The R's make history by filibustering the Hagel nomination

"This isn’t high school, getting ready for a football game or some play that's being produced at high school. This is -- we're trying to confirm somebody to run the defense of our country, the military of our country." (Watch video of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today on the Senate floor here.)

by Ken

So they've gone and done it, the Senate R's have: This afternoon, for the first time in history, though they don't like using the word (see below), they filibustered the nomination of a "national security" cabinet position. And they couldn't be prouder. Because these diseased jungle animals were able to prevent the Senate leadership from getting the crucial 60th vote it needed to end debate ("Senate Republicans block vote on Hagel nomination").

Maybe Harry Reid wishes now that he had pushed for a rules change that would have at least required filibusterers to actually, you know, filibuster -- so that the country could at least see them doing their dirtywork. Do you suppose it's just a coincidence that the totally off-off-the-rails Senate R's decided just now that it was safe to proceed with their precedent-shattering shenanigan?

Even now these demented revolutionaries lie their stinking carcasses out. As Rachel Weiner pointed out this evening on WaPo's "The Fix" blo, "They still don't want to call it a filibuster."

"This is not a filibuster," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) announced on the floor immediately after the vote. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) concurred, saying Republicans weren't trying to block the vote, just asking for more time. "If this is not a filibuster, I'd like to see what a filibuster is," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) retorted. On Wednesday, we explained why Republicans don't consider their block of Hagel's nomination a filibuster.

Republicans don't want to filibuster Chuck Hagel's nomination to be the next Secretary of Defense. They just want to require a 60-vote threshold to end debate on his confirmation on the floor of the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has filed for cloture, saying it's a "shame" that he had to do so.

"We're going to require a 60-vote threshold," Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) told Foreign Policy. But, he added, "It's not a filibuster. I don't want to use that word." Likewise, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) says he now might vote against cloture, which cuts off debate. But he still thinks "a filibuster is a bad precedent" to set for a Cabinet nominee. No Cabinet nominee has been defeated by filibuster; the vast majority receive only an up-or-down vote.

No, that sack of filth Jim Inhofe, a man without a sane cell in his brain, doesn't want to use that word. Why should anyone give a damn what words Crazy Jim does or doesn't want to use? Well, you can read for yourself the tortured word play by which these lying scumbags try to pretend they aren't doing what they've so gleefully done. As I keep pointing out, when you're dealing with right-wingers, it's insane to make any assumption except that every word out of their mouths is a lie.

SO WHAT'S IN IT FOR THE R'S?

This morning WaPo "Fix"-master Chris Cillizza was exploring the question "Why Republicans are filibustering Chuck Hagel," and allowing for the shilly-shallying you know is going to creep in a Village stooge talks to self-important pols, the answer turns tout to be what one might have expected: because it makes them feel like big shots, and because they can. Here's the fancier version:

1. There's no downside. While the fight over Hagel is consuming official Washington -- and enraging the Democratic base -- Republican strategists believe that not only are few regular people following all of this, but the former Nebraska senator isn't someone with all that many allies outside of Washington. "He's about as unsympathetic a character as you're ever going to see so the political danger is virtually non-existent," said one senior Senate Republican aide. Added another GOP Senate strategist: "Hagel doesn't have a natural base of grassroots support outside the president and Democratic leaders so it's difficult to see any real backlash developing." Worth noting: A Quinnipiac University poll conducted earlier this month showed that two-thirds of people didn't know enough about Hagel to offer an opinion either favorable or unfavorable.

2. The beefs with Hagel are legit. Several operatives rejected the notion that the Hagel blockade is largely about politics. (Worth noting: ALL fights in Congress are at least 50 percent about politics and often far more than that.) "A number of senators have serious concerns with his lack of experience leading such a massive bureaucracy, in addition to his position on Iran and Israel," said one GOP strategist. "And in some ways, this is part of a broader debate and effort to draw attention to the administration's policies in the Middle East.  The longer this nomination is drawn out, the more attention is given to those issues."

3. It's a Republican rallying cry. Republicans thought they would be in the Senate majority right now. And they thought they might also have Mitt Romney in the White House. Neither of those things happened. Instead, Senate Republicans watched their House colleagues ensure they got a worse deal on the fiscal cliff and kick the can down the road on the debt ceiling.  In short: The Senate GOP conference needs something to rally around and Hagel's nomination serves as a useful exercise to do just that. (Also, never forget that Hagel is widely viewed as a wolf in sheep's clothing -- a Republican turned kind-of Democrat -- by most of his former colleagues.) "It's always good to have a ‘support your colleagues' exercise when a Senator in your conference is looking for information from the Administration early in a new Congress," explained one aide. "It ensures you're playing as a team going forward.  It sets a precedent that the conference will not be rolled."

