One of the more profound changes in American governance in recent years has been the normalization of the Senate filibuster–or, to be more precise, the threat of a Senate filibuster, since actual filibusters rarely occur. To make a very long story short, since 60 votes are needed to invoke cloture and cut off debate on any measure that doesn’t benefit from special rules (e.g., a budget reconciliation bill), a de facto 60-vote requirement has emerged for passage of legislation in the Senate. Hence, all the excitement about Al Franken becoming the 60th Democratic Senator.
In the train of this development has been a growing obsession with partisan ideological unity. If getting legislation through the Senate requires 60 votes, then no party can tolerate much in the way of defections. And by the same token, undecided senators in either party can exercise an enormous amount of power on close votes–as we saw when “centrist” Democratic and Republican senators reshaped the economic stimulus bill.
As J.P. Green noted a couple of days ago, there’s already a lot of agonizing going on about the relative willingness of Senate Democratic leaders to put the screws to “centrist” red-state Democrats on health care reform, including such specific measures as a strong public option. I say “agonizing” because many Democrats are loath to make demands on senators that could endanger their political careers, and because it’s often hard to know on any particular piece of legislation where to draw the line that separates party discipline from party bondage.
That’s why yesterday’s statement by Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin defining party discipline not in terms of support for the “public option” or cap-and-trade or any other substantive position, but in terms of unity on cloture votes, was potentially very significant if it represents the beginning of a serious and sustained effort. It serves as a reminder that 60 votes are not in fact required to enact legislation in the Senate, and that supporting cloture is not in fact the same as supporting passage of a given bill. Inversely, a vote against cloture is (except in the rare circumstances of a rushed Senate bill) a vote to do nothing–to obstruct any and all legislation in favor of the status quo. And unless I am missing something, no senator has ever been defeated for re-election solely on the basis of voting for cloture on a bill they intend ultimately to oppose.
Insisting on these forgotten facts day in and day out could have an effect, if only to undermine the sixty-votes-myth and force wavering Democratic senators to explain why heterodox views require them to obstruct any action on major challenges facing the country, as though their constituents pay any real attention to procedural votes (news flash: they don’t). That should be a given. The harder question is whether the next step should be to impose real sanctions on senators who rebel on cloture votes. My personal feeling is that supporting a filibuster against your own party and your own party’s president should be treated as a serious and rare measure on major issues of conscience where the sacrifice of some of the prerogatives of seniority are a small price to pay. So maybe that price really should be paid. But at a minimum, the practice of thinking of cloture votes as identical to substantive votes, and tolerating defections on the former as just the same as the latter, needs to come to an end. There is no sixty-Senate-vote requirement for the enactment of regular legislation in the Constitution or in the Senate rules. We don’t need lockstep Democratic unity on policy initiatives. We just need unity on the simple matter of allowing the Senate to vote.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

The big news today on the health care reform front is a much-publicized rebuke delivered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus:

According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.

This was music to the ears of progressives who have been fretting for months that Baucus was going to crucially water down health care reform in the vain pursuit of bipartisanship. And more specifically, since Reid mentioned the risk of Democratic defections, the ukase is being cited as the first fruits of a “Progressive Block” strategy outlined recently by Chris Bowers, wherein supporters of a strong public option in health care reform would outflank “centrists” with a credible threat to take down the legislation entirely.
But in the rush by some observers to happily bury health care bipartisanship entirely, other possible motives for Reid’s tactic may be missed. As Jon Cohn notes today at TNR, Reid may simply be signalling to Republicans that they are exacting too high a price for their support:

As it happens, Reid’s tough talk could (that’s “could,” not “will”) end up making a bipartisan bill more likely. The more that Republicans believe Democrats are wliling to pass reform on their own–either by maintaining enough party discipline to break a filibuster or by trying to use the budget reconciliation process, in which legislation can pass with a simple majority vote–the more likely Republicans are to compromise. It’s possible Reid’s show of pique could actually strengthen Baucus’s hand for dealing with Grassley, while also strengthening the hand of those on the right–be they individual lawmakers or special interest groups–who would prefer a modestly unacceptable bill to one they really hate.

