Please Democrats, read and understand Ian Millhiser’s article, “How to Kill the Filibuster with Only 51 Votes” in The American Prospect. If Millhiser is right, this may be our best chance to escape the hellish predicament of not being able to enact anything, even with 59 percent support of the U.S. Senate. As Millhiser explains,

With conservatives salivating, and progressives seriously questioning whether American government is too crippled to solve major problems, it’s difficult to imagine that Democrats won’t take additional losses next November. Even if they don’t, however, a minority bent on total obstructionism now enjoys the power to veto nearly any bill or nominee. With the exception of the annual budget, literally nothing is likely to pass the Senate for the next three years.
It doesn’t have to be this way, however. A long line of Supreme Court decisions forbid former legislators from tying the hands of their successors. Thus, although current senators may choose to impose a supermajority rule on themselves, they cannot impose such a rule on a new Senate. Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, just 51 senators will have a brief opportunity to reform or eliminate the filibuster next January — but this opportunity will disappear if they do not act right away.

Millhiser goes on to give an account of two U.S. Supreme Court decisions establishing and affirming the aforementioned precedents, and adds:

Taken together, these two decisions open a narrow window every two years, when the Senate’s newly elected members take their seats. During this time, only 51 senators (or 50 senators plus the vice president) are needed to change the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold, eliminate the 30 hours of delay that the minority is allowed to demand between a successful cloture vote and a final vote on a filibustered bill, or even eliminate the filibuster entirely.

Further, Millhiser reasons,

The reason why the filibuster exists is because the rules of the Senate say that it exists. Article I of the Constitution provides that “each House may determine the rules of its proceedings,” so the Senate is allowed to create a rule requiring 60, 70, or even 100 votes before it can proceed with any business.
What the Senate is not allowed to do, however, is tell future senators what rules must apply to their proceedings. Because Reichelderfer prohibits a previous Congress from tying the hands of a future Congress, the rules governing Senate procedure in 2010 cannot bind a newly elected Senate in 2011. The old Senate rules essentially cease to exist until the new Senate ratifies them, so a determined bloc of 51 senators could eliminate the filibuster altogether by demanding a rules change at the beginning of a new session. Once the new Senate begins to operate under the old rules, however, this can function as a ratification of the old rules — essentially locking those rules in place for another two years.

Yes, the reactionary activists of the Roberts Court could conceivably screw with any such Democratic initiative, as Millhiser considers. He adds, however,

Such a turn of events, however, is exceedingly unlikely. For one thing, if the Supreme Court accepts the continuing-body theory, it would do a whole lot more than simply lock the filibuster in place. Were the mere existence of a legislator who has not stood for election since a law or rule was enacted enough to prevent newly elected lawmakers from repealing a recently enacted law, then all federal laws could be enacted with a six-year shield of invulnerability — untouchable until the last senator present when the law was enacted stands for a new election. Nothing in the Supreme Court’s precedents suggest that erecting such a shield would be acceptable, however — indeed, they say quite the opposite. As far back as the Court’s 1810 decision in Fletcher v. Peck, the justices unanimously declared that “one legislature is competent to repeal any act which a former legislature was competent to pass,” acknowledging no exception for laws enacted within the last three election cycles.
There is also a profoundly practical reason why the Court is unlikely to undo a change to the Senate rules — it lacks the authority to do so. Under a line of precedents stretching back to its landmark 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, the Court will actually refuse to hear any case involving a matter that is “textually committed to the political branches.” In other words, if the text of the Constitution itself provides that a particular question must be resolved by the Senate, the House, or the White House, the Supreme Court won’t stand in that branch’s way…The Supreme Court would be grossly overstepping its bounds to second-guess the senators.

And lest we forget, we are one justice away from restoring a modicum of sanity to the High Court. Millhiser concludes:

Now that it has enough votes to sustain a filibuster, it is exceedingly likely that a Senate minority bent on pure obstructionism will have enough votes to block virtually all of the majority’s legislative agenda. Meanwhile, health-care costs will continue to grow at three or four times the rate of wage growth. Long-term deficits will continue to threaten the future of American prosperity. Largely unregulated markets will remain a time bomb that could trigger another great recession, and catastrophic climate change will continue to threaten the very existence of many island and coastal civilizations.
Fifty-one senators will have the power to change this outlook next January — but they get exactly one chance to act.