There's no price to pay. Those, it seems to me, are the crucial words.

If I were advising the president, I would be flooding every media outlet in the country with angry denunciations of the treacherous Republicans who hate America so much that to promote their demented ideology and unchecked egos they prefer to have the Pentagon removed from effective control. I would be crusading to make sure that any American who contemplates voting for a Republican knows he/she would be voting for a traitor who wants to see the country destroyed.

Which of course puts the lie to point (2), about Hagel's administrative inexperience -- even though there is a point to be made here. The Post's Walter Pincus made the case the other day ("An image issue for Chuck Hagel"), arguing that his testimony January 31 before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he "appeared to be unprepared and open to bullying," may have fatally weakened him in the eyes of the people he would have to lead as defense secretary. Among senators, Pincus said, "Enough of his former colleagues will accept the idea that he didn't want to be confrontational or that he was having a bad day."

The people Hagel must worry about are the men and women of the Defense Department for whom the hearing was a first look at their next boss in action. It wasn't a promising start.

If there is one characteristic that marks the military it is preparation -- careful planning, covering all contingencies, firmness, clear questions and answers, personal discipline.

Being prepared is a military habit practiced for that moment when lives may depend on it. It's a quality expected in its leaders.

He cited the case of his friend Les Aspin, who was chair of the House Armed Services Committee when Bill Clinton tapped him to be defense secretary.

Aspin was extremely bright and a good politician. But he was casual, if not sloppy, not just in dress but in his habits. He lacked discipline. Meetings with him could start late and go on forever. He loved to explore every relevant aspect of an issue, and even those that weren't relevant.

As one of Aspin's long-term friends, I was among those who warned him that he had to shape up if he took the Pentagon job. His every step would be weighed by the military, from the Joint Chiefs on down the chain of command.

I was sitting in the stands at Fort Myer during Aspin's welcoming ceremony in 1993. I will never forget the murmurs among the officers and enlisted men around me when Aspin, slouching and out of step, reviewed the troops.

Almost immediately he faced complicated issues, but Aspin's easy-going style never gained much respect within "the building" -- the Pentagon. Criticized for Somalia decisions and troubled by a heart problem, he resigned in early 1994.

But I don't think the R's who complained to Chris Cillizza about Hagel's "lack of experience leading such a massive bureaucracy" had in mind the ease with which they had bullied and beaten him at his committee hearing. Here's Walter Pincus again:

The irony about Hagel's hearing performance is that it hid his feisty personality and left the impression he could be pushed around. More than a half-dozen times he apologized for making perfectly acceptable statements, sometimes not bothering to correct senators who took those statements out of context.

Pincus compared Hagel's performance with John Brennan's subsequent appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

The nominee to head the CIA clearly had that agency's staff in mind Thursday as he sat before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Several times he corrected or challenged senators. He told Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) he disagreed "vehemently" with the conclusion that Brennan had leaked classified information in 2012. With Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), Brennan questioned the accuracy of a news story that was the basis for Coats's questions.

In the end, the administration and the Senate majority leadership will probably do what they have to do to get the Hagel nomination to an up-or-down vote and he'll be confirmed -- as an even weaker defense secretary than Walter Pincus was fearing. And the mad-dog Senate R's will have shown once again that the Just Say No-niks are even more firmly in charge than they were in the president's first term.


UPDATE: YOUNG JOHNNY McCRANKY'S AGAINST
HAGEL 'CAUSE HE WAS MEAN TO CHIMPY THE PREZ

I was so wrapped up with trying to get this post done amidst a welter of other obligations that I didn't notice Howie's pass-along of a delicious ThinkProgress Security post by Hayes Brown in which Hayes quotes that crack security expert and man of principle Young Johnny McCranky on the tube this afternoon with another intellectual giant, Fox Noisemaker Neil Cavuto:

To be honest with you, Neil, it goes back to there's a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly and say he was the worst President since Herbert Hoover and said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which was nonsense. He was anti-his own party and people -- people don't forget that. You can disagree but if you're disagreeable, then people don't forget that.

That's right, you heard it from the dripping maw of the Crankyman himself: "If you're disagreeable, then people don't forget that." Honestly, folks, you can't make this stuff up.

If these people were Gong Show contestants, we'd be well rid of them all by now.

#

In the puzzling wake of Judge Malarkey's secret late-night Senate confirmation, inquiring minds are asking, what became of "the 60-vote requirement"?

