Oh, how the filibuster worm has turned
by digby
Without any sense of of irony or self-awareness, members of the GOP are very upset right now that the Senate needs 60 votes to pass a bill. In fact, it’s downright un-American:
House conservatives on Thursday pointedly criticized Senate Republicans for saying a House-approved bill funding the agency and reversing President Obama’s executive actions on immigration was dead in the Senate.
“If we’re going to allow seven Democratic senators to decide what the agenda is of the House Republican conference, of the Senate Republican majority, then we might as well just give them the chairmanships, give them the leadership of the Senate,” Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said at an event held with the Heritage Foundation.
He and other conservatives called for Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to gut the Senate’s filibuster if necessary to move the House bill to President Obama. With Democrats objecting to the immigration language, Republicans in the Senate are far short of the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles.
Ya think? After the unprecedented numbers of GOP filibusters these last few years, you just have to love it.
This is about the Homeland Security funding which, according to Hugh Hewitt anyway, is likely to be shut down for a long time because there’s no way the Republicans will budge. (!) The wingnuts in the House are perfectly willing to shut down the DHS — they haven’t really paid a price for these tactics yet. Why should they start worrying about it now? Mitch McConnell’s got his hands full. Here’s what Hewitt says:
Republicans have to chose to go big or go home. They can go big in one of two ways: Smashing the remnants of the filibuster, or going into the no-huddle legislative offense and passing a budget and then bill after bill after bill in very rapid fashion while allowing DHS to shut down and stay shut down. They need to tell their story through action, not speeches, and they need to start now.
Wow. That’s quite a “story”.
But there are a couple of underlying dynamics that are also interesting about this. We aren’t talking about “the government” with this one. We’re specifically talking about one department and it’s not one of those associated with the sick and poor like the food stamp program or Unemployment Insurance which the Republicans have no compunction about shutting down. These are police and national security agencies. It’s one of the few Republican government constituencies and a rare department that is considered sacred by GOP voters. So using their shutdown stunt in this case is risky for them in new ways.
Of course, they are hoping to flip the script on Democrats and accuse them of shutting down the government, ho-ho-ho. And they think this will work because Democrats have reputations for being wimpy, wussy wimmin about Nat Sec while they are heroic manly defenders of all we hold dear. So there is some underlying method to their madness beyond the hypocritical “constitution vs the filibuster” thing the House babies are caterwauling about. But this is risky too. The Democrats might still suffer from the old anti-military image but the Republicans are the ones known for having government shutdown tantrums. I suspect it’s not going to be as easy as they might hope.
It certainly doesn’t look as though the Republicans in the Senate think destroying the filibuster is such a hot idea. (They see the 2016 writing on the wall.) They are hoping to convince the baby caucus to fix the bill so they can avoid a shutdown and move along to better terrain. But for the moment it’s anybody’s guess what they’ll do. It’s hard to believe they’d put DHS, of all departments, on the chopping block but they showed themselves capable of doing that when they refused to lift the defense sequestestration. It’s a new game with very high stakes for them politically.
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