Reform, American Style

If you caught NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) on Meet the Press laying out, lamely, the GOP's "gauzy agenda," you may have noticed two things-- that DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen looks brilliant and energetic in comparison (which is a riot-- but even high ranking Republicans admit that Sessions is a catastrophe for the Party of No) and that the GOP has no agenda except to go back to the Bush era nostrums that nearly wrecked the economy and from which the Republicans are now endeavoring to prevent President Obama from digging out from under. Yesterday at Washington Monthly Steve Benen didn't miss a beat in recognizing a clear and developing pattern. "We need to go back to the exact same agenda." Benen seems incredulous. "In context, the agenda Sessions seems to want 'to go back to' was that of the Bush/Cheney administration and the Republican Congress. Indeed, GOP leaders are not only urging a return to failed Bush policies, they're even praising the failed former president.

The chairmen of the two Republican campaign committees defended the presidency of George W. Bush in television appearances over the weekend, a preview of the GOP's planned pushback against expected Democratic attacks on the last president.

"People had jobs when Republicans were not only in charge but George Bush was there," said National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (Texas) during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press.

John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told C-SPAN's Newsmakers program that "Bush's stock has gone up a lot since he left office," adding: "I think a lot people are looking back with more fondness on President Bush's administration, and I think history will treat him well."

"Republican committee chairmen like Sessions and Cornyn," Benen reminds us, "are supposed to know better. Indeed, the entire campaign is quickly becoming inexplicable. In recent weeks, we've seen high-profile Republicans urge the party to return to Bush's economic agenda, Bush's Social Security agenda, Bush's tax policies, and Bush's regulatory agenda. With just four months to go before the midterm elections, Republican candidates seem to seriously believe if we just go back to the policies that failed miserably, and created our current mess(es), we'll all be better off. Dems have been trying to push this argument for months, and for some reason, the GOP now appears intent to help. It seems more than a little risky."

So why do Democrats cater to these discredited losers? Why do they water down every good idea so that the end results are things-- like the painfully too small Stimulus and the so-so healthcare reform bill and the Wall Street-friendly financial reform bill-- that just don't do the job Americans elected Obama and the Democrats to do? Yesterday we got word that the latest compromise with the Devil will result in teaching jobs being sacrificed on the altar of perpetual war.

House Democratic leaders will accept the Senate’s plan to pass a stripped-down supplemental spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while seeking another vehicle for money to prevent the layoffs of some 140,000 teachers, a well-informed House aide said Monday.

The decision reflects the reality that Democrats lack the votes in the Senate to attach billions of dollars in help for states to keep teachers on the payroll this fall... In the Senate, Republicans and some Democrats have objected to the added domestic spending being added to a war supplemental, even if it is offset by other cuts. The budget deficit can’t take another hit, those senators say.

They mean, can't take a hit for teachers and education, not for endless, pointless, disastrous wars... that's fine (of course; some things never change, regardless of cute campaign slogans).

So this afternoon the Senate dramatically ended the conservative filibuster on extending unemployment benefits-- at least until after the midterms. Democrats-- from Obama and Pelosi right on down the food chain to... Donna Brazile-- have been castigating Republicans for blocking benefits. "Because of the Republicans, about 33 people lose their benefits every minute," says Brazile in a Democratic Party e-mail (Speaker Pelosi tweeted that 2,642,581 Americans had lost their benefits since the GOP started on this particular hissy fit, so well summed up by Alan Grayson last night). Well, it isn't false, but Brazile forgot to mention-- as did Obama, Harry Reid, Pelosi and everyone else-- that not only have a couple Republicans finally signed on, but that one putative Democrat, Ben Nelson (D-NE), was the single vote that prevented unemployment benefits from passing last time. Taking advantage of Robert Byrd's death, Nelson crossed the aisle and voted with most of the Republicans to ensure the death of unemployment insurance for those 2,642,581 Americans the Speaker was lamenting in her eloquent tweet. 

If you don't think Obama, the DNC, the DSCC and the execrable OFA will do all they can to help Nelson get re-elected in 2012, you haven't been paying attention. "Conservatives in the Senate," wailed Brazile, "have been at this for weeks-- abusing the rules to block Democrats from passing legislation. Their filibuster means millions of people lose their unemployment checks, and the entire economy suffers because of it." Let me look through this letter again for a mention of Ben Nelson. Nope-- zilch. Brazile, the Vice Chair for Voter Registration and Participation for the DNC, offers not a word about Ben Nelson, no mention that if he had died instead of Byrd, millions of unemployment checks would already have gone out.

This all brings us back to the filibuster, and why conservatives-- yes, on both sides of the aisle-- have kept it alive. These kinds of reforms are next to impossible to achieve because there always seems to be a corporate-friendly conservative ruling coalition-- usually always bipartisan-- running the show. The filibuster isn't even etched in stone, and there was once a time when progressives almost got rid of the equally idiotic Electoral College. Allow me to quote from the Gospel According to Rick, actually from Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, on the time progressive reformers almost abolished that profoundly oligarchic impediment to democracy in 1970:

Another longtime dream of reformers was to do away with antiquated and antidemocratic electoral college. The House had passed a bill for direct popular election of presidents in September of 1969 by a vote of 338 to 70. But as Senator Strom Thurmond knew better than anyone else, the South's major political trump card was the threat of a renegade third-party presidential candidate using his electoral votes to keep either of the major parties from an electoral college majority. Thurmond [R-SC] had Senate Judiciary chair James Eastland [D] of Mississippi bottle the bill up in committee. Birch Bayh [the progressive father of the conservative shithead Bayh from the same state] threatened to block consideration of [segregationist posterboy] Harrold Carswell unless the debate came to the floor. When it did, in the summer of 1970, Thurmond, Eastland and Sam Ervin filibustered. Nixon tried to use the presidential bully pulpit to force a vote. Stirringly he intoned, "Our ability to change this system in time fir the 1972 elections is a touchstone of the impulse to reform in America today. It will be the measure of our ability to avert calamity by anticipating it." ... His motives, though, were not noble. Getting rid of the electoral college would crush George Wallace's power as a presidential candidate. Unfortunately for Nixon [well, really for America], cloture failed, and the electoral college survived its greatest threat in two hundred years.

At least the unemployment benefits that were restored today will be retroactive. But what happens on December 1? Will Republicans and a lame duck Congress be ready to deliver a small lump of coal to millions of American families for Christmas this year? Who will be leading the "War on Christmas 2010"? Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Miss McConnell? According to the video below, it looks like McConnell is already practicing: