What Democrats Failed to Do on January 3

Yes. I, for one, think of this daily.

by Gaius Publius

It's widely understood, even in Republican circles, that a Supreme Court nomination that should have fallen to a Democratic president was stolen from him by Senate Republicans and will be handed instead to a Republican president, Donald Trump. (In Republican circles, it's not just understood, it's celebrated.)

Democratic Party leadership have four ways they can respond — Not at all, Weakly, Strongly, or Very strongly. "Responding not at all" is not an option, since Senate Democrats (and frankly, institutional Democrats in general) must at least appear to have "seen the Sanders light" and started to stand up for the people — and more frankly, themselves — in this newborn Age of Trump.

Responding with words and not deeds would qualify as "responding weakly." Some actions in opposition and retaliation could be considered "responding strongly," depending on the action, though when you consider that Trump's SCOTUS nominee will serve for life, even the strongest of oppositions — save the full Mitch McConnell response ("oppose everything all the time") — still seems not strong enough by comparison.

Any "very strong" response would necessarily be one that actually "resteals" the nomination back into Democratic Party control and prevents the Trump nomination entirely. Happily, there is such a response — or was. The clock on that response started on January 3 at the very open of the new session of Congress, and ran out just a few minutes after that.

Yet that response would have worked, which is why I'm presenting it to you now. This is your first example of Senate Democrats not choosing a "very strong response" to Republican and Trumpian provocation. For the details, read on.

David Waldman's Plan to Steal Back the Obama's SCOTUS Nomination

This piece was written in December, and it distills thinking by David Waldman (KagroX as was) on how the Democrats can use (manipulate) Senate rules to deny Trump the right to nominate his own candidate for the Supreme Court in place of Merrick Garland. This plan, in other words, puts Merrick Garland on the bench.

I know from personal experience that Waldman knows his Senate rules; he's my goto person when I have questions myself, and I'm not alone in relying on him this way.

From Karoli Kuns at Crooks and Liars, here's the distillation of Waldman's plan (emphasis in original):

Senate Democrats Have One Shot At Saving SCOTUS - Will They?

It is now time for Senate Democrats to take their shot at saving this country from fascists assuming the reins of power in January. It can be done, but it will require them to be courageous and aggressive.

David Waldman (KagroX on Twitter) has outlined how they can confirm Judge Merrick Garland on January 3rd for the few minutes that they will be the majority in the Senate. Waldman is a long-standing expert on Senate procedure and political plays. He was one of the first to call for passage of the ACA via reconciliation in the Senate after Scott Brown was elected.

Here it is, in a nutshell.

On January 3, 2017, Democrats will hold the majority in the Senate for a few minutes, until the newly-elected Senators are sworn in. Biden could convene the Senate in those few minutes and call for a vote. The majority could then suspend the rules and vote in Merrick Garland.

The key here is that VP Biden would have to be willing to convene the Senate and recognize Senator Dick Durbin instead of Mitch McConnell. Durbin moves to re-nominate Garland, and Senate Democrats then vote to confirm him. They will have a quorum for those few minutes.

Kuns appropriately adds:

It's bold. Garland would be confirmed by 34 Democrats and no Republicans. It will certainly enrage Republicans, but they're already enraged and full of hubris about how they're going to screw Democrats anyway, so what do they really have to lose?

Not much. It takes courage. It takes a resolve to do what's right for this country, to reclaim the Supreme Court nomination Republicans think they stole from us. It takes backbone.

Here's where the rubber meets the road. We're not talking about "comity" anymore. We're talking about conviction and confirmation.

Is this a legitimate use of Senate rules? Yes. Using the rules within the rules is legitimate (legal) by definition. Would the Republicans pitch a total fit if this happened? Of course, but they do that anytime they lose and some times even when they win.

Should Democrats care about Republican objections? No. But are they bold enough to do this? Of course not. We know that because they didn't do this.