The downside of Millhiser’s challenge is that even under the best case scenario, we are stuck with the current mess for 11 months. However, that should not deter Democratic leaders from making use of the budget reconciliation process as much as possible in the interim, when the stark alternative facing them leading up to November is campaigning with zero Democratic reforms enacted between now and then.
To do otherwise amounts to a pathetic abdication of political responsibility, recalling a skit by one of the guerilla theater groups of the sixties, in which a group of protesters occupies the Dean’s office of a large university. When ordered to leave, they get down on all fours and crawl out of the building on hands and knees, chanting “Grovel, grovel, grovel. Who are we to ask for political power?”
So the question for Democratic leaders is, “do we have the mettle to act on our mandate?” The only acceptable answer for a political party that hopes to have a future is, “Hell, yes.”

Daily Kos has just released a large Research 2000 poll it commissioned to test the views of just over 2000 self-identified Republicans. Here’s Markos’ analysis of the findings, and here are the crosstabs so you can slice and dice the results yourself.
Markos calls the poll’s results “startling,” but I guess that depends on your expectations. Seems to me that it confirms the strong rightward trend in the GOP that its leaders have been signaling now for the last two years. Some of this actually represents a long-term trend that ‘s been underway since the early 1960s; some of it involves the shrinkage of the Republican “base” to a seriously conservative core from the party’s identification peak around 2004; and some is attributable to a conscious or subconscious effort to absolve the party from the sins of the Bush administration by treating it as too “moderate.”
In any event, aside from a general and rigorous conservatism, the two findings that are probably most relevant to the immediate political future, and to the relationship between Republicans and independents, are the GOPers’ exceptionally hateful attitude towards Barack Obama, and their unregenerated cultural extremism. The first factor will complicate any efforts in 2010 to go after congressional Democrats as a bad influence on the well-meaning president (who remains more popular among voters outside the GOP than either party in Congress). And the second undermines the media narrative that today’s Republicans are semi-libertarians who have finally sloughed off all that crazy Christian Right stuff and are focused like a laser beam on the economy and fiscal issues.
How much do self-identified Republicans hate Barack Obama? Well, this is hardly news, but in the DK/R2K poll they favor Obama’s impeachment by a 39/32 margin (the rest are “not sure”). Only a narrow plurality (42/36) believes he was born in the United States. By a 63/21 margin, they believe he is a “socialist” (tell that to his progressive critics!). Only 24% say Obama “wants the terrorists to win,” but with 33% being “not sure” about it, only a minority (43%) seem convinced he’s not an actual traitor. Only 36% disagree with the proposition that Obama is a “racist who hates white people” (31% agree with the proposition, and the rest are not sure). And only 24% seem to be willing to concede he actually won the 2008 election (12% think “ACORN stole it,” and 55% aren’t sure either way).
On the cultural-issues front, self-identified Republicans are divided only between the very conservative and the very very conservative. The number that jumps off the page is that 31% want to outlaw contraceptives (56% are opposed). But that’s not too surprising since 34% believe “the birth control pill is abortion,” and 76% (with only 8% opposed) agree that “abortion is murder.”
But it’s the homophobia of GOPers that’s really striking, considering the steady national trend away from such a posture, particularly among younger voters. It extends beyond familiar controversial issues like gay marriage (opposed 77/7) and gays-in-the-military (opposed 55/26) to exceptionally unambiguous statements of equality like the ability of openly gay people to teach in public schools (opposed 73/8). This last finding really is amazing, since St. Ronald Reagan himself famously opposed a California ballot initiative banning gay and lesbian public school teachers, way back in 1978.
The crosstabs for the poll break down the results on regional lines, and there are some variations; most notably, southerners are marginally more conservative on most questions, and really stand out in their incredible levels of support for their own state’s secession from the United States (fully 33% favor a return to 1861, as opposed to only 10% in the northeast). But by and large, the regional splits aren’t that massive; the old idea of the GOP as a coalition of conservatives based in the south and west and moderates in the midwest and northeast is totally obsolete.
The poll finds no real front-runner for the 2012 presidential nomination. Given eight options (about the only plausible candidate not mentioned is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels), Sarah Palin tops the list at 16%, with Romney at 11%, Dick Cheney (!) at 10%, and everyone else in single digits. Fully 42% are undecided. Given the overall results of the poll, that almost certainly means the 2012 nomination process will exert a powerful pull to the right for all the candidates. I mean, really, in a scattered field, is it at all unlikely that someone will focus on that one-third of southern Republicans pining for secession and start channeling John C. Calhoun before the early South Carolina primary? Or might not a candidate seeking traction in the Iowa Caucuses, a low-turnout affair typically dominated by Right-to-Life activists, maybe call for banning those “murderous” birth control pills?
We’ll know soon enough how crazy the GOP crazy-train will get in 2012, I suppose. But it’s a lead-pipe certainty that the dominant right wing of the Republican Party won’t find any reason to moderate itself if the GOP makes serious gains in November.