If Cohn’s speculation is correct, then this may not be a simple morality tale in which progressives finally start emulating Republicans by showing some spine (a favorite injunction in the progressive blogosphere), and roll on to victory, but a more complex dynamic involving pushes and pulls aimed at various factions in both parties. In particular, those who view the progress of health care reform as purely a matter of “spine” or “strength” should remember that public opinion is a big factor in all these senatorial calculations. It’s noteworthy that Reid called not only for preservation of the public option, but for stopping all the talk of paying for health care reform by taxing some portion of employer-sponsored health care benefits, which many progressives (though typically not those in the labor movement) strongly support. The public option is popular; taxing benefits is not.
It’s clear (as Cohn also notes today) that taking the benefit tax option off the table is going to complicate the process of “paying for” and hence enacting health care reform. But it also removes yet another stick-in-the-eye to Republicans, who can’t forget that the Obama-Biden campaign savaged John McCain for proposing elimination of the tax benefit (albeit in the pursuit of very different health care policies that can hardly be described as “reforms”).
So who knows exactly what Reid is up to or where the process will go next? I’m not sure even he knows, but one thing is for sure: progressive “strength” is best exerted in concert with public opinion, and in the service of a workable strategy.

Seems like a lot of the ink, bytes and air time being lavished on coverage of Sarah Palin’s latest stunt are focusing on the wrong question, which is” Why did she quit?” The more interesting question is “Is Sarah Palin over?”
Yes, we will be seeing lots of her in the months ahead, as she cranks up her campaign and runs around the country trying to raise dough for her legal fees and Republicans whose support she hopes to win. And the media will give her lots of play, just because she is a political bomb-thrower. But it seems to me that she has just added a lethal dose of doubt to her narrative. In his CNN.Politics.com commentary, “The Politics of Self-Destruction,” Paul Begala nails it nicely:

For all her whining about the ethics complaints brought against her, Sarah Palin is not the victim of the politics of personal destruction. She’s the victim of the politics of self destruction.
I have no idea why Palin decided to quit, so let’s just pretend she was telling the truth: She believes she can make more of a difference on the issues she cares about as a private citizen than as the chief executive of the Last Frontier. My guess is a lot of Alaskans wish she’d said that when she was trying to become governor, but what the heck.
…The speculation is that, rather than returning to being a private citizen, Palin aspires to the presidency. Good luck. She quit her job as city councilwoman to run for mayor of Wasilla. She quit her job as mayor of Wasilla to run for lieutenant governor. She quit her job as the head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to run for governor. And now she’s quitting her job as governor to … be a private citizen? Right.

It appears Palin just handed her opponents — in both parties — a powerful meme, that she is a quitter, and one much more interested in her own career than public service. Sure, they could make the argument before, but now it is a slam-dunk. Hard to see how she can fashion a credible answer to the question that will surely dog her at town hall meetings, along the lines of “Why should we believe you will be a good President when you never finish the job?”
True, the American public has a short memory, as Nixon proved. Speaking of Nixon, Palin’s “I’m not a quittter” is disturbingly reminiscent of Nixon’s ‘I’m not a crook,” as will undoubtedly be depicted in creative YouTube clips before long.
Palin’s theatrics don’t do her party any favors, as Begala points out:

It is a paradox of the modern Republican Party: If they hate government so much, why don’t they leave it to those who can use it as a tool for national renewal? Republicans say government would screw up a one-car parade, and then when they get into government, they set about proving their theory right (e.g., Katrina, Iraq, the economy, etc.).

