover, he has been willing to do “tax reform” for from the get-go as well. That is the Grand Bargain. Here, one more time with feeling:
“Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don’t work, and making things that we have more efficient. But I’m not suggesting, George, I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped,” Obama told me in his first interview since arriving back in Washington, DC as president-elect.
I asked the president-elect, “At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform, entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?”
“Yes,” Obama said.
Sheesh…
Anyway, these oracles see the makings of a deal on the horizon, but they seem to suggest it will take the President pretending that the Republicans twisted his arm and forced him to cut Social Security and Medicare against his will. I’m fairly sure he’s more than willing to go there. I’m not so sure about the Republicans. (On the other hand, they have shown they can be quite successful at talking out of both sides of their mouths on this issue. See: 2010, Medicare.)
“There is an increased focus on engagement because of the opportunity the circumstances provide,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said. “He is trying to make something good out of a bad situation. We don’t have a looming deadline. Republican leaders have made clear they’re not revisiting, at least not anytime soon, the idea of postponing the sequester in a balanced way. So the sequester is here. The budget process, regular order, is moving forward.”
Oh good. It worked. The sequester cuts are the new normal. Excellent.
Meanwhile:
Privately, House Republican leaders think they’ve checked two of the three boxes of a grand bargain: first, the Jan. 1 tax increases; second, the spending cuts via the sequester. Now, in their view, all that’s left is entitlement reform. Top Republicans are also skeptical Obama would agree to the kind of tax reform that House Republicans have drawn a firm line on: The revenue to be generated by closing loopholes would go to lowering rates.
If that works out, they will have achieved the most magnificent policy success any opposition party has ever achieved: minimal tax increases on some of the richest people in world history in exchange for decimating the US government’s discretionary programs, cutting the “entitlements”, preserving the defense budget (that’s already in the proposed continuing resolution and the Democrats won’t dare oppose it)and setting up a new tax regime that lowers rates. I don’t think any GOP president could achieve that.
Everyone says that the White House is adamant that they will not accept any deal without revenue. What that actually means is that they’ll accept anything as long as it contains revenue. And we don’t know how much they’ll require to call it a day or even what form it must take. There’s a whole lot of wiggle room in there.
This is just hilarious:
Republicans felt burned by the fiscal cliff deal, opposed further tax hikes and, contrary to West Wing predictions, would not cave. Senior administration officials also assumed Republicans wouldn’t be able to backtrack on their dire warnings of the sequester during the 2012 campaign and their party’s reliance on defense industry contributions.
“It was a gross miscalculation and a miscalculation that flew in the face of common sense,” said Jim Dyer, a former Republican appropriations aide on Capitol Hill. “They poked the Republicans once too hard.”
Right. Politico reports without irony that Obama was mean to the Republicans so now they’re digging in their heels.
The original calculation of the Grand Bargain was always daft: deficit reduction in a time of massive unemployment and a moribund economy. And even worse that the Bargain was defined as some sort of amorphous “revenue” from people who won’t even feel it in exchange for benefits cuts to some of the neediest people in the country. This is also known as a “balanced approach” (to a problem that doesn’t doesn’t need fixing.) That we’ve taken a hatchet to discretionary programs is just frosting on the cake. Well played.
The bottom line is this: I think it would be nice to raise some more “revenue.” But it is definitely not worth this price and I doubt very seriously it will last any longer than the Clinton tax hikes lasted — that is until the Republicans regain the presidency. They are not going to overnight become friendly to the idea of progressive taxation, so whatever tiny little accommodation we get now is it, and it’s very temporary. But the people of this country will be suffering for many, many years from the cuts to vital programs that were given up in this Bargain.
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Georgia Republicans want the mentally ill to have more guns
by David Atkins
Remember all that Republican sturm und drang in the wake of Sandy Hook about how it isn’t guns that kill people, but just the mentally ill? Well, Georgia Republicans beg to disagree even about that:
While some states push to tighten gun control laws after the Connecticut school massacre, lawmakers in gun-friendly Georgia want to ease rules preventing some mentally ill people from getting licenses to carry firearms.
Georgia’s House voted 117-56 on Thursday to allow people who have voluntarily sought inpatient treatment for mental illness or substance abuse to get licenses.
“Simply being hospitalized doesn’t make a person a criminal or a threat,” said Rep. Rick Jasperse, R-Jasper, the bill sponsor. The legislation now heads to the state Senate.
The same bill would force officials to check on whether applicants have received involuntary treatment in the past five years before issuing licenses. Georgia also might change its laws to allow people to carry guns in churches, bars and on college campuses.
