Here’s Tommy Friedman, making a modicum of sense.
…we have to solve the big problems in our control, not postpone them or pretend that more lobby-driven, lowest-common-denominator solutions are still satisfactory. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, but a reprieve and a breathing spell — which is what we’re having right now — is a really terrible thing to waste. We don’t want to look back on this moment and say: How could we have gone back to business as usual and petty political gridlocks with all those black swans circling around us? Then we will really kick ourselves.
In some ways, this echoes the standard progressive critique of the Obama administration. For example, the health care bill can fairly be described as the lowest-common-denominator solution that could pass Congress. A remarkable achievement, yes, but also a remarkable disappointment that fell well short of what was proposed and what was needed. One thing many on the left seem to miss, however, in their dismissal of post-partisan language, is that Obama’s approach isn’t really aimed at reaching common agreement through compromise. He wanted to create an unstoppable coalition of the center-left by incorporating the center-right.
That’s why Obama let Gates stay on at the Pentagon, offered Powell a job, brought on Ray LaHood to run Transportation, made John McHugh the Secretary of the Army, and offered Sen. Judd Gregg the Commerce Department. He wanted to put the reasonable Republicans in his camp and isolate the crazies on the other side. That way, an increasingly shrill and detached minority would make a spectacle of themselves as they impotently railed against an agenda that had strong backing from a solid majority of the country. Everything is working according to plan except for one little problem. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have actually decided to keep their caucuses united in opposition to everything and they have succeeded. This is only possible through a combination of Democratic disunity and the filibuster rule in the Senate.
Of the two, the filibuster rule is actually the more important one for creating delay and for forcing legislation to the lowest-common-denominator. Without that rule, a good health care bill would have passed by July of 2009. Without that rule, we’d already have passed financial reforms, a cap and trade energy policy, and we’d plausibly be working on an immigration bill that could pass.
It’s not possible to do the things we need to do in the way we need to do them so long as we cannot even vote on those things. This is supposed to be a democracy of some sort where the majority prevails. But it’s the minority of forty in the Senate that exercises veto power over the president’s agenda. Do we want to keep it that way? After all, one day soon it will be a Republican president whose agenda is stalled, and we may all be grateful that they can’t screw everything up quite as easily as they might want to.
I guess my point is that Friedman makes some excellent points, but he never once assigns blame where it belongs. The Republican Party is responding to multiple threats and crises by using every procedural rule in the book to prevent concerted action. That strategy forces Obama to go for lowest-common-denominator solutions that are basically whatever Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe can agree on. And the president did not run on enacting the Nelson-Snowe agenda. That’s not what the country voted for. It shouldn’t be what we have to settle for. And it’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough.
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have actually decided to keep their caucuses united in opposition to everything and they have succeeded.
It’s been that way ever since Newt’s rise to power(as much as the Speaker is allowed). And it’s not going to change any time soon. For Obama not to realize this is criminal.
After all, one day soon it will be a Republican president whose agenda is stalled, and we may all be grateful that they can’t screw everything up quite as easily as they might want to.
Are we going to move towards a more parliamentary system? If not, then it won’t matter because unless we kick them out of the party, we’ll always have tools like Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and Evan Bayh that are Republicans best friends while they try to torpedo a Democratic President.
Calvin, it has not been that way ever since Newt came to power. It may seem that way, but it took a while to develop. If you want a truer beginning point, look at the impeachment fight. That was when the hard right activists first flexed their muscles and got moderate Republicans to go along for the ride. The 2006-2008 elections decimated what remained of reason in the GOP, and primaries have done further damage. Today’s GOP bears little resemblance to the GOP of 1994. It looks like the crazy freshman class of 1994 who were treated with disdain and mistrust by Newt and his henchmen.
But it’s been that way ever since Obama came to the Senate. Who’s the only Republican(in the Senate) that would ever vote against Bush? Lincoln Chaffee?
Umm…did you forget that Bush couldn’t even get a vote for Harriet Miers or Social Security privatization?
I am talking about votes taken .. and look what the result of the Miers mess was. I still think Bush played the base like a drum on the Miers thing. Think about that for a second. And on Social Security. For a guy who tries to think about the poltics of everything, you sure miss that one too. After all, look at what’s happening now. Long-term strategy!!
Is there much chance of the filibuster rule being changed? I know people are talking about it, but will it happen?
It depends a lot on whether the GOP thwarts efforts to do work on immigration and energy, and whether they leave Obama with dozens of unfilled appointments after two full years in office. If they don’t relent, then I think the Dems will change the filibuster rule. But the GOP might be smart enough to relent just a little…just enough to prevent any change.
This is what scares me as the likeliest outcome. Not so much that the GOP will relent in quite the way you describe, but they’ll back off temporarily just long enough to make Dems look unreasonable if they did decide to pull a rules change. But as soon as the new Congress is in session and it’s too late to change the rules, they’ll yank the football away again and we’ll be flat on our backs.
Personally, I’d recommend making the rules changes and just taking our lumps, in regard not just to the filibuster but the other little procedural things like quorum calls or whatever else the reepubs have been making use of. Yeah, we’ll lose the majority some day, but it’s not like we’ll ever use these procedural obstacles with anything near the effectiveness that the GOP enjoys. And even if we did, the press would murder us–a prime reason why Bush was able to get so much of what he wanted during his entire tenure. We’re literally damned either way, so why not at least choose the path that would allow some real changes in the short term.
It’s disturbing that there’s so little talk, either in beltway circles or among the “left” about the filibuster. How much more damage does it have to do before we say enough? It has no value in a system already overburdened by all the inventions the founders imposed to assuage their terror of democracy. There are no arguments in the filibuster’s favor except its status as a hoary token of the Old Boy System. Its destruction should be at the top of the agenda for anyone who wants America to halt its slide to permanent disaster.
The “we’ll be sorry when They are in power” argument is like the gun nut line: Yeah, banning machine guns might save the lives of a few poor kids, but you’ll be sorry when the commies/Mexicans/Muslims/ATF try to take over the country. Even if the filibuster offered real protection it would still be wrong and stupid to let a small minority thwart the will of a Congressional Majority and a president.
The filibuster’s defenders try to sell it as a moderating force, but that’s bullshit too. It has the opposite effect. There is no compromise when one side, the minority side, can impose its will without any cost. So all we have to lean on is the patsy hope that the minority will be nice. Some way to run a country. We’re like one of those miracle drunks you read about who keeps getting hit by cars and falling out of high windows and comes out of it without a scratch. It looks like our streak has come to its end finally, so maybe we could consider acting like sane people for a change.
Come on, the Dems have a majority — stop making excuses — they’re to blame. Start with the Gulf catastrophe and work on down through the whole rotten structure. The people know it — Obama now polls at 48% approval, the Dem Congress at a whopping 22% (RCP).
That’s one reason that Independents are now a plurality in the US, because more people don’t want to identify with a major party than do. So it’s wrong to assume that progressives are Democrats, and it’s wrong not to blame Democrats for the national political messes. The buck stops with them.