This Democrat is watching

Ms. Warren’s adversaries are said to be trying to keep her off the banking committee, where she could push for more regulation, while her admirers want her to be on it. “Her strategy will depend on what happens,” said Simon Johnson, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “If she doesn’t get on the banking committee, then she’ll take a more outspoken approach.” He said that Democrats as a whole had not followed through on several issues of financial reform, so “it matters a great deal” where Ms. Warren is assigned. “Not putting her on banking would make the Democratic Party look like a creature of Wall Street, which, by the way, it is,” Professor Johnson said. “But they don’t like to be too explicit about it.”

Katharine Q. Seelye, "New Senator, Known Nationally, Sometimes Feared", in The New Yorks Times, 10 November 2012.

Reasons not to vote Republican--Part 1: Uncompromising, Filibustering

Reason #1: Moving Goal Posts, Refusing to Compromise for the Good of the Country, and Taking Filibustering to Incredibly Belligerent Lengths

Especially in the last few years, Republicans have moved the goal posts over and over again as Democrats have sought compromise on issues. As Kevin Drum writes in a blog post today: "Is it any wonder that so many Democrats are no longer in any mood to appease the right?" 

Drum links to Matt Steinglass's May 1st post in The Economist, in which Steinglass writes that Democrats have moved toward (and past) the center and away from issues they pursued in the past: "gun control, defence budgets under 3% of GDP, banning oil exploration off America's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a public option or single-payer solution to universal health insurance."

Steinglass continues:

Today these positions have all been abandoned. And we're talking about positions held under Bill Clinton, a "third way" leader who himself moved Democratic ideology dramatically to the right, the guy responsible for "ending welfare as we know it". Since then, Democrats have moved much further yet to the right, in the fruitless search for a compromise with a Republican Party that sees compromise itself as fundamentally evil. The obvious example is that the Democrats in 2010 literally passed the universal health-insurance reform that had been proposed by the GOP opposition in the Clinton administration, only to find today's GOP vilifying it as a form of Leninist socialist totalitarianism. [my emphasis]

The fight over the debt ceiling and Republican vilification of "Obamacare" were the final straws for me. I just quit taking the Republican party seriously as a party working for the good of the country. Though there are individual Republicans who think and act responsibly, the party as a whole has gone too far right and has become intransigent.

Republican leadership is fond of claiming that they have tried to work with the President, that they are open to compromise, but the claim is a lie. (There. I've written the word--lie) On the very evening that Barack Obama was celebrating his inauguration, Robert Draper records in his new book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, a group of Republican leaders were meeting to map out a plan to stymie Obama's legislative leadership. (Newt Gingrich was present.) Kevin McCarthy (Republican Rep., Calif.) is quoted as saying, "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign." 

As Draper says in an interview, this group of Republicans began to strategize, and what they ultimately came up with was a plan to attack the president's agenda, say no to everything and stick together." Now, of course each party should work to pass legislation it thinks is best for the country, but this is pigheadedness to the extreme, with a focus on one party's one-upmanship rather than on governing and doing the will of the people. 

Saying "no" to everything also means distorting the constitutional power of the majority in the Senate. As Thomas Geoghegan points out in his New York Times op-ed, "Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution," "the Constitution explicitly requires supermajorities only in a few special cases: ratifying treaties and constitutional amendments, overriding presidential vetoes, expelling members and for impeachments." However, in the last few years, and especially during the Obama administration, filibustering has increased exponentially in the Senate, with Republicans being the worst abusers of the filibuster. And supermajority vote has become the norm in passing legislation rather than the outlier.

Geoghegan writes that "[t]he filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent." [my emphasis]

He continues:

". . . we now have to take what a minority of an inherently unrepresentative body will give us. Forty-one senators from our 21 smallest states — just over 10 percent of our population — can block bills dealing not just with health care but with global warming and hazards that threaten the whole planet. Individual senators now use the filibuster, or the threat of it, as a kind of personal veto, and that power seems to have warped their behavior, encouraging grandstanding and worse.

Simple legislation or judicial appointments that should pass with a simple majority are now filibustered to the extreme by the minority party so that a supermajority is required to break the filibuster. (And Senators don't even have to be present to say they're filibustering; they can call in their "filibuster.") What is truly ironic about this unconstitutional use of filibuster votes is that Republicans are really big about holding up the Constitution and the intent of our founders as inerrant, yet they are the worst abusers in filibustering, thus bringing the work of the government to a grinding halt in order to force the political will of a MINORITY in the Senate. [See more statistics that show the rise in unconstitutional use of the filibuster vote here: The U. S. Senate's posted chart "Senate Actions on Cloture Motions."]

James Fallows has written extensively on his blog about the increasing use of the filibuster to circumvent majority rule in the Senate. His blog posts on the filibuster are here: Filibuster

Do Democrats use the filibuster vote? Yes, of course. But Republicans have carried that use to the extreme. And now, we might expect a future Democratic minority in the Senate to do the same because the procedure has become so commonplace.  

As Norman Orntein writes in  his article "Worst. Congress. Ever.,", in Foreign Policy:

Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters' rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics -- the filibuster and the hold -- in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier.

"House Republicans," Ornstein writes,

are adamant about refusing to compromise with the president, and are able in most instances to make good on the threat. When they are not able to maintain this unity, they are simply unwilling to bring up or pass measures that would lose significant GOP votes and require as many or more Democrats in support. This is a formula for gridlock, or worse is the Republicans are simply declining to govern.

[See also Thomas E. Mann's and Norman J. Ornstein's recent article in The Washington Post: "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem." ]

Republicans' admitted plan to say "NO" to everything, to "challenge every single bill," has not been good for the country. Why reward them by voting for them?

Habeas corpus

The Senate today failed to pass a bill restoring the right of habeas corpus to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The Senate needed 60 votes to pass the bill; 56 Senators voted for the bill. Thus, the extraordinary measures of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 still stand, preventing detainees from access to a speedy trial and from access to their choice of legal representation.

Why should we care? While habeas corpus has been suspended at different times in the history of our country, these recent changes in the law may set precedents that will permanently affect this traditional right to challenge one's incarceration or the incarceration of another, as Jeffrey Toobin suggests in a 2006 article in The New Yorker.

President Bush has said over and over again that terrorists hate our freedom. Well, based on these legal challenges to the basic rights underlying those freedoms, it seems that the Republican party hates freedom, too. Note again the names of those who voted against re-establishing the right of habeas corpus to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Only six Republicans voted to uphold this traditional right that Americans have long held to be a cornerstone of freedom.