Judge Malarkey and, uh, some other guy (it doesn't matter
who, because our Mike is gonna be such an independent AG)

As we have been told so often, it's now standard operating procedure in the Senate, at least if you're the Democrats: Ya wanna do sumpin, ya gotta has 60 votes, on accounta they'll just wheel in Philly Buster, the knuckle-draggin' Senate terminator.

However, they didn't have to roust Philly from his sleep last night for the unexpected, unscheduled confirmation of Judge "Big Mike" Malarkey as U.S. attorney general. As a matter of fact, the last I heard, nobody seems to know even now how the confirmation vote came to happen last night, seemingly sneaked onto the Senate docket. One hears dark whisperings of a "deal"--presumably yet another in the series of Amazing Deals (do I hear "TV reality show" up ahead?) that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has reportedly engineered with his GOP opposite numbers, giving away pretty much anything that's asked for in exchange for . . . um . . . er . . . well, let's put it this way: If the Dems came away with as much as a handful of beans, they did better than I'm imagining. (I'm sure they were told the beans were magic.)

Meanwhile, many people with lingering reservations about the much-respected Judge Malarkey--even in spite of his sincere vows to be independent in saying and doing everything the White House instructs him to--point to the 53-40 vote, with all those missing Democratic presidential candidates supposedly committed to voting "no," and wonder how this fits with the new reality of the need for 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate. Notably Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com, in pondering "What happened to the Senate's '60-vote requirement'?," notes:

Thus, at least 44 Senators claimed to oppose Mukasey's confirmation -- more than enough to prevent it via filibuster. So why didn't they filibuster, the way Senate Republicans have on virtually every measure this year which they wanted to defeat?

Numerous Senate Democrats delivered dramatic speeches from the floor as to why Mukasey's confirmation would be so devastating to the country. The Washington Post said the "vote came after more than four hours of impassioned floor debate." . . .

So why would 44 Democratic Senators make a flamboyant showing of opposing confirmation without actually doing what they could to prevent it? Is it that a filibuster was not possible because a large number of these Democratic Senators were willing to symbolically oppose confirmation so they could say they did -- by casting meaningless votes in opposition knowing that confirmation was guaranteed -- but were unwilling to demonstrate the sincerity of their claimed beliefs by acting on them?

Along the way Glenn digresses most welcomely into an astonished aside on how torture has become just another issue that people can take sides on:

[The most amazing quote was from chief Mukasey supporter Chuck Schumer, who, before voting for him, said that Mukasey is "wrong on torture -- dead wrong." Marvel at that phrase: "wrong on torture." Six years ago, there wasn't even any such thing as being "wrong on torture," because "torture" wasn't something we debated. It would have been incoherent to have heard: "Well, he's dead wrong on torture, but . . . "

Now, "torture" is not only something we openly debate, but it's something we do. And the fact that someone is on the wrong side of the "torture debate" doesn't prevent them from becoming the Attorney General of the United States. It's just one issue, like any other issue -- the capital gains tax, employer mandates for health care, the water bill -- and just because someone is "dead wrong" on one little issue (torture) hardly disqualifies them from High Beltway Office.]

Eventually Glenn comes to rest, as you knew he had to, on the notion that there really isn't a 60-vote requirement, except when there is:

it isn't true that there is a "60-vote requirement," because only Republicans are willing to impose it. Democrats won't, even on what they claim are the gravest of matters, such as confirming someone as Attorney General who is "dead wrong on torture" and who won't even "tell the president that he cannot ignore the laws passed by Congress."

The so-called "60-vote requirement" applies only when it is time to do something to limit the Bush administration. It is merely the excuse Senate Democrats use to explain away their chronic failure/unwillingness to limit the President, and it is what the media uses to depict the GOP filibuster as something normal and benign. There obviously is no "60-vote requirement" when it comes to having the Senate comply with the President's demands, as the 53-vote confirmation of Michael Mukasey amply demonstrates. But as Mukasey is sworn in as the highest law enforcement officer in America, the Democrats want you to know that they most certainly did stand firm and "registered their displeasure."

I really can't think of anything more to say. But if you check out Glenn's full post on Salon.com, you'll find that plenty of other people could. The last I looked, there were 263 comments.


UPDATE: ABOUT THE REID DEAL ON JUDGE MALARKEY

On TPM, Greg Sargent is now reporting:

"According to sources inside and outside the Democratic leadership, Harry Reid allowed a vote on Mukasey because in exchange the Republican leadership agreed to allow a vote on the big Defense Appropriations Bill, which contains $459 billion in military spending but doesn't fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Reid had wanted to get this bill passed before the end of this week, and in fact, the defense bill did come up for a vote late last night and was passed after the Mukasey vote. "

Says Sargent, "Dem leaders wanted this defense approps bill passed . . . to be able to argue that they had sent a bill to the President funding the military, if not the war itself. The idea was that doing this would allow them to protect themselves in the days ahead when the battle over Iraq funding heats up and Republicans inevitably charge that Dems are refusing to fund the troops."

