If only this were more true.
“We are now functioning under a parliamentary form of government,” says Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) in a conversation with NRO. “An ideological supermajority in Congress, along with a government run by community organizers, has taken over.”
Imagine what the Senate would have passed if they only needed 50 votes (plus Biden). That bill is what a parliament would have passed. Whatever the merits of the Senate’s bill, it is about the farthest thing from an ideological bill that can be imagined. It’s a cobbled together compromise that conflicts with the ideology of at least 80% of the left in this country. Finally, a community organizer may be in the White House, but it is the centrists in the Senate who have distorted the rules to take over our government.
Surely, Nelson and Lieberman moved the bill to the right, but we don’t actually know what would have been passed without the need to get their support, because Obama has been pretty consistent so far in trying to buy away objections from powerful industrial groups like pharma, insurance, etc. in health care and Wall Street in the bank bailout.
That puts a pretty powerful break on what would have been done even with Nelson and Lieberman twisting in the wind.
To put it another way, Obama never fought for a public option, despite having campaigned for it as a candidate; he fought drug importation, despite having campaigned for it; he embraced an individual mandate, despite having campaigned against it….
Taking away Nelson and Lieberman just makes Obama the 60th senator, so to speak.
Where you err is in your assumption that the administration made deals because they wanted to. They made deals because passing a bill like this is about as easy as a camel going through the eye of a needle. But, and this is important, the situation compels the deals. The situation at 50 is dramatically different from the deal at 55 or 60. Each has its own set of deals.
I appreciate that you have some access, but that is heavily filtered.
So far, Obama has done nothing to give one confidence that he would pursue a progressive agenda if only he could. What he has done is pursue an “intelligent centrist” agenda, i.e., he has common sense and a desire to make some changes within the context of the existing power structure.
When I voted for him, I didn’t imagine I was getting Howard Dean. I did believe, however, he would not so readily act to restore and enhance the powers of those who already have power and influence. Indeed, I understood him to be making this “outsiderism” a centerpiece of his campaign and what distinguished him from Ms. Clinton. So far, I am bitterly disappointed in this aspect of his presidency.
I don’t understand how you could be surprised. He was never going to be a transformational POTUS. He’s transitional.
It’s what can be built off him that will determine our future. We are a very troubled country, that has been neglected and propagandized for 35 years. That cannot be overcome by one person, one generation.
It’s going to take years. If it happens at all it will take 20 years, at least.
nalbar
If I had known he would not be a transformational POTUS, I would have voted for Hillary.
She is the consummate protector of vested interests, as he is proving to be, and much tougher than he is, from what I can see.
Just plain bullshit from Gregg. But what do you expect. Arguments like Gregg’s are just a sample of what the Republicans and the their media Wurlitzer’s are going to be screaming from now until the fall and well beyond; until they are back in power. This is done purely with the goal of convincing the voters that there is, in fact, some radical underground mix of ACORN, commies, atheists, fags and assorted dark skinned people and foreigners ramming through a far left agenda that is more anti-American than anything that has come down Main Street USA in the last 234 years.
I wish I could say that I’m confident that this argument will not stick with the voters, but we know how things work. The Cokie Roberts rule always applies when a Democrat is in office, “If people are talking about it, whether it’s true or not, we have to report it”. It doesn’t really matter what is true. Only what people think to be true. So they will be saying this type of thing at every opportunity. It’s always worked for them. Why would they abandon it now?
I’m curious what exactly Sen. Gregg has against community organizers.
I would love to hear why he feels, in particular, that the tireless work of churches all across the nation to organize their communities should be mocked and dismissed as detrimental in some way to our nation.
Darn those hellions!
Better yet, ask Obama why he offered this asshole a position in the administration.
To get him out of New Hampshire so we’d have 61 Democrats in the Senate right now?
Maybe, but we sure dodged a bullet when he turned it down. I had thought of him as one of the few sane Republicans early on. Disappointing to see that he’s just another lying asshole like the rest of them.
He probably is. The sanity of Republicans can’t be judged by how they behave at the national level anymore, or rather when they’re in the Senate.
Just look at Charlie Christ. Without the RNC, I probably wouldn’t care if Meek lost, that much. Sure, I’d rather Meek win, but Christ is a Republican I could work with.
However, if you look at him lately, you’ll see what you have to become to “fit in” with the RNC’s gang.
Same thing with Pawlenty. Two years ago he advocated cap and trade. Today he questions global warming’s reality.
Major typo. Not Christ, Crist. Lol.
Everyone knows Christ was a hippie.
