Harry Reid and Senate Democrats have thrown down the gauntlet, in no uncertain terms. If GOPers follow through with their threat to pursue the so-called “nuclear option” (a procedural maneuver that would outlaw filibusters on judicial nominations and allow them to slide through on a simple majority vote), Senate Dems will stop cooperating with all the legislative lubricants (many of which require unanimous consent) that keep the chamber operating.According to (subscription-only) Roll Call today, every Senate Democrat is on board with this strategy, and while Republicans claim to have 50 solid votes for upholding the rule change that’s at the heart of “going nuclear,” their ranks are shaky, beginning with Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter.There are several smart things about the way Reid has approached this fight.First, he’s made it clear that Democratic resistance will not extend to issues like support for U.S. troops, urgent national security matters, or the basic functioning of the federal government. This will avoid some of the parallels the media, in its two-sides-to-every-argument approach to partisan issues, would otherwise draw to Newt Gingrich’s defiant and hugely unsuccessful government shutdown of 1995.Second, Reid is treating the “nuclear option” not as a procedural matter, or even as a defiance of Senate traditions, but as part of a broader pattern of abuse of power by the Republicans who control Washington. As such, he is linking Democratic opposition to this tactic to a broader message of reform, which is exactly what Democrats ought to be doing every day of the year. If nothing else, it will help remind the roughly one-third of the population that doesn’t know who runs Congress that Republicans can no longer pose as the anti-Washington party, because they are in charge of the whole federal government.And third, in terms of the underlying dispute over the judiciary, Reid is linking Democratic resistance to a long bipartisan tradition of opposition to one-party and executive-branch control of the federal bench. I hope Democrats take every opportunity to remind people that these are lifetime appointments we are talking about, which could have a profound impact on the laws of this country for decades.Now, Democrats obviously have a Big Bertha in reserve: the GOP’s real goal, which is to pave the way for Supreme Court appointments designed to overturn Roe v. Wade, the long-delayed payoff to the cultural conservative foot-soldiers of the Republican base. As a self-proclaimed (if moderate) pro-lifer, Reid may well have special credibility in opposing an indirect assault on the right to choose, by GOPers who know they would lose any straight fight on abortion.Add it all up, and you’ve got a formula for raising the stakes on this obscure-sounding conflict, and that’s what Democrats need in order to win. Some real drama is required to overcome the media perception that this is just cloakroom maneuvering by the partisan pols in Washington, over a snoozer of an issue.Maybe the Democratic battle-plan will act as a deterrent to the deployment of the nuclear option. Some GOPers, after all, want to use the so-called Judicial Obstruction issue as a conservative fundraising and crowd-pleasing device going into the 2006 elections. And even more of them won’t be happy with the consequences of provoking a partial shutdown of the Senate, interfering with all sorts of opportunities for pork-barrelling, constituency-tending, and beast-starving (not to mention those handy little bills naming some home-state highway interchange after a big contributor or local potentate).But deterrent or not, this is a fight well worth having, and a fight that can only be won if Democrats are serious and systematic about waging it with a large reform message.

Suddenly, the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, the U.S. Senate, is full of meaningful activity this week, thanks to the annual debate on a congressional budget resolution. Today Bill Nelson of FL offered a sense-of-the-Senate resolution expressing opposition to any Social Security proposal that involved “deep benefit cuts or a massive increase in debt.” It failed on a 50-50 vote, but as Sam Rosenfeld noted at Tapped, its big-tent wording not only attracted support from every single Democrat and five Republicans, but also put 50 GOPers on record as having no problem with “deep benefit cuts or a massive increase in debt,” a gift to Democrats that will keep on giving for many campaigns to come. And it was a particularly smart move for Nelson, a prime target for Republicans in 2006 in a state where messing with Social Security is just not something you want to do. But as Mark Schmitt of The Decembrist has explained, the Senate will consider another amendment tomorrow with perhaps bigger implications: an amendment to the budget resolution cosponsored by Democrat Russ Feingold and Republican Lincoln Chafee that would reimpose pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rules for spending increases AND tax cuts. This amendment would block the current administration/GOP leadership effort to extend some of the 2001 tax cuts without offsetting spending or revenue measures. If it passes–probably an even bet at this point–PAYGO might well replicate last year’s House-Senate Republican impasse over the budget resolution, which means GOPers would not be able to ram through their specific budget plans (not only tax cuts, but some nasty spending measures, especially on Medicaid) without the usual 60-vote requirement to avoid a Senate filibuster.In other words, this is a key step in unravelling the whole Bush legislative agenda for the year, and in stopping the insane tax and fiscal priorities that will eventually disable our government from doing much of anything to meet big national challenges. The vote tomorrow merits some real attention and energy.