Out of touch doesn’t even begin to describe this.
It was a party-line vote, by the way. But hey, I’m sure Georgia Republicans would be much more reasonable if only Democrats would compromise more. Then we could have real bipartisanship!
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Joe Scarborough, then and now
by digby
Here is Joe Scarborough during his debate with Paul Krugman on Monday:
Q: Would you support an extra $200 billion a year in spending on infrastructure and education right now?
A: Oh yeah. I talk about it all the time. I go around and I talk to Republicans all the time.
And here is Scarborough writing with Jeffrey Sachs in the Washington Post today:
Both of us opposed the [2009] stimulus package, the increased spending in Afghanistan and Washington’s fixation on short-term thinking. We said that the only result of this short-termism would be exploding deficits. And well before Obama himself acknowledged the point, we said that there was no such thing as “shovel-ready” projects worthy of public investment in the 21st century.
It’s an unusual approach. most people would have thought that the 2009 stimulus was the more important one, heading as we were to a possible Great Depression. But no. Dr Scarborough was against that one and for a stimulus today.
Like I said, unusual.
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Wise words from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ed Kilgore
by digby
If you are a white person who has on occasion felt aggrieved at the persistence of allegations of white racism in America, do yourself and your conscience a favor and read Ta-Nehisi’s Coates’ guest column today in the New York Times.
Yes, read it. It’s amazing. He talks about a humiliating incident that happened to the actor Forrest Whittaker when he was frisked in a Manhattan Deli under suspicion of shoplifting. He relates the fact that the man who did it, the owner of the place, has since apologized, proclaiming that he isn’t a racist and is a “good person.” Coates writes:
The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.
But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.
I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.
The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a ni**er, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.
And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.
Can you blame him?
Kilgore writes about his own family in the south and mentions Martin Luther King’s admonitions to the preachers and the “white moderates” in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. I get this. Many of us grew up in families much like Kilgore’s and we know what it is to love someone and yet hate this part of them — or try to rationalize it as something other than what it clearly is. But then good and evil resides inside every human being. He says:
Now that racism is no longer respectable, it’s tempting to reason conversely and suggest respectable people can’t be racists. But to do that is to reason racism virtually out of existence. Most of the world’s religious and moral traditions try to remind us that while good works are always to be valued, there is something in the human soul that makes good people prone to doing bad things. That did not stop being the case when racism was deemed “bad” by national consensus in this country, and those of us who will never suffer a single indignity for the color of our skin should remember that before turning all human experience on its head and claiming we are the victims of racism if our own good will is challenged.
People sometimes say that it’s foolish for liberals to point out racism, that it accomplishes nothing and only creates hostility. I always ask them when they say this, “what do tell our African American friends and family?” It’s not just up to Ta-Nehesi Coates and his family to confront these good white people. It’s our job as fellow human beings, to stand with them.
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New data shows the climate change hockey stick is sharper than we thought
by David Atkins
Mother Jones has some scary news about the exponential rate of climate change. Remember the old hockey stick graph from An Inconvenient Truth? Well, it’s getting sharper.
Here are the details:
Back in 1999 Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann released the climate change movement’s most potent symbol: The “hockey stick,” a line graph of global temperature over the last 1,500 years that shows an unmistakable, massive uptick in the twentieth century when humans began to dump large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It’s among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann’s back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists.
Today, it’s getting a makeover: A study published in Science reconstructs global temperatures further back than ever before—a full 11,300 years. The new analysis finds that the only problem with Mann’s hockey stick was that its handle was about 9,000 years too short. The rate of warming over the last hundred years hasn’t been seen for as far back as the advent of agriculture.
Here’s the old graph going back only 2000 years:
And here’s the new graph going back 10,000 years:
The upshot here? Yes, temperatures have been higher in the past. But the rate of change was very gradual, allowing time for species to migrate and adapt. Our current rate of change is sharply and dangerously abrupt. Worse, it has an exponential curve.
It proves two things: first, there is no way the current climate change is in any way a natural event. It’s caused by human action. Second, it has terrifying implications for the ability of life on earth to adapt to it.
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The Village: “very, very privileged people wanting to make sure they cut spending on everybody else?”
by digby
Greg Sargent games out what I believe to be the Obama administration’s most plausible definition of “success”:
The ultimate irony in such an outcome is that Republicans could plausibly declare victory. If they accepted Obama’s current offer as is, that alone would amount to a short term victory, since it contains far more in spending cuts (over $900 billion) than new revenues (nearly $600 billion). According to Paul Van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this would mean that overall, we would have achieved nearly $4 trillion in deficit reduction, through a cuts-to-revenues ratio of 1.8 to one — nearly $2.5 trillion in cuts, versus nearly $1.4 trillion in revenues — after Obama decisively won an election about these matters. Republicans could say they forced Dems to accept entitlement cuts and got significantly more in cuts than they gave away in revenues.
