Tag: senate

Ed Kilgore has some thoughts on Democratic leadership and the need for term-limits (and specifically for Nancy Pelosi):

Ever since Democrats fell short of their 2016 goal of taking back control of the U.S. House, there’s been talk about […] leadership change in the House Democratic Caucus. And after Democrats failed to win any of the four GOP House seats where special elections were held this year, there was renewed talk about Nancy Pelosi stepping down as House Democratic Leader. The negative buzz became particularly loud after the party’s biggest special-election hope, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, suffered a disappointing loss, in the wake of Republicans running many millions of dollars of ads linking the candidate to Pelosi.

[…]

[Pelosi] is a much bigger target for Republicans than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell appears to be for Democrats. Part of the problem may simply be that she happens to represent a jurisdiction with rich negative symbolism (dating back at least to the attacks on “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984 after the Donkey Party held its convention in the City by the Bay) for the conservatives who are mostly the target for anti-Pelosi ads. You cannot quite imagine Democrats running ads mocking Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin or Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky in this manner.

Emphasis added by me because Kilgore completely discounts the most important information in his several paragraphs. The demonization of Pelosi has nothing to do with her having been in the arena for too long, being a woman, coming from San Francisco, or anything else. Those are all useful pegs for the GOP to build their messaging on and around, but they aren’t themselves decisive or even all that interesting. Anyone serving as minority leader will immediately come under sustained and focused attack from the right wing and their stenographers in much of the media. It’s Cokie’s Law: if information, factual or otherwise, is “out there” then it must be discussed uncritically. Thus the media happily carries the GOP messaging machine’s water on Pelosi and anybody else in the cross-hairs that day. There’s just no getting around it, and The Democrat not only doesn’t have anything like this, they aren’t even on the same planet with the scale and coordination of this operation. Unless and until they create a sustained messaging attack on McConnell and Ryan, those two can continue right on doing what they’re doing. Just to focus on McConnell, he’s likely the most destructive force in government today, but most people would be hard pressed to name him, much less know what he’s been up to and why it is dismantling the way our government has, until recently, functioned.
That’s simply not the case for Pelosi, and that has nothing to do with the fact that she’s from San Francisco and everything to do with a sustained, targeted, and years long messaging attack that salts the Earth and leaves useful framing tools for any GOP hopeful to pick up and use, readymade. Democrats try to build the machine from scratch with every individual election, every cycle. How’s that working out for them?

Lastly, if you like the ACA, thank Nancy Pelosi. Period. That doesn’t mean she gets a pass to serve in party leadership forever, but she did that lift more or less with her own political momentum and within the context of the sustained, entirely negative noise machine and well after perceptions about her in the media were set in stone. Think on that as you try to show her the door.

[T]he Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that ‘as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.’ My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who will be chairing the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. Thankfully we can all rest assured that the Adults are in charge of the GOP. There might be one or two show votes, but then they’re going to buckle down and get to the hard work of governing by consensus. Certainly that’s what the Commentariat is telling me. So it must be true. Cannot wait for my pony.

Why am I optimistic? Because you can smell the winds

Chuck Schumer, Senator from New York, explaining why I am very glad not to be involved in or even be located near these “negotiations.”

Scott Brown’s Favorite Justice

Perhaps an ad should be made that superimposes Scott Brown’s self-professed man-love of Justice Antonin Scalia with these comments that Scalia recently made at the the AEI:

The death penalty? Give me a break. [The framers of the Constitution didn’t think it was unconstitutional and neither do I]. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state [and therefore it should ever remain thus].

Good ole moderate Scott Brown. Always willin’ to work across the aisle when it comes to restricting women’s rights, restricting who we sleep with, and (most of all) promoting government sponsored execution. I’m sure these and other positions he and his beloved Justice share poll very well here in the Commonwealth. It’s a textual thing, you wouldn’t understand.

[You] can constantly rationalize a deeply anti-democratic system on grounds of imagining scenarios where a brave minority of progressive senators are the only barrier to horrific right-wing policies. But you don’t have to imagine how a filibuster-wielding Republican minority can bring the country to a virtual standstill. We’re living in that world right now.