I kind of hate to say this as early as I'm saying it, but "Ladies and gentlemen, these are your Senate Democrats in action." Or inaction, as the case may be. This counts as responding "not at all." Get ready for weak, but ineffective, responses later to show they have a pulse.

Why This Matters

This matters for two reasons, not just one. First, it's a fairly damning, in my opinion, indication of what to look for from the rump Clinton-Obama leadership team in the Senate. Will they act boldly in the Age of Trump, or just appear to? Jury's out, but it doesn't look promising.

And second, as Clinton, Obama and every institutional Democrat with a voice and a microphone reminded us constantly during the campaign — The Supreme Court Matters. But enough to do anything about, or or anything effective? Apparently not, despite the campaign season hysterics.

Remember the rule: The role of money in politics is to neuter Democrats and enable Republicans. I'm afraid we're about to see a string of examples of this, starting with the one just cited.

GP
 

Well, what do you suppose Pat Buchanan would have to say to get his sorry ass fired by MSNBC?

by Ken

We need to talk about the latest installment in Rachel Maddow's ongoing exploration of the ever-stranger connections emanating from the now-infamous C Street "church" of the Famlly, along with the ranking guide into the Family sanctum, Jeff Sharlet (whom she now has to apologize to profusely for dragging him away from his hoped-for vacation, as the story just won't stop metastasizing).

We'll get to that, but first I guess we really need to talk about another segment on Rachel's show last night: Pat Buchanan's appalling attempt to defend his column attacking Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whom he has taken to ridiculing as "an affirmative-action judge." Of course, to appreciate the full measure of viciousness intended, you have to understand that in the lunar landscape that is Pat Buchanan's brain, "affirmative action" is nothing more than a piece of the massive plot -- watch out, the plotters are everywhere! -- to cheat white males, the very people who made America what it is, out of their rightful share of the pie, which is all of it.

(And he is only too happy to rattle off the list of names of the white male victims, even if he can't pronounce the name of the sainted Frank Ricci -- I guess those Irishmen have trouble with Eye-talian names), and it seemed to me that a woman slipped onto the list of white males. Let's not even get into the questions of whether a program of systematic discrimination can actually be conducted against a nation's power elite, or whether a class of victims whose names can be recited in one breath by the craziest of crazy old coots really qualifies as, for want of a better term, a "class action.")

Rachel is taking some heat for her remarkable efforts at maintaining her poise, and even I sometimes wished at times that she would "lose it." But of course if she'd done that, she would have handed the even to Pat, who may be an old coot now but who has been fighting these fights for a lot of decades now, and knows that as soon as you reduce the opposition to enraged spluttering, you've won.

Anyway, Heather over at Crooks and LIars had the patience to do a point-by-point summation with commentary of this sad and sordid interview. I was in no condition to observe the spectacle closely enough to do so even if I had been inclined. I hadn't planned to watch it, and wish I'd stuck to my (sensible) original intention. It drove me storming around my apartment in -- what else? -- a spluttering rage.

Here's Heather's account:

During what was at times a bit of a heated exchange, but way too chummy in general -- given the type of browbeating Pat Buchanan actually deserves for his continued racist remarks on MSNBC -- Rachel Maddow ends up telling Pat Buchanan to quit living in the 1950s, and that he's fanning the flames of racial hatred with his rhetoric. Before that, she gives him ample opportunity to put on full display, again, just how horribly he thinks the poor, downtrodden white man is being treated in America.

Some of Pat’s "finer" moments during the interview.

-- Comparing Sonia Sotomayor to Harriet Miers.

-- Calling her a purely affirmative action candidate by the President and completely dismissing her academic accomplishments.

-- Saying that “white folks” built this country.

-- Calling Bork and Scalia “real scholars” and "tremendous minds" and saying Sotomayor hasn’t risen to their level.

-- Saying the only reason she was appointed to the bench was because of affirmative action.