If Republicans really want to tackle the deficit, they just have to accept Yes for an answer.
Indeed. That’s been true since 2011. The problem is that while Greg says that experts have agreed that 4 trillion in deficit reduction is necessary, I don’t think it’s a true consensus. There are plenty of experts who think this fetish with the deficit is daft. Here’s one:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
But he’s right that the consensus among politicians and DC pundits is that this arbitrary figure of 4 trillion is written in stone and much be achieved somehow or the world will end. And at this stage the only question is whether or not there will be any more revenue on top of the inevitable addition of spending cuts. That’s an accurate reflection of how the discussion is going.
What we’ve been hearing lately is that the Republicans just didn’t really know how much the president was offering until now, which strikes me as somewhat unbelievable. But nonetheless, it’s true that he’s been offering up a lot of things they can easily say yes to and achieve their own unpopular and destructive policy goals while being able to blame the Democratic president for doing them! You would think they’d jump at the chance. And who knows, someday they might just wise up.
Here’s a a good article in The Nation today talking about this phenomenon which recounts a call to C-Span this morning:
I hope Republicans do the right thing, take care of the people—you know who we are. And I don’t want anything from the government, I’ve been working all my life and so has my entire family, so I hope that you guys stick to your guns, no matter what the cost, and please bring us back from the brink of disaster. And don’t set up that CPI, that chained CPI that the president wants. And would you explain the Chained CPI a little bit?
Can you see what’s wrong with that picture (aside from the very serious cognitive dissonance?) I knew that you could.
But all that is abstract, inside baseball. Another article in today’s New York Times should be what everyone is reading in order to see why this entire debate is such a tragedy for our country. This one’s by highly respected political reporter Tom Edsall and it’s called “The War on Entitlements”. It lays out all the reasons in clear detail why this obsession with reducing the so-called entitlements is going to badly hurt millions of people. And, most interestingly, he lays the responsibility for its perpetuation exactly where it belongs:
The debate over reform of Social Security and Medicare is taking place in a vacuum, without adequate consideration of fundamental facts.
These facts include the following: Two-thirds of Americans who are over the age of 65 depend on an average annual Social Security benefit of $15,168.36 for at least half of their income.
Currently, earned income in excess of $113,700 is entirely exempt from the 6.2 percent payroll tax that funds Social Security benefits (employers pay a matching 6.2 percent). 5.2 percent of working Americans make more than $113,700 a year. Simply by eliminating the payroll tax earnings cap — and thus ending this regressive exemption for the top 5.2 percent of earners — would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, solve the financial crisis facing the Social Security system.
So why don’t we talk about raising or eliminating the cap – a measure that has strong popular, though not elite, support?
[…]
Cutting benefits is frequently discussed in the halls of Congress, in research institutes and by analysts and columnists. The idea of subjecting earned income over $113,000 to the Social Security payroll tax and making the Medicare tax more progressive – steps that would affect only the relatively affluent — is largely missing from the policy conversation.The Washington cognoscenti are more inclined to discuss two main approaches that are far less costly for the affluent: means-testing of benefits and raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. (Sidenote: policy makers and national journalists who weigh in on this issue generally earn more than $113,700 a year.) Means-testing and raising the age of eligibility as methods of cutting spending appeal to ideological conservatives for a number of reasons.
First, insofar as benefits for the affluent are reduced or eliminated under means-testing, social insurance programs are no longer universal and are seen, instead, as a form of welfare. Public support would almost certainly decline, encouraging further cuts in the future.
Second, the focus on means-testing and raising the age of eligibility diverts attention from a much simpler and more equitable approach: raising the payroll tax to apply to the earnings of the well-to-do, a step strongly opposed by the ideological right.
Third, and most important in terms of the policy debate, while both means-testing and eliminating the $113,700 cap on earnings subject to the payroll tax hurt the affluent, the latter would inflict twice as much pain.
The C.B.O. estimates that elimination of the payroll earnings cap would cost the well-to-do the equivalent of 0.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product, while substantially reducing Social Security payments to the top third of the income distribution, through means testing, would only cost those better off recipients the equivalent of 0.1 percent of G.D.P.
Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard and an authority on the history of the American welfare state, contended in a phone interview that policy elites avoid addressing the sharply regressive nature of social welfare taxes because, “at one level, it’s very, very privileged people wanting to make sure they cut spending on everybody else” while “holding down their own taxes.”