Funniest lede of the day? This one, from AP (via CNN):”House Majority Leader Tom DeLay strongly denied wrongdoing Tuesday in connection with two overseas trips financed by outside organizations, and said he is eager to discuss the facts with leaders of the House ethics committee.”I like that “strongly denied.” What’s he going to do? “Weakly” deny wrongdoing? It reminds me of a great Hunter Thompson fantasy (we miss you, man) from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, wherein a doomed candidate denies reports he’s withdrawing from the race and “predicts total victory in all states.” DeLay’s alleged “eagerness” to talk about his junkateering–especially the little casino-financed jaunt to the U.K.–is pretty funny, too. Yeah, I bet he just can’t wait to lay out all the details. The way this story’s going, it’ll probably turn out he made the trip on Hooters Air.But the best part is DeLay’s designated confessional box: the House Ethics Committee. Good thing he had the foresight to neuter the watchdog committee completely in a series of moves earlier this year. Making his case to those guys is the functional equivalent of sticking it in a bottle and dropping it in the ocean. But maybe he should wait a week or two before he gets chatty about his latest series of ethical lapses. At his current pace, there will be two or three more, er, ah, situations to explain by Friday. DeLay, of course, is blaming all his problems on a partisan Democratic witch-hunt. He’s giving us way, way too much credit for industry and imagination. Nobody could invent this level of ethics recidivism. And with more smoke in the air than a roadhouse on Saturday night, DeLay could burst into flames any day now, with or without Democrats helpfully offering some lighter fluid.

One of the inherent risks of blogging is that once you hit that “publish” buttom, it’s Out There and you can’t really take it back. My last post defending myself and the DLC from a tirade by Kos will likely earn me lots of emails and links deploring my involvement in this “fight” (vindicating the school-yard axiom that nobody really cares who hits first or hardest; the Assistant Principal will punish everybody). What I should have done is to link to the screed, and then quote Woody Allen’s words to the Christopher Walken character in Annie Hall:”Excuse me, Duane, I have an appointment back on Planet Earth.”

Well, it was just a matter of time, I guess. Perhaps upset at occasional bouts of Sympathy for the Devil being posted on his own page, Kos of DailyKos has more or less called for kicking the DLC out of the Democratic Party for being mean to other Democrats. Or at least I have no other way of understanding today’s characterization of myself and my colleagues as “the media’s handy tool for Democratic bashing. Enemies of unity of the left. Self-important fools who exist merely to advance the other side’s agenda.” Nothing much ambiguous about that, eh?The crowning “outrage,” apparently, is the recent suggestion by Al From and Marshall Wittman that maybe the leadership of MoveOn doesn’t speak for the Democratic Party as a whole, a suggestion Kos chooses to interpret as a call for the party to “purge millions of supporters from its ranks.” (Oh, yeah, Al also mocked bloggers; I somehow managed to get over it, down there in my basement).Man, talk about beams and motes. The vitriol that’s been poured on the DLC by Kos and several other netwarriors in the last couple of years is endless, personal, often obscene, and frankly, a little nuts. If we’re as irrelevant as he keeps insisting we are, why bother? Just ignore us, and we’ll go away, right? If our only value, as Kos suggests today, is to provide right-wing media with anti-Democratic quotes, then you have to wonder why so many elected officials bother to identify with us and come to our events (e.g., one today attended by Sen. Joe Biden)?Indeed, that question seems to bother Kos as well, since his very next post begins a process of “calling out” DLC-friendly Democratic pols and asking them to disassociate themselves from us. He even took the trouble to dig down in our web page–bypassing a few hundred thousand pages of policy work, which is what we do to pass the time while waiting for the next call from Fox News–and discover that Sen. Barack Obama is still listed in our data base! Scandal! (He’s in there because he recently joined the Senate New Democrat Coalition, all of whose members are in our database, which is about as controversial as a phone book). Hillary Clinton? Evan Bayh? Better get away from those people, or risk the consequences.This is more embarrassing than anything else, to tell you the truth. If Kos was screaming at us for alleged agreement with Bush or something, he’d at least have the beginnings of an argument. But being called “divisive” by a guy who’s way around the bend in hating this particular group of Democrats is just a bad joke.Well, I for one ain’t going anywhere. And having contested this particular guy’s right to show me the door, I will say no more about this or future Kos temper-tantrums. After all, I’ve got some of that deceptive Republican-bashing to do, and a few of those issues to work on that nobody cares to hear from me about. And despite this terrible anathema, I remain ready to break bread with anybody in the party who wants to talk, self-important fool that I am.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