An ideological supermajority = Republicans + Lieberman + Nelson + Lincoln + Landrieu + Conrad + Baucus
46 now equals an ideological supermajority.
As I remember, the conservative’s whole idea back in the 1960s was to create ideological parties that would run in a quasi-parliamentary manner — i.e. rigid party discipline. From 2001 until 2009 the mostly got their wish.
The big tent is back. Caucuses function like parliamentary parties and US parties function like the ruling and opposition coalitions.
Guess what the Republican coalition is looking like?
You should elaborate that when you have a chance.
I think what’s interesting about Gregg’s comment is that he has it exactly backwards. The GOP acts like a parliamentary party and the dems do not. Big tent vs small tent misses the point. You can have a big tent party that still has discipline. What makes the Dems weak and the GOP strong is that they discipline their members if they don’t follow the top down strategy.
The classic “tell” that the GOP had gone Full Parliamentary was when they almost expelled Snowe for negotiating with Baucus, and later with Reid. Extracting concessions in exchange for a vote is standard operating procedure in our system, sort of sacrilege though in a parliamentary system.
The classic “tell” that Reid and OBama are still running their party like one in a “first past the post”, majoritarian-presidentialist system: letting Nelson and Lieberman extract major concessions for agreeing NOT to filibuster/obstruct an already watered down version of what the President received an electoral mandate for.
Until the post-Goldwater purge of the Republican Party, both parties had conservatives, moderates, and liberals–maybe not in equal proportions, but certainly enough to require within-party coalitions. Within the Republican Party, there were liberals like Jacob Javits, Edward Keating, Nelson Rockefeller; moderates like George Romney (Willard’s dad); conservatives like Everett Dirksen, Charles Halleck, and Barry Goldwater. All that changed with Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and the move of Strom Thurmond from Democrat to Republican in 1965.
In addition, there was a separation between the infrastructure of the presidential party and the infrastructure of the congressional party within each of the big tents. This identification of the four-party system (Dem Pres, Dem Cong, Rep Pres, Rep Cong) was the subject of one of the classic political science works of the 1960s. (Sorry, I can’t remember who the author of it was.)
At the time the conservative movement gained strength under the influence of William Buckley and the Young Americans for Freedom youth movement (these two did not always agree), there was an influential book by a conservative political analyst that advocated a parliamentary approach to American politics and sought ideological unity in the big tent parties — with the Republicans being the equivalent of UK Tories and Democrats being the equivalent of UK Labor party. The Repulicans started on their project. The liberal response in the Democratic Party died with the McGovern loss in 1972. So we were left with one increasingly more unified and ideological party and one big tent party. The ideologues sold their ideas, and the big tent party governed. Until 1994, when the ideologues took over the Republican Congressional party completely. And was consolidated when George W. Bush had a Republican majority in both Houses after 2002.
Of course Gregg has it exactly backwards. That is a tactic that Republicans have used for over twenty years. I call it the projective “sucker punch”. The GOP is up to its eyeballs in election fraud; so it goes after ACORN on false charges of voter fraud. You can add other examples.
And sort of bizarre that he would phrase it as such. Gregg (and McConnel) I suspect was behind the transformation of the GOP into a modern day parliamentary party (ie, one where the opposition does NOT work with the majority party) vs our historic (and what our system was designed for) practice of having consensus and compromise between the two parties.
If the democratic party was a parliamentary party, Lieberman and Nelson would be expelled and moved to the bottom of the list.
Again this sort of reminds me of when the GOP called Kerry a coward, when their candidate was, well…you know.
Perhaps this is why Reid and Obama haven’t similarly adapted and molded the democratic party into a parliamentary party. I’d be interested Booman whether you think this is because you don’t think Reid and Obama can do it, or because they won’t/don’t want to.
I think if its the latter, the logic would be something like the GOP has sort of boxed the dems in here, in that if they fight parliamentary fire with parliamentary fire, the dems would come out looking bad as all this “ugly partisanship” that would result from parliamentary style parties mucking up our political institutions would only hurt the party in power.
i say f*ck that. roll the dice and tell lieberman and nelson their days in the caucus are numbered unless they stop holding legislation hostage with the threat of a filibuster. In my politically naive fantasy, Obama invites Nelson to the white house and Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack is there sitting next to Obama when he gets there. Obama then says, Senator, this is Secretary Vilsack, is he your new best friend or your new worst enemy?
My fantasy is kind of the reverse of what actually happened. Obama and Reid call Lieberman into a meeting and ask him, “So, are you really sure you want to continue to obstruct health care reform?” Then they hand him a copy of the sections of the next draft of the budget in which funds for military bases and highway construction/repair in Connecticut are zeroed out. Then they ask the question again.