On the subject of a Democratic fillibuster to the nomination, according to Sargent, "A leadership source claimed that it was because Dem leaders were convinced that Repubs would be able to break off enough Dems to reach the 60 vote threshold and defeat the filibuster. They would have gotten 60. Some on the Democratic side honestly fundamentally don't believe in filibustering cabinet secretaries. We are on the cusp of a new administration, and we think it will be a Democratic one. Filibustering here would have set a bad precedent."

#

The bad news: Just 3 percent of our eligible voters have the power "to stop almost anything" in the Senate. The good news: We can work around this.

"Using Census figures, Geoghegan discovers that the 11 percent of Americans living in the least populated states have enough Senate votes--41--to sustain a filibuster. Yes, 89 percent of the population may support a policy, but 11 percent of the population has the senators to block that policy's enactment. . . .

"Lawmakers trying to keep their jobs only need support from a majority of those who turn out to vote. In those 21 least populated states with filibuster power, that majority is typically about 7 million voters, based on turnout data. That's just 3 percent of America's total voting-age population wielding enough Senate representation to stop almost anything."
--David Sirota, in his latest syndicated column, "Tyranny of the Tiny Minority"

It would be nice, for once, to have some good news about our electoral process.

No, I don't have any good news. However, short of that, maybe we can settle for the occasional bit of new news. Taken by itself, it's just one more piece of bad news, of course, but just maybe, by increasing our understanding of our electoral process, it can enable us to find some creative ways around it.

"Wondering why Congress rarely passes anything the public wants?" David Sirota asks in his new column. "Then grab Thomas Geoghegan's 1999 memoir, The Secret Lives of Citizens."

As Geoghegan [right] notes, in the 100-member Senate, just 41 "no" votes kills most legislation with a filibuster. You might think that if 41 percent of our representatives oppose a bill, maybe it should die. After all, civics class taught us that the Senate is supposed to protect the voice of a significant minority.

But here is what civics class didn't teach: With each state getting two senators regardless of population, 41 percent of the Senate often represents not a significant minority, but an infinitesimal one.

Using Census figures, Geoghegan discovers that the 11 percent of Americans living in the least populated states have enough Senate votes--41--to sustain a filibuster. Yes, 89 percent of the population may support a policy, but 11 percent of the population has the senators to block that policy's enactment. When you go further than Geoghegan and consider the election-focused mindset of politicians, you see the situation is even more absurd.

Lawmakers trying to keep their jobs only need support from a majority of those who turn out to vote. In those 21 least populated states with filibuster power, that majority is typically about 7 million voters, based on turnout data. That's just 3 percent of America's total voting-age population wielding enough Senate representation to stop almost anything.

To see how this works, consider what followed a July CBS News/New York Times poll that found 69 percent of Americans support Congress either enacting a timetable for troop withdrawals from Iraq or defunding the war completely. When the Senate voted on timetable legislation that month, 47 senators voted "no"--enough to filibuster.

Should we be surprised that a policy supported by more than two thirds of America drew opposition from almost half of the Senate? No, not when we consider the math.

I can't say I ever thought of it that way.

Of course, once you have thought of it that way, it's hard not to be even more tummy-numbingly discouraged than before you thought of it that way. You have some new appreciation for what we're up against, but you're not apt to break out the champagne for that.

Our David is less easily discouraged, of course, which is why I encourage everyone to read his presentation. He's already come up with two ways of making this knowledge work for progressives.

First, he looks for someplace other than Congress to work for change:

In the Karl Rove age of base politics, this Senate setup means that most domestic reforms will not come from D.C., no matter which party controls Congress or the presidency. Change will come instead from the arenas that are more democratic and have no filibuster: state legislatures.

This isn't wishful thinking. As energy, universal health care and consumer protection initiatives face Senate filibusters, legislatures are acting. For instance, California already passed one of the planet's most far-reaching clean energy mandates and may soon enact a universal health care plan. North Carolina passed predatory lending laws that are setting national standards. Such examples could fill a phone book.

Then, he sketches "a new strategy making the Senate's drawbacks the campaign's strength":

Specifically, Senate Democrats whine about not having 60 votes to pass Iraq-related legislation. They pretend they are innocent bystanders with no means to act, and some anti-war groups give the charade credence by echoing these excuses. Yet, if properly pressured, those Democrats might be able to muster 41 votes to stop war funding bills.

Well, it's a start. And I guess it beats just plain whining, 24/7.
.