Thanks to the American Prospect’s apparent new policy of hiding content to sell actual magazines, I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting to write about a fascinating new Matt Yglesias article on Democrats and national security. I read a bootleg copy, but didn’t want to discuss it until I could steer eager readers to a link.But fortunately, in a Tapped post today, Matt did a nice summary of his basic hypothesis:

On forward-looking issues there are, to be sure, disagreements among Democrats. But in my experience those disagreements don’t split the party into two camps, don’t map onto a hawk-dove divide, and don’t have a great deal to do with the Iraq War. The bigger divide is just between people of various persuasions who are determined to continue focusing on national security and find a way to make the Democrats competitive on the issue versus those who’d prefer to put their heads in the sand and hope for a revival of ’90s-style “it’s the economy, stupid” politics.

In the full article, Matt goes on to suggest that this politics of evasion on national security is partly attributable to the constituency-group mindset of so many Democrats. If there ain’t a Big Democratic Group that cares about a subject, why should the rest of us care, right?I’ll do a fuller treatment of Matt’s article when the fine folks at the Prospect put it online, but it does remind me of a satori moment I experienced back in the 90s when the constituency-group focus of my party became clear to me. Shortly after Roy Romer became general chairman of the DNC, a colleague ran into my office with a big fat book, crying “Look, Romer’s already making a difference over there; this is an actual issues book for Democratic candidates!” Together, we excitedly looked at the table of contents, only to find that the “issues” were all organized by constituency group (“Public Employees Issues,” “Asian-Pacific Islanders Issues,” etc., etc.). Made us want to howl at the moon.

Like many Americans, I have temporarily put aside poltical differences to focus on the NCAA basketball tournament.Unlike many Americans, I am searching for analysis of the women’s, not the men’s tournament.In part that’s because my preferred school, the University of Georgia, is not in the men’s tournament, while its women’s team, as always, is in the hunt, seeded sixth but considered dangerously capable of going higher.But in part it’s because the women’s college game is more fun to watch from a purist’s perspetive. They always block out. They rarely miss layups. They generally hit their free-throws. And their 3-point shooting is usually strategic, not egocentric.Aside from my attachment to the Lady Dogs, my interest in the women’s game goes back to early childhood, when I had several aunts who played small-town high school basketball down in Haralson County, Georgia. One year I attended a regional championship game with my Aunt Sylvia, who spent the entire 48 minutes screaming at the refs to call “3 seconds in the lane” and other technically accurate but rare penalties. I learned then that women in many respects took the game more seriously than men.So I’ll watch the men’s tournament, but will reserve my real passion for the women’s game, where all the old virtues of basketball, with few of the new moneyed vices, live on.

In a long-delayed response to the emergence of the Religious Right, there are stirrings of life on the Religious Left, reports the intrepid Amy Sullivan in (subscription-only) Salon. Her departure point is a press conference held last week by leaders of five mainline Protestant churches (the Protestant Episcopal Church, the United Methodists, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Church of Christ, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) denouncing George W. Bush’s proposed budget as “immoral.”While greeting this development, Sullivan goes on to indict “liberal” Protestants (the primary components, outside the African-American churches, of the “Christian Left”) for a self-marginalizing, secularized approach to political engagement in the past, complemented by a hands-off attitude towards religion by these churches’ natural allies in the Democratic Party. She also notes that mainline churches have been frequently paralyzed by internal denominational fights in recent years, exemplified by the current travails of the Episcopalians over same-sex unions.If anything, I suspect Amy’s being too nice to her fellow (and my fellow) mainline Protestants. Look at that list of denominations represented in the anti-Bush press conference again. They were once the dominant religious, cultural and political forces in America. They have been shrinking in numbers, and in influence, for decades, even as fundamentalist and pentecostal denominations grow like topsy. There are certainly demographic and sociological reasons aplenty for their decline, but you don’t have to be a conservative to understand that religious liberals have largely lost their prophetic voices somewhere between weekly worship services and the host of civic and political organizations they support with great energy and commitment.The steady secularization of mainline Protestantism over the second half of the twentieth century is an old and familiar story. But its relationship to the counter-secularization now championed by the Christian Right is less well understood. It’s fairly safe to say much of the political and social teaching being hurled at congregations across the religious spectrum is dangerously disconnected from its scriptural and theological roots. This gives religio-political conservatives an advantage, given the natural tendency of religiously minded people to value what they understand as “traditional values.” And it gives fundamentalists a crucial advantage, because they can selectively find “inerrant” scriptural support for any number of right-wing cultural and political positions.That’s why the revival of mainline Protestantism as a religious force, and as a poltical and cultural force, point in exactly the same direction: a movement to rediscover and proclaim the profoundly un-conservative message of the Law, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Church Fathers, and Church History, with a minimum reliance on modern sociology or Identity Politics.Let the Christian Right be the faction of bad physical and social science, bad economics, and distorted, selective history. Let them be the ones who dress up secular agendas in “God Talk.”Sure, the Religious Left needs to adopt better organizational methods, better communications strategies, and better tactics. But above all, “liberal” Christians need to save themselves as religious communities before they can fulfill their calling to help redeem the world for truly Christian values.