DLC president Bruce Reed affirms the observation in his current SLATE.com article, “Quitters Never Win: In Sarah Palin’s GOP, the leaders keep quitting and the troubles don’t“:

Look at the 2009 toll so far. One 2012 Republican wannabe, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, announced he would not seek re-election next year. One of the top woulda-beens, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, quit his job to join the Obama administration and left the country and the hemisphere.
Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter quit the party. Last month, Nevada Sen. John Ensign had to resign his Republican leadership post to spend more time with his sex scandal. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford resigned as head of the Republican Governors Association. After this week’s disastrous AP interview, Sanford soon may have to step down as governor as well. As his Argentine mistress said, you can’t “put the genius back in the bottle.”
When did the GOP become such a bunch of quitters? What ever happened to the party of Larry Craig and his you’ll-never-take-me-from-this-stall-alive spirit?
…Time after time, quitting has turned out to be the “worthless, easy path” that Sarah Palin insists it isn’t. What makes her sudden resignation especially troubling, though, is not the flawed strategy so much as her jubilation and relief in putting the statehouse in her rear mirror. Palin’s resignation is a symptom of what’s crippling the Republican Party of late: Governing has become an unwelcome distraction.

Palin should have learned from McCain’s fiasco in threatening to withdraw from the Fall debate with Obama that voters don’t have a lot of respect for politicians who reneg on their agreements. Certainly it’s another reminder that, as Begala puts it “The Republican Party was once a solid, serious, stable group of people…Now it’s got more flakes than Post Toasties.” At the very least, Alaska’s Democratic Party just got a huge gift.

The Palin resignation saga has refocused some media and insider attention on the early field for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. And the latest data, from Rasumussen, has reported the usual tight three-way contest among Palin (the favorite of 24% of self-identified Republicans), Romney (leading at 25%), and Huckabee (a close third at 22%).
But the poll also checked out favorable and unfavorable opinions of these putative candidates, and here’s where the numbers get a little wacky: Romney 73/19; Palin 76/21; Huckabee 78/17; Gingrich 65/39. That’s all very predictable. But then there’s Haley Barbour at 34/37, and Tim Pawlenty at 38/33. Only a fifth of Republicans have issues with Palin, while about half of those who seem to have an idea who Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty are don’t like them.
Barbour’s controversial nature is somewhat understandable; he was a Washington insider for decades before returning to govern one of the less admired states, and his Foghorn Leghorn speaking style doesn’t appeal to everybody. Still, the things about Barbour that might repel Democrats–say, his lobbying career–don’t usually bother Republicans. And what on earth has Tim Pawlenty done to offend so many Republicans?
Maybe the answer is that this is a Rasmussen poll, and shouldn’t be taken that seriously. Or maybe the perpetual competition among Republican candidates to outperform each other in ideological posturing has evolved into a mandatory exercise. If you are not out there every day shrieking about socialism or promising to end the “Holocaust” of legalized abortion, then something must be wrong with you. That’s the only thing I can think of that would make a tapioca politician like Pawlenty so much more disliked, even among Republicans, than Sarah Palin.

One of the more alarming developments of the last couple of weeks of bad economic news has been the calm assertion by a lot of highly reputable progressive economists (e.g., Paul Krugman here and Laura Tyson here) that we obviously need another economic stimulus package from Washington. It’s alarming because the political climate for another (actually, the third of this recession counting the one that was enacted in 2008) batch of stimulus legislation is really bad, particularly with battles over critical climate changes and health care initiatives fully underway.
The first plausible idea I’ve heard for resolving this dilemma comes from Noam Scheiber at TNR’s The Stash:

Why not pair a second stimulus with the cap-and-trade legislation now working its way through the Senate? That is, you could cut several hundred billion dollars worth of payroll taxes for low and middle-income workers, the argument being that they’re the ones who’d be hit hardest by energy-price increases under cap-and-trade. As my colleague Jon Chait points out, it’s hard to imagine the GOP opposing a tax cut. And you wouldn’t need to have an entirely separate stimulus debate–you just piggyback on the cap-and-trade debate. Better still, it probably makes it easier for Democrats to pass cap-and-trade, since this defuses a key GOP criticism, which is that the resulting energy price increases will act as a tax on hard-working Americans.