Yes, sports fans, the 2010 election cycle begins today, with primaries in Illinois, including selection of candidates for governor and U.S. Senator.
The gubernatorial race on the Democratic side features a close battle between incumbent Pat Quinn, who succeeded to the post from the lieutenant governorship when Rod Blagojevich was forced out of office, and state comptroller Dan Hynes. The Democratic senate primary has front-runner and state treasurer Alexi Giannoulias trying to hold off former Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman, with Chicago Urban League chief Cheryle Jackson also a factor.
Ideology isn’t much of a factor in these Democratic primaries, but negative campaigning is, with Hynes using an ad with negative comments about Quin from the late, revered Chicago mayor Harold Washington, and Giannoulias’ rivals blasting him for the financial collapse of a bank in which his family has been heavily involved.
GOP primaries, by contrast, are mostly about ideology, with even well-documented “moderates” racing to the right and the Tea Party/conservative Republican coalition fighting stiff odds to defeat RINO candidates. In the gubernatorial primary, the designated right-wing candidate is Andrew Andrzejewski, though most observers think former state Attorney General Pat Ryan and former state party chair Andy McKenna are the front runners.
And in the GOP senate primary, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk has had a big bulls-eye on his back from conservatives throughout this race, but after a campaign in which he has constantly tried to make himself acceptable to the Right, he is strongly favored to prevail over developer Patrick Hughes.
There are also a number of U.S. House primaries (notably the Kirk open seat, and GOP challenges to vulnerable Democratic Reps. Melissa Bean and Debbie Halvorson).
We’ll have full analysis of the results as they come in, for those of you not riveted to the Tube for the Lost Final Season Premiere.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira provides an important update on political attitudes toward health care reform. Teixeira explains:

…In a Kaiser Family Foundation/Washington Post/Harvard Public Health follow-up survey to the Massachusetts election, voters in that election were asked their views on the Massachusetts Universal Health Insurance Law, a law “assuring that virtually all Massachusetts residents have health insurance.” Massachusetts voters said they favored that law by 68-27, and even conservative Scott Brown’s supporters backed the law by 51-44. As for Obama’s claim that the public is not well informed about the health care reform bills and would support these bills more if they were clearly explained, he seems to be on very secure ground according to the latest Kaiser Health Tracking poll. In that poll the public’s reaction to 27 different elements of health care reform legislation was tested, and in 22 of those cases the public had a net positive reaction, with more people favorably inclined toward the measure than unfavorably inclined.

Teixeira then cites “the 10 most strongly supported features of the legislation,” including:

tax credits to small businesses (73 percent said they were more likely to support legislation with this provision compared to 11 percent who said were less likely); health insurance exchange (67-16); won’t change most people’s existing health care arrangements (66-10); guaranteed issue of coverage despite pre-existing conditions (63-24); Medicaid expansion (62-22); extend dependent coverage through age 25 (60-22); help close the Medicare prescription drug doughnut hole (60-21); increased income taxes on the wealthy (59-24); subsidy assistance to individuals (57-24); and reduce the deficit (56-20).

But Teixeira cautions “much of the public—exactly Obama’s point—does not know these provisions are in the reform bills that passed the House and the Senate,” and adds,

According to the same poll, among the provisions above that were tested, lack of awareness ranged from a high of 56 percent for closing the doughnut hole to a low of 28 percent for subsidizing individuals. For most provisions, around 40 percent or more of the public was unaware the provisions were in the legislation.

As Teixeira concludes, Republican charges that the public opposes the Democratic health care reform plan are groundless — as usual, and President Obama is right on target in citing the need to promote public awareness of the legislation’s components.