Today’s latest Washington Post installment of the Jack Abramoff/Indian Casino/Ralph Reed story is especially surreal. James Dobson puts in a guest appearance in a supporting role to Reed in pledging to whip up evangelical Christian opposition to a rival to Ambramoff’s client. The senior leadership of the U.S. Department of the Interior drifts in an out of the story as they weigh various Indian casino bids and warily eye politically connected suitors. Huge amounts of money change hands. Golf junkets abound. If you didn’t know this was nonfiction, you’d almost swear the whole spectacle was a promo for some new HBO series called The Cross and the Croupier or Indian Givers or Triple Cross or something. If this doesn’t become the Watergate of this era, it’s not for lack of drama, intrigue, or tragi-comedy. Don’t wait for the DVD; pop some popcorn and read it now.

Garance Franke-Ruta’s recent American Prospect article on key differences between Left and Right bloggers has created an interesting and useful debate. But I suspect she may be spurring a different, but equally useful, debate in a new post on Tapped that challenges the idea that bloggers are mainly “citizen-journalists” who represent an entirely new phenomenon in political commentary.Franke-Ruta goes through a whole list of leading Left and Center-Left blogs, including this one, and notes the various credentials–in terms of background, experience, institutional ties, and even social connections–their authors bring to the keyboard. Her post will probably set off a backlash among bloggers who (a) fear the blogosphere is being taken over by Washington and/or Establishment Types, and (b) really freak out at the idea that Washington and/or Establishment Types are eating, boozing, and shmoozing together in order to promote each other at the expense of their less-connected peers.I did a long post last fall providing my own, tentative take on the relationship between blogs and other forms of political expression, and concluded that the whole phenomenon represents the confluence of a new technology with a classic market failure in political journalism and advocacy.Alternatives to market failures create all sorts of new outlets for creativity and expanded involvement, and that’s been the case with blogs. But alternatives to market failures also produce a market response, and that’s why so many Washington political institutions have started up or blessed blogs.So: does that mean the Establishment is neutering the blogosphere? No, for two major reasons.First, the Establishment response to the growing influence of online competition has loosened up the Establishment itself in significant ways. Kos is now a player in Democratic campaign planning. Nobody involved in Democratic strategy on the Social Security issue can ignore Josh Marshall. And institutional blogging is changing institutions. The stable of young bloggers at the Prospect is changing that staid journal’s image and emphasis significantly. I can tell you a lot of people seem to be taking a new look at the DLC thanks to this blog and The Moose. The Center for American Progress and the New America Foundation are now sponsoring blogs, along with most political magazines. Co-optation of market-share-threatening trends is generally a two-way street. So the invasion of the blogosphere by the Establishment is a tribute to the medium’s influence.But secondly, whatever advantages Establishment bloggers have, everybody else remains just a click or a google-search away, and the quality and value-added of non-Establishment blogs continue to bubble up. I’m forever discovering that some blog I read now and then is being written by somebody living in America rather than Washington–someone with a day job who is light years away from getting a hand on the greasy pole of print or electronic journalism, or from a gig with a major political outfit or think-tank. Like most low-mid-major bloggers, I get a constant stream of email from people wanting me to link to their blogs, and the backlog of requests is a constant source of anxious guilt.But they are there, in far greater numbers than the people lining up for interviews with Establishment outlets, and boasting qualifications–like the ability to write, and an actual knowledge of actual conditions around the country–that their Ivy-educated peers often don’t have.Yeah, many bloggers are people who’d be doing faily well in the punditocracy if the internet did not exist, and yeah, the internet has created opportunities for intelligent commentary and advocacy by a whole lot of folks who didn’t go to Harvard and thus can’t get in the door at The New Republic. Let’s hope the supply and demand curves ultimately begin to converge. In the mean time, there’s space for us all.