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Thoughts on a frozen government

If you follow The In-Specter, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t posted much lately. It’s been difficult for me to write about anything political for the last couple of weeks because it has been so upsetting to see how selfishness, ignorance and fear have poisoned the ability for our government to deliver the change it was elected to bring to Washington. Instead, what we’ve seen in the United States Senate is a minority party in an already democratically unrepresentative chamber impeding the will of the majority of the American people. Scott Brown’s surprise election in Massachusetts really threw my intuitions for a loop as I realized not just how angry some people have become at the establishment, but also how depressed the coalition that elected President Obama to office have become due to failures of both his leadership and of ourselves. Barack Obama beat John McCain in Massachusetts by 26 percentage points, yet Martha Coakley, the state’s attorney general and the practical incumbent in a seat occupied by Kennedy’s for generations, lost only a year later by 5. Hundreds of thousands of Obama voters sat this one out, presumably demotivated by their lack of faith in a 60-vote Democratic majority to get anything done in Washington.

Disheartened, I haven’t been able to separate how I feel personally about the political situation from my own objectivity as an analyst of the Senate primary. I’ve avoided covering the horse race aspects of the Senate race lately out of my own worries that the entire primary process may very well be for naught if Pat Toomey ultimately beats whomever the Democratic Party nominates in May.  Moreover, all signs point to Arlen Specter being the man who wins this primary based on a yawning gap between Specter and Sestak’s percentages of the likely vote in poll after poll and an ever-firming base of institutional state support among local Democratic committees and Unions. Covering the horse race isn’t much fun in these circumstances, or particularly newsy.

What continues to surprise me (though perhaps by now it shouldn’t) is the degree to which our “national dialogue” is manipulated by powerful special interests that work their will through the media, our elected officials, and our corporations. Men like Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have national platforms on which to indoctrinate people with outright lies and outrageous intellectual dishonesty. Women like Sarah Palin spout sound bytes mocking our President moments before reading basic talking points off the palm of her hand. Lobbyists on Capitol Hill influence our congresspeople to block popular, immediately necessary reforms to our financial system, healthcare system, and energy policy in the name of small but powerful and extremely wealthy interests who are too comfy with the status quo. All of these are people for whom equating a increase in the marginal income tax rate amongst people who make over $250,000 a year with socialism is a convenient way of destroying a reasonable policy discussion with dishonest sloganeering and propagandizing.

And it works. As Washington literally froze over this week, many people were remarking what an apt metaphor “snowmageddon” is for the legislative stalemate that has crippled our Senate. Polls find most Americans are unhappy with government, and its easy to see why when it wastes so much time failing to enact the people’s will. Even routine executive nominees like Craig Becker, Obama’s choice for a vacancy on the National Labor Relations Board, are being filibustered by what a Republican “superminority.”

I have never more firmly believed that, in order to salvage the Democratic majority, we need more than more assertive leadership from the President—though his aggressive moves in an attempt to hold the Republicans more accountable for the obstructionism and hypocrisy are welcome and long merited. We also need a rule change in the Senate that reforms the filibuster. The next time the Senate votes to approve their rules before the next session of Congress, there ought to be a effort made by Democratic senator on the Senate floor to reform the filibuster—and show the American people what a real “filibuster” looks like by holding the floor until those who oppose reform get up in front of the cameras and explain to their constituents why they believe our democracy shouldn’t be governed democratically.

Legislation introduced by Democratic Senator Tom Harkin would work well. Co-sponsored by Joe Lieberman in 1995, Harkin’s fix would have kept the 60-vote rule for the first vote but lessening the number required in subsequent votes. “He said that for instance if 60 senators could not agree to end debate, it would carry on for another week or so and then the number of votes required to end debate would drop by three. Harkin said it would carry on this way until it reached a simple majority of 51 votes” (reported by CBS news).

Another procedural change would remove the “tracking system” implemented after the historic civil rights era filibusters which allows the Senators to simply table discussion on the bill being filibustered and move on to other matters. This “virtual filibuster” has taken away the entire basis for the filibuster—what was meant to give Senators a chance to stand their ground, literally, on an issue of great moral import—and in so doing, drained it of any integrity it might have as a legitimate practice in the legislative body.

Eliminating this system, and forcing Senators to actually defend their filibusters by putting their bodies on the line, should be a campaign issue. We need to know how Arlen Specter, Joe Sestak, and yes, Pat Toomey too, will promise to vote on this issue when it is introduced at the beginning of the 112th Congress in 2011, as Senator Tom Udall has vowed to do. Let’s get these men on the record so we can hold them accountable for their positions now.

February 12, 2010 at 1:30 pm

--Adam Schwartzbaum

Tags: Arlen Specter, Barack Obama, Craig Becker, filibuster, Joe Sestak, Martha Coakley, Pat Toomey, Scott Brown, Tom Harkin, Tom Udall

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