-- Complaining about Sotomayor getting a chance to go to the best schools and knocking out someone who might have gotten better grades than her. When has Pat Buchanan ever complained about the likes of George Bush and other legacy children being allowed into the best schools because of who their parents are, and knocking other kids out? I would guess he has not. I’ve certainly never heard him bring it up. Rachel should have called him on that one if he'd let her get a word in to do it.

When asked if she got the grades she did in college because of affirmative action, saying that in the Ivy League schools, half the kids graduate cum laude now. Really? So they're raising students' grade point averages in college now and no one told the rest of us about it? Then retreating to saying he bet he graduated higher in his high school class than she did, and going so far as to say he probably did better than she did in college as well, but he doesn't think he's qualified to be on the Supreme Court.

So being a judge for seventeen years doesn't count for anything in Pat's world. And Pat says he did better than she did in school, without backing that up with any specifics. If anyone knows just what his grade point averages were in high school and college, I'd like to find out.

He compared the track team at the Olympics potentially being all black or a hockey team being all white to the racial make up of the Supreme Court. Yeah, that's exactly the same thing, Pat. He seems to have forgotten that there was a time not all that long ago that blacks in America were not even allowed to play on the same team as white people.

And he refused to say there is anything wrong with the fact that the Supreme Court has been made up almost entirely of white men for all these years and might benefit from other races being represented. He dodged back opining over the firemen they trotted out there as a political game at the hearing rather than answer the question.

I really don't understand why Rachel felt the need to bring him on if she was going to let him lie and talk over her for the better part of the interview. She's just not aggressive enough to deal with the likes of this bully, and he knows it. MSNBC has allowed Buchanan to become a racist sideshow on their network. As Media Matters has wondered: What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC?

Now that, Heather, is a splendid question. What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC?

For the record, MediaMatters' Jamison Foser didn't write the piece to which she directs us in response to last night's Rachel Maddow appearance. He wrote it on June 8.

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Who do these senators think they are anyways?

Who the heck does Senator DiFi think she is? Unfortunately, like her fellow U.S. senators, especially her fellow Democratic senators, she seems to think she is one really big cheese.

by Ken

Our friend Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars is normally the most poised and calmly reasoning of commentators, which makes it that much more delicious when she's pushed beyond her breaking point. About two weeks ago the Baroness I mean California Senator Dianne Feinstein accomplished this feat, when she hauled her imperial self onto the TV and calmly shredded the major elements of the president's health care reform package as we know it:

Dianne Feinstein: "I don't know if Obama has the votes (for health care) now."



With DINOs like DiFi, who needs to worry about Republicans?

President Barack Obama may not have enough votes in the U.S. Senate to pass his effort to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein said.

“I don’t know that he has the votes right now,” Feinstein said today on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “I think there’s a lot of concern in the Democratic caucus.” Controlling costs of the new system is a “difficult subject.”

So the very wealthy DiFi, who hasn't met an appropriation she wouldn't try to swing to her husband's company and ended up having to resign from the Military Construction Appropriations committee when this conflict came to light, and lucky recipient of free healthcare, courtesy of the U.S. Senate, doesn't think that the 59 (nay, 60, if Franken ever gets his seat) Democrats can actually pull it together to vote for the health care reform that a HUGE percentage of Americans want?

Pardon my French, Di, but WHY THE FRAK NOT???? Her answers don't make a lot of sense, frankly. . . .

Oh, Nicole proceeds to her more usual point-by-point reasoning, but all I could think of when I saw her post was, "Who do these senators think they are?"

Well, they think they're big cheeses is what. Giant big cheeses.

Before we blame Harry Reid's leadership or lack of it for all the evils in the world, or even for all the (many) failures of the Senate Democratic majority since it reemerged in the 2006 election, and of course was dramatically upped in the 2008 one,

To pick just one example, it's an interesting question whether Senator Harry could have dealt more harshly with Dem-unfriendly Sen. Holy Joe Lieberman at the start of the 211th Congress if he'd wanted to (and you'll recall that, while he was hardly advocating tossing His Holiness from the caucus, he was hoping the members would send him a message when he turned the matter over to them). Between the signals coming from the White House that Holy Joe was not to be harmed, there was clearly widespread sentiment amont the Democratic members against punishing their pal Joe.