Gary Burtless, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, agrees that elite proponents of cutting benefits for the elderly have a narrow view based on their own high incomes and comfortable lives: “The median voter has a much more well-rounded sense of the risks associated through everyday life than the elite,” he said in an interview.
No kidding. And yet, as far as I can tell, the leaders of both parties see this as some kind an abstract game of chicken in which the everyday lives of average Americans are not even among their considerations.
I urge you to read the whole thing and consider what this means to average people in this countrym half of whom who are going to be living on less than $30,000 at a time when they are unable to work. This program is inadequate, not overly generous and the idea that they are actually considering cutting it (and the Chained-CPI is nothing more than a disguised cut) is just appalling.
They do not have to “fix” entitlements by cutting them. Indeed, the only rational “fix” is to raise social security and expand Medicare to include younger people. Instead, we are doing the opposite. It is nuts, pure and simple.
This “deal” that Sargent sketches out is very likely to be considered a big win for the president among the cognoscenti. I have no doubt that we’ll all be told it was the best he could do and that the Republicans are big meanies and that we just have to be realistic. But that is utter bullshit. Social Security doesn’t contribute to the deficit and Medicare costs are symptomatic of much bigger problems in our medical system than anything that cutting the benefits can possibly fix. It is a phony solution to a non-problem and I suspect it comes out of a craven desire to make sure that the deficit reduction of today — for which they believe they will be rewarded — stays permanent and falls on people who are too old and too sick to complain when it happens to them.
We’re all justifiably concerned about the bipartisan expansion of presidential power and the perpetuation of the national security state. The debates about the drone war and the kill list and the War on Terror are vital. But we’ve had a bipartisan National Security policy for decades, one that has always placed a premium on our continued global military hegemony. There is nothing particularly new about that, as appalling as it is.
But a Democratic president leading the way to cutting Social Security and Medicare is something new. There was a time when that would have been unthinkable. I’ve said it before, but it’s more and more obvious to me that if the Democratic Party sells out its constituents on “entitlements” — which they fought for and defended for over half a century, particularly at a time when their authentic democratic political power is stronger than it’s been in over three decades, I’m hard pressed to see what the rationale for their continued existence really is. But then, as Edsall points out, “policy makers and national journalists who weigh in on this issue generally earn more than $113,700 a year” so they have their own dog in this fight, don’t they?
Edsall ends his piece with this:
This conflict could not have come at a more difficult time: the United States is in the midst of a zero sum struggle requiring politicians to pick losers, not winners. The population of those over 65 is set to multiply, with longevity steadily increasing even as median annual household income for the population at large has shrunk to $51,584 in January 2013 from $54,000 in 2008.
In this kind of conflict over limited goods, one of the most valuable resources that can get lost in the fray is the wisdom of the electorate at large. In this case, the electorate is pointing toward progressive tax increases for those closer to the top far more readily than members of the political class, for whom high-earners are a crucial source of campaign contributions.
The very nature of the basic security Americans are entitled to is at stake.
Anybody listening?
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Hands off this planet, Obama. It belongs to the Republicans
by digby
Here’s a good Tom the Dancing Bug over at DKos comics:
Click the link for info on how to get the comics delivered to you early. Sometimes, it’s the only bright spot in my day …
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Is the president too cool for politics or is he a magical thinker?
by digby
Ezra made an interesting observation this morning in a post about last night’s bipartisan dinner party:
It’s a common complaint from both Republican and Democratic legislators that Obama simply doesn’t like talking to them. Conservatives recall that Bill Clinton loved getting their opinion and would listen for as long as they wanted to talk — even while they were impeaching him. I spoke recently with a liberal senator who fondly remembered that former President Bush repeatedly invited him up to the White House even as the senator spent every single day investigating and opposing Bush in the Senate — Obama, he said, has spent less time with him than Bush did.
It would be easy to discount these complaints, but as any reporter who deals often with Congress will tell you, they’re constant, and they come from both sides of the aisle. It’s the same complaint that came from wealthy liberal donors during the election. Obama just doesn’t like the grip-and-grin, small-talk side of politics and political players who are used to receiving that attention end up feeling neglected.
The process that typically produces national politicians selects people who like schmoozing donors and building countless relationships and sending Christmas cards to everyone they’ve ever met and making their colleagues feel loved. But whereas Bush and Clinton and pretty much every other president had lived and excelled in that world for a very long time as a precondition for coming to the White House, Obama’s rise was so swift and unusual that he came to the White House lacking some of the typical traits of national politicians. His trajectory simply selected for different traits — including a deep impatience with the kabuki rituals of Washington politics.