According to all the insider accounts, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was the finalist with Sarah Palin for the 2008 Republican vice presidential nod. He’s now generally considered a major player for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. In both cases, Pawlenty’s major credential is that he doesn’t offend any significant conservative interest groups.
I’ve already written a couple of pieces suggesting that this guy is a less than a political fireball. But he really does seem to be positioning himself as the ultimate lowest-common-denominator candidate. Just today (via Matt Yglesias), I read a Tim Paw op-ed in Politico that was one of the dumbest, paint-by-the-numbers utterances on record.
This was presumably Tim’s response to the Obama budget, but it could have been written twenty or even thirty years ago, for delivery at some midwestern Lincoln Day Dinner that couldn’t attract a better speaker. Entitled “Ponzi Scheme on the Potomac,” the piece never bothers to explain its initial assertion that the federal budget is indeed anything like a “Ponzi Scheme,” and then descends into incoherent banality.
Pawlenty’s Big Idea, you see, is a constitutional amendment to require a balanced federal budget. This was a very popular idea a long, long time ago, until it became apparent that (1) it was a way for politicians to avoid talking about how, actually, the federal budget should be balanced, and (2) such an amendment would never, ever, be enacted, in no small part because it might require spending cuts and/or tax increases that a majority of politicians, and for that matter, a majority of Americans, would oppose.
Within seconds of wheeling out this antediluvian idea, Pawlenty calls for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent, and for additional tax cuts, which shows you why he favors a balanced budget only in the abstract sense of the term.
Tim Paw’s think piece wheezes to the finish line with a recitation of his proud fiscal record in Minnesota, capped by the boast that he “moved the state out of the Top 10 in tax burden.” Too bad that only 37% of Gopher State voters say they’d vote for him for president, according to a recent Rasmussen survey.
All in all, it’s hard to imagine Pawlenty outclassing Republican rivals like Palin or Huckabee, who, whatever their other abundant demerits, are interesting people who can light up rooms full of rabid conservatives. And it’s hard to imagine this plodding pol chasing Barack Obama around the ring in a general election debate. If this is the best the GOP can offer, please bring him on.

Reading Peggy Noonan is emotionally difficult for me. For one thing, she was the first of a breed that I find inherently obnoxious: the Celebrity Speechwriter. Perhaps it’s just envy, since I happened to have labored at that craft in total obscurity for decades. But there’s something, well, unseemly, about a ghost that is so all-pervasively visible, and so willing to take credit for the golden words uttered by employers who, after all, were actually elected to public office and bear responsibility for their deeds as well as their words.
But more importantly, ever since she obtained her own bylines and television gigs, Noonan has steadily “grown” into one of those imperious columnists who express exasperation at the idiocy and small-mindedness of politicians, particularly those who happen to harbor policy views at variance with her own. And that’s especially annoying when, as in her snarky take on the State of the Union Address for the Wall Street Journal, she is offering dubious and partisan “advice” to Barack Obama, designed to attack what he is doing while professing sympathy for his challenges.
There are no less than three such toxic bits of “advice” in the column in question. First, Noonan mocks President Obama for allowing Congress to push him around, unlike, of course, her first Big Boss, Ronald Reagan:

James Baker, that shrewd and knowing man, never, as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, allowed his president to muck about with congressmen, including those of his own party. A president has stature and must be held apart from Congress critters. He can meet with them privately, in the Oval Office. There, once, a Republican senator who’d announced opposition to a bill important to the president tried to claim his overall loyalty: “Mr. President, you know I’d jump out of a plane for you if you asked, but—”
“Jump,” said Reagan. The senator, caught, gave in.
That’s how you treat them. You don’t let them blur your picture and make you more common. You don’t let them call the big shots.

Aside from reflecting the eternal Cult of Reagan, these words certainly distort the actual relationship of the 40th president with Congress. Nothing was more central to the Reagan presidency than his initial budget and tax proposals. His budget director, David Stockman, wrote an entire book on how these proposals were mangled into a fiscal abomination by Members of Congress from both parties. It was entitled, revealingly, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed.
Quite likely Barack Obama erred during his first year by deferring too much to congressional committee barons on health care reform, and on the composition of appropriations bills. But that was a matter of degree, not some fundamental failure to pursue a Fuhrerprinzip that separates the Big Men from the small. Obama’s immediate predecessor was arguably a small man in genuine leadership capacity, but no one since Nixon has demanded more imperial powers. America can do without more of that.
Second, Noonan stipulates that Obama’s anti-Washington rhetoric is laughably in contradiction with his policy agenda:

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don’t trust us, we think of no one but ourselves.

Now you don’t have to think too deeply about this to understand that Noonan is saying that “Washington” is “liberalism.” So “anti-Washington” sentiment is conservatism. Thus, presumably, for Obama to redeem the “change Washington” rhetoric of his presidential campaign, he needs to become conservative! What a brilliant idea!
This is all pretty ludicrous, of course, since recent conservative administrations (particularly those following Noonan’s exalted notions of presidential leadership) have been avid to use federal power to wage undeclared wars, usurp civil liberties, and preempt state regulations of corporations. Moreover, you can be angry at “Washington” not just for trying to do too much, but for trying to do too little, or for doing what it does poorly or corruptly. “Change” can be in any sort of direction, not just Peggy Noonan’s direction.
Third, Noonan extends an especially devious back-handed compliment to Obama (employing the hoary device of an anonymous “friendly critic” who seems to resemble Noonan herself) of suggesting that he’s “too honest” to undertake the obvious route of “moving to the center,” by which she means “moving to the right:”