We have to remember here that the title "majority leader" is something of a misnomer as applied to the U.S. Senate. The reality is that the job is more like "majority steward." You get the job by building a network of palships, and when those pals put you in the leader's chair, the last thing they expect from you is hassling or arm-twisting or intimidation. About the only thing that interests them, is what can you do for them?

Of course the majority leader has substantial control over Senate scheduling and all sorts of matters that affect the daily lives of his conference members, but he has to be careful how he uses that "power." Because he knows that if enough of those members feel that he's using them for somebody's benefit other than his own, he's toast.

Just last week DWT's own Noah was giving our Harry hell. And the other day our friend Balakirev, who regular readers of the DWT comments will be aware has, shall we say, roughly zero patience for Senator Harry's leadership style, and is also dubious about the influence being exerted, or not being exerted, by the White House, passed along this excerpt from a Kathleen Hunter CQPolitics profile of the majority leader the other day:

Reid says he expects the tactic of gentle persuasion to work best, given the size of his Senate Democratic flock and the political divergences within it. “I don’t dictate how people vote,” he said in an interview this month. “If it’s an important vote, I try to tell them how important it is to the Senate, the country, the president … But I’m not very good at twisting arms. I try to be more verbal and non-threatening. So there are going to be -- I’m sure -- a number of opportunities for people who have different opinions not to vote the way that I think they should. But that’s the way it is. I hold no grudges.”

The emphasis was added by Matthew Yglesias in his post of our Harry's remarks, to which Yglesias appended the amusing note: "I’m not sure I would say this philosophy has been bearing a ton of fruit. " At least as interesting, though, I think, is the first comment added to the post:

Duvall Says:

But I’m not very good at twisting arms. I try to be more verbal and non-threatening.

He knows that “twisting arms” is a metaphor, right?

It’s important to remember that Reid is the leader that the Senate Democrats chose. If they wanted a leader that demanded things from them, they would [have] picked someone else. Don’t put all the blame on the substitute teacher.

I'm not disagreeing that inherent in the majority leader's powers are a whole lot of things he could do to influence his members toward agendas that he supports. (Of course, then we also need to know which agendas he actually supports!) One thing is for sure, though: If you try to exercise power and fail, you wind up with less power than you even thought you had.

Our image of the whip-cracking Senate majority leader traces back to the days of Lyndon B. Johnson, which may be odd because a lot of the people who have that image barely remember who Lyndon B. Johnson was. Just for laughs, I assembled this list of the conference leaders in the Senate (majority or minority) dating back to the Age of LBJ:

DEMOCRATIC SENATE LEADERS since 1953

Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas (1953-61), majority leader 1955-61
Mike Mansfield of Montana (1961-77), majority leader the whole time
Robert Byrd of West Virginia (1977-89), majority leader 1977-81 and 1987-89
George Mitchell of Maine (1989-95), majority leader the whole time
Tom Daschle of South Dakota (1995-2005), majority leader 1/3-20/2001 and 6/6/2001-1/2003
and Our Harry of Nevada (2005-present), majority leader since 2007


REPUBLICAN SENATE LEADERS since 1959

Everett Dirksen of Illinois (1959-69), never majority leader
Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania (1969-77), never majority leader
Howard Baker of Tennessee (1977-85), majority leader 1981-85
Bob Dole of Kansas (1985- 6/96), majority leader 1985-87
Trent Lott of Mississippi (6/1996-2003), majority leader 6/1996-2000 and 1/20-6/6/2001
Bill Frist of Tennessee (2003-07), majority leader the whole time
and Our Miss Mitch of Kentucky (2007-present), still never majority leader, thank goodness

[I think I've got the little microscopic twists and turns more or less right, but after all it's the big picture we're concerned with here.]