In many ways, that’s why voters like him. But it doesn’t always serve him well with other political elites.
To be honest, I think that’s something of a convenient conceit. President Obama was a skilled and experienced politician long before he won the office. And nobody wins it without political skills. And make no mistake, what Ezra is describing are political skills, not personality traits.
But whatever. The more important aspect of this is that Obama ran for office as the guy who could transcend party divisions, heal the nation and change Washington. A whole lot of people believed that (maybe even the Republicans on some primitive level — for about a month.)But what, exactly, was supposed to be the mechanism for this? If he is the guy Ezra describes, then he obviously believed it would happen by the sheer force of his charismatic persona.
This isn’t a new subject here by any means. I’ve written about it many times. Mostly I’ve said (generously I think) that the administration believed their own hype which is to say they thought the mere fact of winning the election would bring the Republicans around. But I’m beginning to agree with David Atkins that it’s deeper than that:
President Obama is a man of many admirable qualities and strengths. But he has a character flaw worthy of Shakespearean tragedy that is perfectly illustrated in this little snippet. That flaw is the desire common to many tragic anti-heroes imbued with a certain narcissism, to believe that he can do what no others can–in this case, to transcend seemingly impossible political divides by bringing the two parties together to achieve bipartisan policy goals.
And if what Ezra says is true, he evidently believed he could do it without lowering himself to politics! Apparently the idea was that by simply proposing bipartisan solutions to vexing problems, everyone would agree and we’d all check them off our lists until everything was fixed and our terrible political culture was healed. That truly is narcissistic.
I don’t know if it’s the case that he’s not “reached out” enough personally or whether DC crybabies are simply playing for attention. (It wouldn’t be the first time.) I don’t know that any amount of outreach would make a bit of difference. After all, these people are complaining that he isn’t as nice as Bill Clinton was and they impeached Clinton for his trouble. So, I’m not going to assume that any of that is true.
But if Ezra is right and the president really is aloof and hostile to the political process then he was guilty of more magical thinking about “hope and change” than even I previously believed. And regardless of the personal psychology, it’s political malpractice to believe that the mere force of his own personality would be enough to change a political culture. I’m not sure what would have done it, but then I thought it was a ridiculous thing to promise in the first place. You deal with the political culture you have, not the one you wish you had. You certainly can’t change it by simply saying “make it so” — it changes by virtue of the success or failure of government to address the needs of the people.
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The other filibusters you didn’t hear about
by David Atkins
Thirteen hours after it began, the talking filibuster initiated by Rand Paul is over. It was a classic filibuster done the way it should be done, if the filibuster is to exist at all. Moreover, it was on an issue that does deserve further scrutiny on both left and right.
But what you may not have heard about is the other, quieter filibusters. From Steve Benen:
This morning, Senate Republicans filibustered a qualified judicial nominee, basically because the NRA told them to. Last month, for the first time in American history, a cabinet nominee was denied an up-or-down vote due to a Republican filibuster. Last week, a judicial nominee recommended — by the GOP and facing zero opposition — was forced to wait 263 days for a confirmation vote, during which time he faced Republican filibusters. Republicans also vowed last month to use filibusters to stop the Obama administration from enforcing the law as it relates to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to stop the president’s nominee to lead the ATF.
And today, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and some of his friends are on the Senate floor, launching what is effectively an old-school, speak-for-hours filibuster, blocking John Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA.
The Lucy-snatching-the-football-from-Charlie-Brown moment has to go to Dick Durbin, who actually said this:
“I hate to suggest this, but if this is an indication of where we’re headed, we need to revisit the rules again,” the Illinois Democrat said. “We need to go back to it again. I’m sorry to say it because I was hopeful that a bipartisan approach to dealing with these issues would work.”
The progressives are always right. The bipartisan fetish centrists are always wrong. It would be nice if they handed over the steering wheel from time to time. Merkley and the Senate reformers aren’t going away quietly:
In an interview on Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the author of a proposal to place more of the burden of sustaining a filibuster on the minority party, including forcing filibustering senators to speak on the floor, echoed remarks by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) earlier in the day about the need to revisit filibuster reform.
“Senate Republicans have demonstrated that they have absolutely no intention of ending their assault on the ability of the U.S. Senate to function,” Merkley told TPM, saying he had hoped the bipartisan rules change would ease gridlock. “Many of my colleagues are absolutely beside themselves with frustration, and that frustration is rapidly turning to fury.”
Every filibuster should look like Rand Paul’s filibuster. Or they shouldn’t happen at all.
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