The Democrats completely folded on filibuster reform.
I had been figuring that this would be Harry Reid’s last term as a senator. And I was fine with that. He could step aside and allow a younger Democrat to take his seat. But now, I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope that Reid just dies. It doesn’t have to be a violent or painful death. But it wouldn’t hurt.
Last year Reid was screaming about how broken the Senate was. He stated publicly that he regretted not fixing the filibuster when he had the chance. But now he says that he isn’t quite ready to get rid of the 60 vote requirement for renaming a fucking post office! He said, “With the history of the Senate, we have to understand the Senate isn’t and shouldn’t be like the House.” Last time I checked, the Senate wasn’t at all like the House. It is already undemocratic. The 300,000 people in Wyoming get two senators, just like the 36 million people in California.This is inside the Beltway bullshit, pure and simple.
And it is all so frustrating! If Reid wasn’t prepared to go with the constitutional (nuclear) option, he should have negotiated different. If he had pushed for the elimination of the filibuster (Which is what I wanted!) then McConnell might have cut a deal with him to only require the talking filibuster. But instead, he threatened just the talking filibuster. And McConnell effectively said this, “My final offer is this: nothing. Not even the fee for the gaming license, because you are such a pussy, I know I can walk all over you.”
If this sounds familiar, it should: this is the first term Obama school of negotiating with yourself. But this is worse, because Reid didn’t have to negotiate with anyone. The Democrats could have just taken the ridiculously undemocratic Senate and made it just a tad less undemocratic. But no! We can’t do that! Because Reid cares more about setting a bad (i.e. democratic) precident in the Senate than he cares about his constituency or the whole of the United States.
So fuck Harry Reid! Fuck Carl Levin! Fuck the lot of you! This is why the average man on the street votes Republican: he thinks the Democrats are a bunch of pussies. And he is right.
Update (24 January 2013 12:10 pm)
Ezra Klein on this news, “Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell have come to a deal on filibuster reform. The deal is this: the filibuster will not be reformed.”
I liked the "talking filibuster" idea. And for purely selfish reasons. Because while Dems and Repubs bounce back and forth in the polls, basic liberal policies are almost always more popular than conservative ones. The only conservative positions that routinely win popular support are "less government" and "lower taxes" (both nice ideas in the abstract) and yet conservative suggestions for how to achieve these goals are invariably disliked by huge majorities.
So if Dems or Repubs spent a day, or two, or even a week holding up legislation, I imagine that legislation would get some degree of media scrutiny. And just about any legislation that becomes more transparent is supported by the American public when it backs traditional liberal goals and rejected when it backs newfangled conservative ones.
There’s always the possibility, though, that only Repubs would bother filibustering anything. While they are more disciplined than Dems, true, are they really any less lazy?
@JMF – I think the talking filibuster would have done a lot of good. There are smart people now claiming that it wouldn’t have–Jonathan Bernstein, for one. But I don’t think so. For one thing, a talking filibuster would have taken senators away from their main jobs: dialing for dollars. So they wouldn’t have filibustered just anything. As Greg Sargent noted, Reid’s fold on this means that the Republicans have received [i]no[/i] punishment at all for the last four years. That in itself was enough of a reason for reform.