Ed Kilgore is right, but the real root of the problem is that only some of the country is living in that world. So far as I can tell, FOXnews watchers are convinced that it’s the Democrats who are bringing the country to a standstill by not offering to “reach across the aisle.” Look no further than this NewsHour discussion of Dick Lugar’s defeat and its broader meanings. Turns out he was run out of town because “he’s commended by many as one that does reach across the aisle, but, unfortunately, in our mind, that’s a one-way road. The other side, the Democrats, don’t seem to do that. And, in fact, they advocate that, but in their mind, that’s we surrender, we being the Republicans, would surrender to their ideals.”
When, exactly, did that demand for surrender happen? Because I remember nothing but repeated pleas on the part of The Democrat: please, take our Social Security, our Medicare, our Whatever, but just don’t blow up the country today Mr. GOP.“ And, in return, the numerous GOP counteroffers (aside from Ryan-plan mandated elimination of these programs) were? …
This belief in Democratic intransigence, though, is amazingly widespread and typically accepted as fact (cf. Ifill’s complete non-reaction to this preposterous statement. One can only conclude that it must be pretty close to 100% accurate). Then you get to the proportion of "serious person” type folks that think both parties are equally at fault for gridlock. Then and only then do you get to the sad lunatics who think the GOP has been sanding the gears and bears most of the blame for inaction these past few years that just happen to coincide with Obama’s presidency and just happens to coincide with a similar and explicitly stated purpose on the part of GOP leadership in both the House and Senate (to sand the gears and hurt Obama). But why bring pesky facts into this?
And so, because of all this and more, the only political party that’s going to eliminate the filibuster in my lifetime is the GOP. It’s been so for a very long time now.
And, as I’ve said many times, the filibuster will be eliminated exactly 30 seconds after a new Congress convenes in which the GOP holds the Presidency and fewer than 61 chairs in the Senate. And that’s 2012 in a nutshell. If you like the social safety net, you’d better goddamned well get out and vote. Early and often. The ACORN way.

Americans are hurting across this country, and the president’s out there campaigning. Why isn’t he governing? He doesn’t — he doesn’t have a jobs plan even now.

Mitt Romney, who must be referring to the fact that the GOP minority in the Senate has already filibustered said “jobs bill” to death and plans to filibuster its pieces to death as well. That pretty much means “Obama has no jobs bill,” right? After all, it’s been uniformly reported as “Democrats fail to pass…” and “Obama jobs bill fails” and never, ever the decidedly shrill “GOP blocks…” or even “Republicans outmaneuver Democrats on jobs…”
Note to Anderson Cooper: this is precisely the sort of thing you might mention next time it comes up in a debate amongst the folks vying for the Republican nomination for President of these United States. To quote some future Sam Jackson movie: “You the moderator? Then moderate, motherfucker.” Or we’ll just let Watson do it the next time. Frankly, I don’t see how Our Computational Overlord could do any worse.

The Republicans are serious budget reformers; the lady from Washington, doesn’t do budgets.

Grover Norquist, primary driver of conservative economic policy in the form of his idiotic anti-tax pledge. In every way that matters, this is who they are.
He’s referring to the second highest-ranking member, male or female, of the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Patty Murray. You stay classy, Grover.
Source: The New York Times

Again with the Gangs

Steve Benen reports that the Gang of Six, er, Five, er, Six, er five plus Coburn who left but is back again is claiming to have come to terms on a broad budget agreement:

Coburn … noted the Congressional Budget Office would score the plan as a $1.5 trillion tax cut because it would eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax. It would generate a significant amount of revenue out of tax reform and reduction of tax rates, which authors believe would spur economic growth.

Ah. So we’re going to eliminate the AMT, apparently without paying for it (because when has any gang ever actually paid for something), further cut other tax rates, and then, magically, revenues will just rise and rise. Just like they’ve never done in the past. At least we’re finally getting the serious people together over the kitchen table, as it were. Now if we can just placate the unicorn caucus and raise the ceiling to eleventy trillion billion dollars, we’ll have a deal.

Depths of Hypocrisy

42 Republicans voted to filibuster Goodwin Liu’s judicial nomination today:

The Republicans who said they’d never filibuster a judicial nominee? They filibustered a judicial nominee. The Republican “moderates” who said they found these tactics distasteful? They filibustered Liu, too. When the dust cleared, how many GOP senators were willing to give this nominee an up-or-down vote? Just one: Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski.

Depths of Hypocrisy

…the underlying problem is that anyone with actual expertise and any kind of public profile — in short, anyone who is actually qualified to hold [a position requiring Senate confirmation] — is bound to have said something, somewhere that can be taken out of context to make him or her sound like Pol Pot. [Donald] Berwick has spoken in favor of evaluating medical effectiveness and has had kind words for the British National Health Service, so he wants to kill grandma and Sovietize America.

So what lies down this road? A world in which key positions can only be filled by complete hacks, preferably interns from the Heritage Foundation with no relevant experience but unquestioned loyalty.

In short, we’re on our way to running America the way the Coalition Provisional Authority ran Iraq.

Paul Krugman
I’d only quibble with: on our way.
Source: The New York Times