I know it doesn’t work that way. I wish I knew how LBJ did it. It was said you could go into his office cursing him and calling him the biggest sumbitch in the country, and come out with his arm around your shoulders, and you’d be smiling and agreeing with whatever proposal he was trying to get passed that you were cursing when you went in.
I still haven’t anyone give a compelling argument for why that kind of hardball is a bad thing? Booman and others argue that Obama tried everything he could to get Lieberman and Nelson’s cloture vote (again, not their real vote, just asking them to not obstruct his party’s campagin promises), but did they try that? ANd if they didn’t, why not? I’m not being snarky, just trying to better understand politics. Obviously such threats are behind closed doors and while Lieberman and Nelson could certainly leak that sort of thing, but doesn’t it hurt them as well? Would they lead it so they could become some sort of bipartisan martyrs? Would they rather have that than highway funds in CT and agricultural subsidies in NE?
I keep trying to get my head around it and it always comes to the same conclusion: Obama asked for their vote, but didn’t play hardball. Reid wanted to play hardball, but had much less leverage to play with, especially after Obama took the biggies like pork and relations with the executive off the table.
And LBJ did it very similarly to how you describe. He was skilled at the art of knowing which buttons to push with people. He knew which carrots could win you a vote, and which stick could make someone fall in line. There’s no evidence whatsover to conclude that Obama has that skill, quite the opposite. IN fact, I think he picked Rahm because Rahm has a lot of those talents.
Obama could have fought harder for a public option, but I don’t think he would have succeeded in getting one on the first pass through the Senate. Remember that he needed 60 votes, all of them from the Democratic caucus. He didn’t even have 60 votes until September when Kirk took over for Kennedy, and he was told very early on that the didn’t have enough Dem votes on Finance to pass one through that committee, let alone through the whole Senate.
Given that, he pursued a rationale policy of keeping the PO alive as long as possible but not letting the lack of one stall the committee process. He went ahead and acquiesced in putting a PO in the base bill, even though a lot of people, including his chief of staff, thought that that move could imperil the whole bill (which it did).
As for punishing Connecticut, how could he do that to Dodd after he shepherded the bill through HELP for Kennedy and when he is the most vulnerable Dem incumbent in the Senate?
Yea, didn’t think of the Dodd thing. Good point- he’s been a good soldier and Obama didn’t want any shrapnel to hit him from any fights with Joementum. Why not threaten to freeze holy joe out of the Israel debate then? Tell Mitchell not to take Holy Joe’s calls anymore unless he stops equating cloture and vote as the same thing. Again, I don’t see how anyone could have any qualms at turning the screws against Holy Joe, since nobody was asking him to do somethign that wasn’t popular in his state and that he himself hadn’t supported months prior or as a VP candidate in 2000. If joe’s going to use being a senator to act like a thug and settle old vendettas, I say fight fire with fire.
Your well-made point on the f*ck up being Reid’s inclusion of the PO on his merged bill is really what’s informing my point that OBama backed off at that point. Obama wanted to fight for the PO in conference and when Reid asked for his help herding lieberman and nelson, he told him he had made his bed, now lie in it. I guess a lot of us take the Lieberman thing personally and don’t realize how much insignificant inside baseball that is to the rest of the county.
Hmm, you’re right about Dodd, Maybe bluffing Lieberman would have been enough; we’ll never know. Or we could go back to my first plan, and in recognition of all his hard work and years of Party service, appoint Lieberman ambassador to Israel. Or maybe Cameroon, where he might be able to do less damage.
Th fact that Obama did not fight harder for the Public Option the crux of the perception problem that a large part of his supporters are upset about. Even thousands of OFA members are depressed and rightfully so.
i think you are correct that Obama probably could not have got the public option through successfully but it would have kept his loyal troops fired up to fight for his policies in the future.
…has taken over!
Like, what else is it supposed to do: appease an implacable, non-negotiating minority?
Oh, wait…
There is no reality left in Gregg’s world.
Perhaps Mr. Gregg should focus on winning elections? Heh, and to think he could be running the Commerce Dept.
Ambinder on Bi-Partisanship
Now this process has made me hate Obama. I proclaimed as much at DKos and that particular comment caused quite a stir. That hatred has little bearing on my opinions and analysis of his policies. He’s better than anything the republicans could throw up for instance. And I want to be strong for the Democratic Party so…. I’m glad Ambinder wrote this.