As you may recall, lots of conservatives talked about a payroll tax “holiday” during the last stimulus debate. It’s one of the few tax cut ideas with a progressive impact. As as Noam and Jon say, it would at least create some problems for Republicans, who are slavering at the prospect of another “big government spending” bill to attack at a time when the last stimulus package’s impact seems to be relatively small.
Maybe the administration and congressional Democrats should just hang tough and hope that the existing stimulus spending will kick in at the right time, and that health care and climate change legislation can be enacted even if the economy’s strugging and shrinking revenues make the deficit picture look steadily worse. But if another stimulus bill truly is an economic necessity, it would be smart to get off the dime preemptively and ask Republicans if they’ve really given up their tax cut mania in favor of the green eyeshade of deficit hawkery.

One particularly distasteful aspect of the recent neoconservative attacks on President Obama’s cautious strategy regarding the Iranian protests has been the incredibly smug self-assurance with which they assert that they know vastly more about what participants in movements for social justice are thinking and what they really need then does the “naïve” and “gullible” Barack Obama.
This is, to say the least, a somewhat odd view because not a single one of the leading neoconservatives – not a single one – has ever walked a picket line, much less felt what a policeman’s nightstick feels like when it cracks the thin layer of skin on the top of your skull and sends blood pouring into your eyes. Not a single one of them ever served in any position of any kind in the leadership or even the rank and file of any movement for social justice. Even in the privileged ivory-tower world in which they live, not a single one of them has ever published an article which seriously analyzed the strategy and tactics of any popular mass movement for social justice or basic democratic rights.
But this doesn’t seem to bother them at all. In their view, leading a mechanized tank brigade into battle is a complex task that requires a tremendous amount of specialized knowledge, field experience and study. Advising movements for social justice, on the other hand, is like Karaoke singing – some people may happen to be better at it than others, but anyone has a right to grab the mike.
Several days ago this arrogant attitude reached its intellectual reductio ad absurdum with the publication of an op-ed piece by John Bolton advocating the Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear installations. It contained the following assertion:

Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider. Military action against Iran’s nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together consistently.

Bolton is not alone in this view. Writing in Commentary magazine, Max Boot quoted this precise paragraph, describing Bolton’s article as a “compelling and courageous analysis.”
Most people’s first reaction to this notion is a kind of mental double-take. What? Wait a minute — is he really saying he thinks Iranians can be “effectively” convinced to accept the bombing of their country as something that is not directed at them and is even ultimately done in support of their struggle for democracy?
One possibility, of course, is that neoconservatives don’t honestly believe this idea at all. They consider the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites to be necessary regardless of any collateral consequences it may have and they are simply tossing this notion out to deflect one major objection.
Unfortunately, that’s the optimistic scenario.
Even worse is the possibility that they actually do believe that Iranians can be convinced to view the bombing of at least some 6-14 major nuclear installations – many within 150 miles of Tehran – as ultimately supporting and helping them in their struggle to win greater democracy.
To get some sense of how wildly implausible this notion actually is, it is only necessary to read any of a number of recent commentaries that detail the extraordinarily complex divisions within Iranian society that have emerged since the recent election. These divisions include those within (1) the clerical establishment, where there are at least four major divergent political forces at work, (2) the regular military, elite military, paramilitary and police forces (3) the business community (4) the young (5) the secular nationalists, (6) the urban working class (whose level of support for Ahmadinejad now much less certain than before the election) as well as other social groups and then to try to imagine how the bombing of their country by Israel would strengthen or weaken the position of each of these groups in the struggle for democracy.