“I don’t think he can do a Bill Clinton pivot, because he’s not a pragmatist, he’s an ideologue. He’s a community organizer. He mixes the discrimination he felt as a young man with the hardship so many feel in this country, and he wants to change it and the way to change that is government programs and not opportunity.”
The great issue, this friendly critic added, is debt. The public knows this; Congress and the White House do not. “To me the Republicans are as rotten as the Democrats” in terms of spending. “Almost.”
“I hope we have big changes in 2010,” the friend said. Only significant loss will force the president to focus on spending. “To heal our country we need to get the arrogance out of the White House and the elitists out of the Congress. We need tough love. We need a real adult in the White House because we don’t have adults in the Congress.”

So Obama can only be saved by a Republican victory in 2010 (the only “big changes” on tap), which will enable him to act as an “adult” on “debt,” which the people–and Peggy Noonan and Obama’s “friend”–understand as “the great issue.” (Never mind that it didn’t seem to be a “great issue” when George W. Bush was running up most of the debt we now face).
What’s really going on in Noonan’s column, beyond a remarkable display both of arrogance and of disjointed, illogical writing, is a theme we will hear a lot of between now and November. Republicans understand that for all his struggles, Barack Obama remains more popular and trusted than they are. Heavy-handed right-wing attacks on the president as some sort of treasonous monster can backfire, and also don’t comport well with the sort of well-bred sophistication that conservatives like Noonan cultivate. So Obama is Gulliver among the Lilliputians, held back from his better impulses by the petty spendthrifts of Congress and the hobgoblins of his own ideological and “community organizer” background.
If and when Republicans make big gains this November and succeed in completely thwarting Obama’s efforts to act as president, “friends” like Noonan will sadly conclude that he couldn’t overcome his shortcomings, and begin calling for a “real adult”–Mitt Romney, anyone?–in 2012. Bet on it.

In the fog of commentary that will come out on the release of the president’s FY 2011 budget today, you can look for two simple optics. The administration and its allies will argue that this budget combines short-term job creation and demand stimulus with the first steps towards long-term deficit reduction. Republicans will shriek about every spending and deficit number. Their biggest challenge is to figure out how long to pause between demands for balanced budgets and demands for deficit-boosting lower taxes.
All in all, it’s a spectacle you can safely ignore.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama executed his well-advertised double pivot toward job generation and fiscal restraint. Almost lost in the pundits’ babble was the release of a CBO report, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2010 to 2020,” coupled with CBO director Doug Elmendorf’s testimony to the House and Senate budget committees. CBO’s analysis makes it clear just how daunting the employment and fiscal challenges are over the next decade . . . and how perilous the political terrain will be for the Democratic Party.
Let’s start with jobs. For a variety of structural reasons, despite the severity of the recession, CBO predicts a slower-than-average recovery, with fourth-quarter to fourth-quarter GDP growth of only 2.1 percent in 2010 and 2.4 percent in 2011. This means that unemployment this November is likely to be about where it is right now—namely, 10 percent. At the end of 2011, it will stand at 9.1 percent. As growth accelerates in 2012, unemployment will decline more quickly, but it will still be high by historical standards—between 7.5 and 8 percent—on the eve of the next presidential election. Assuming no new recession, we won’t return to full employment until 2016.
These projections are very bad news for middle-class Americans—and for politicians as well. A midterm election conducted in these circumstances is likely to go poorly for the majority party, all the more so because no one thinks that the short-term measures the president proposed will make much of a difference over the next ten months. And no president wants to begin his campaign for reelection with unemployment over 9 percent.
What about the fiscal situation? Using the legally required baseline assumptions, the budget deficit is expected to average about $600 billion a year between 2011 and 2020, and the debt-to-GDP ratio would rise from 53 percent to 67 percent. Using more realistic assumptions, the annual deficits would be much larger, and the debt would reach nearly 100 percent of GDP. Almost no one thinks that our economy could sustain this level of borrowing and debt accumulation without severe damage, including soaring interest payments that would crowd out needed public and private investment.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, while Obama has accurately identified the economic challenges we face, the responses he has proposed thus far are woefully inadequate. Last week, he told Diane Sawyer that he’d rather be a successful one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. Unfortunately, there’s a third possibility. To avoid it and become the transformational president he clearly wants to be, he must challenge his administration, his party, and the entire political system to acknowledge the true scope of our ills and embrace solutions commensurate with the problems.