I don't know about you, but apart from LBJ, I don't see a whip-cracker in the bunch. For that matter, it's worth remembering that LBJ wasn't exactly LBJ, being in many ways powerless before the entrenched conservative Southern senatorial barons who ruled the major committees. In theory, the reforms that diluted the powers of the committee chairs should have increased those of the majority leader, and I'm sure in some ways they have. But looking at those rosters of "leaders" (bearing in mind that on the Republican side the reign of nebbishes is misleading, because the Republican members get their discipline from higher sources), not to mention the ongoing history of day-to-day Senate operations, suggests that in choosing their "leaders," Senate members have expressed their own feelings about that transfer of power, and have generally thought it would be best transferred to them.

Which is no excuse for letting up the heat on Harry. He's got to get the job(s) done for the simple reason that there isn't anyone else to do it.

Did I hear somebody say, "We get the Senate we deserve"? No? Okay, maybe I'll say it.

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Our first Campaign for Health Care Choice TV spots are in the can -- watch out, Blanche Lincoln!

Help us help the senator from WalMart Arkansas "get it."

Numbers as of, well, earlier today

Breaking news from our pal John Amato at Crooks and Liars:

We spent almost all day yesterday filming our commercial spots which target Blanche Lincoln's non-support of a vibrant public option at the C&L Bat Cave. Digby, d-day and BNF's were amazing. Gordon Skene of Newstalgia also joined the crew and did a bang up job.

I want to thank the readers that have donated to Blue America's Campaign For Health Care Choice so far. We can still use your help. I told you that we weren't going to sit by and watch and we're getting to work.

To back up a bit, as Howie has reported, the Blue America team -- C and L, Digby's Hullabaloo, and Firedoglake in addition to DWT -- has teamed up with Brave New Films on this campaign to defend the best health care reform option available to us. John explained last week: "I think we've come up with a great idea. We are going to target Blanche Lincoln first with TV ads, with the help of Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films, and expose her actions to her constituents in Arkansas. This will be the first play because she is up for re-election in 2010 and has already received the second most money from the HIC of any Senator."

The scripts for the spots are by none other than Digby (I don't know about you, but I can hardly wait to see the results!), who has given her take on the project:

Watching the health care debate unfold is frustrating and predictably enervating. These kinds of debates are often followed by a deepening of public apathy and a sense that government can't help solve the big problems. And this plays into conservative hands since they are the ones who want to stoke that belief so that the citizens don't get it into their heads that they can get an equal shake with those who think they own this country.

We can't let that happen with health care. It is just too important on every level, for individuals, business and the country at large. It's time to get involved. To that end Blue America is launching a campaign to raise money to run some television ads. We've got to get these wavering Democrats off the fence about a public plan choice or this thing is going to fall completely apart before it even starts.

Perhaps it's not surprising that Lincoln is showing so much compassion for the poor insurance companies. She's taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from them over the years. In fact, she's already received $14,500 from insurance companies for her 2010 campaign, the second highest of any senator up for re-election next year. And the only reform they support is reform that will get the taxpayers to pay the overpriced premiums for the 47 million uninsured without having to change their ways. The fact is that insurance companies are not in any danger of going out of business because of the public plan choice unless they continue the kind of practices that have brought us to this crisis.

Please go to our Blue America Act Blue Page to give what you can.

In his Monday report, Howie wrote:

We're on schedule to raise the money we need to help ignite a robust debate in Arkansas about Lincoln, while serving notice on the state's other wavering, conservative senator, Mark Pryor. Please consider helping us make this an effective campaign. If money is tight and all you feel comfortable giving is $5 or $10, remember that Blue America has managed to bring in close to $2 million by aggregating lots of $5 and $10 donations. We don't get any corporate contributions. Please learn more about our campaign and contribute to it, here at our Blue America page, the Campaign for Health Care Choice.

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