Read more…

Don’t read Battochio’s post, “Diagrams on Conservatism: Visualize the Insanity” at Vagabond Scholar (flagged by Digby), if you don’t want to be caught smirking, chuckling or laughing out loud at the office. What Battochio does is channel a little bit of The Rude Pundit‘s bluntness through an erudite filter, and comes up with a perceptive, sharp-tongued exploration of the values that undergird modern conservatism. Here’s a sample:

Modern conservatism can be summed up many ways, from “You’re on your own” to “Good luck” to “Screw you, I’ve got mine” to “Screw you, I don’t have mine, but you ain’t getting anything either.” It’s a twisted worldview, impractical and even unrealistic, generally self-serving, sometimes self-destructive, but almost always destructive to others. Rather than recognizing and trying to minimize unnecessary suffering, as an ideology it seeks to justify cruelty and callousness. Movement conservatives seldom feel responsible for their own actions or the horrible consequences of their policies. It’s unquestioned dogma for them that they represent the “natural” order, that unearned privilege within their group is proof of merit or God’s favor, and the real problem with America is the uppity heretics who question all that and don’t mind their place.

Battochio breaks Conservative movements down and offers this consideration of libertarians:

For “mistaken,” it’s hard for me not to think of libertarians, and all other conservatives who have nice-sounding, self-serving theories that aren’t fully thought out, are divorced from empirical data, and show little understanding of basic human nature…They epitomize confirmation bias, and tend to ignore data and major events disproving their ideas. Their crackpot theories can be harmless – as long as they’re not in power and acting on them. (I’d say the smartest libertarians realize their approach’s limitations, view libertarianism itself mostly as a cautionary check, and are “thoughtful.” Meanwhile, the full-blown Randians are typically callous, ignorant or worse.)

And this on “movement conservatism,”

…which is in authoritarian in nature and has been a major strain in America since at least Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. It got a major boost under Reagan, went into overdrive with his many myth-making acolytes, and achieved a perfect storm of belligerent idiocy and ruthless incompetence in the astonishingly arrogant George W. Bush administration. The base exemplifies its unreflective, displaced anger…the conservative base is a toxic mix of callousness, ignorance, spite and zealotry.

Battochio provides some amusing charts, with overlapping circles, diamonds and ovals featuring terms like “cloistered,” “devious,” “Spiteful, “ignorant” and “assholes.” He’s also got a funny, link-rich round-up of conservative pundits and how they fit into his schema. Battochio points out that the decline of rational conservatives has coarsened the debate between Americans across the political spectrum, and progressives would be better off being challenged by more thoughtful, articulate conservative adversaries now in increasingly short supply.

Andrew J. Bacevich ‘s article “Obama’s strategic blind spot” in The L.A. Times takes a sobering look at President Obama’s grand strategy regarding Iraq and fighting terror and calls for an approach based on adherence to key principles. Bacevich, a professor of History and International Relations at Boston University, likens Obama’s strategic myopia to that of Prime Minister Winston Churchill being “fixated with tactical and operational concerns” and unable to wage peace:

The Long War launched by George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11 has not gone well. Everyone understands that. Yet in the face of disappointment, what passes for advanced thinking recalls the Churchill who devised Gallipoli and godfathered the tank: In Washington and in the field, a preoccupation with tactics and operations have induced strategic blindness.
As President Obama shifts the main U.S. military effort from Iraq to Afghanistan, and as his commanders embrace counterinsurgency as the new American way of war, the big questions go not only unanswered but unasked. Does perpetuating the Long War make political or strategic sense? As we prepare to enter that war’s ninth year, are there no alternatives?

Bacevich urges the President to embrace a less tactical and more strategic approach to exiting Iraq and fighting terrorism:

…Pragmatism devoid of principle will perpetuate the strategic void that Obama inherited. The urgent need is for the administration to articulate a concrete set of organizing precepts — not simply cliches — to frame basic U.S. policy going forward.

He advocates the adoption of five principles of grand strategy:

First…The regime-change approach — invade and occupy to transform — hasn’t worked; simply trying harder in some other venue (Somalia? Sudan?) won’t produce different results. In short, no more Iraqs.
Second, forget the Bush Doctrine of preventive war: no more wars of choice; henceforth only wars of necessity. The United States will use force only as a last resort and even then only when genuinely vital interests are at stake.
Third, no more crusades unless the American people buy in; expecting a relative handful of soldiers to carry the load while the rest of the country binges on consumption is unconscionable. At a minimum, the generation that opts for war should pay for it through higher taxes rather than foisting a burden of debt onto their grandchildren.
Fourth, the key to keeping America safe is to defend it, not to project American muscle to obscure places around the world. It may or may not be true that a “mighty fortress is our God”; had the United States been a mighty fortress on 9/11, however, the 19 hijackers would have gotten nowhere.
Fifth, by all means let the United States promote the spread of freedom and democracy. Yet we’re more likely to enjoy success by modeling freedom rather than trying to impose it. To provide a suitable model, we’ve considerable work to do here at home. Meanwhile, let’s not deny others the prerogative of defining for themselves exactly what it means to be free.

Bacevich concludes by urging President Obama to appoint a “czar for strategy,” calling it a “most crucial portfolio.” (Nixon had Kissinger. Carter had Brzezinski. Bush had, well…Wolfowitz). Bacevich concedes that his list of strategic principles may be short or otherwise inadequate. But his challenge to President Obama to avoid “strategic drift” and think more strategically merits consideration.

Regular readers of TDS probably know that we’re not real jazzed around here about those “ideology polls” that ask people if they are “liberal,” “moderate” or “conservative.” Reassuring as they are to conservatives who want to believe this is a “center-right country,” these polls don’t define terms, don’t get deeper than labels, and have produced results that have not significantly changed for decades.
So you can imagine my reaction when Gallup came out with a new poll that showed “trends” in ideological self-definition along this L-M-C spectrum, based on this question:

Thinking about your views on political issues and how they have changed in recent years, would you say that you are now more conservative than you were a few years ago, have your views not changed, or are you more liberal than you were a few years ago?

In response to this ill-defined and double-loaded question, 39% of respondents said they were more conservative, 18% were more liberal, and 42% hadn’t changed.
In their analysis of this poll, and to their credit, the Gallup folk spend much of their time explaining why the results didn’t necessarily make any sense or mean anything:

Which way do Americans want to be led? While the new Gallup Poll finds the public reporting a heightened sense of conservatism in its political outlook, Americans’ specific policy positions have not changed much since 2004. To the extent they have, about as many of these positions have become more liberal as more conservative.

So we all have Gallup’s permission to pretty much ignore this poll, right? That’s probably not an option if you are a conservative politician or pundit who’s spent much of the last few months arguing that the Republican Party didn’t need to change its ideology or perhaps needed to become even more ideologically rigid. Indeed, I’m sure we’ll see some saying: “See? The Republican Party needs to move to the right to keep up with public opinion!”
Like their famous abortion poll in May, Gallup’s latest ideology poll may prove comforting to conservatives–but so comforting that they may make stupid strategic decisions on that basis.

If you follow politics somewhat impressionistically, you’d probably think that Barack Obama has had a terrible time getting anything through Congress. After all, Republicans hate him, “centrist” Democrats are perpetually off the reservation, it takes 60 votes to get anything through the Senate, and the President’s too genteel to crack heads.
That’s why it’s of interest that Rachel Bloom and John Cranford have published a study showing that Obama’s early success rate with legislative positions he has taken is the highest of any president since CQ started measuring this in 1953.
Specifically, the White House has taken a clear position on 26 votes in the House and 37 in the Senate (the higher Senate number mainly being the product of 20 confirmation votes). The House has voted with him 24 times and the Senate 36 times, for a combined success rate of 95%.
LBJ’s success rate (albeit over his first full year) was 93% in what is generally considered one of the most productive congressional sessions in history, and Eisenhower came in at 89%.
Obama’s lost one meaningless symbolic vote two days after he took office, so he’s really lost two: the famous Senate vote on Gitmo in May, and the House defense authorization vote in June.
Sure, there’s a long time to go this year, with Senate action on climate change and House-Senate action on health care still to happen. But the picture so often painted of Obama as the helpless victim of a fractious Congress is not really accurate so far.