November 22 (a repeat)

To try to repeat or somehow add to what Articleman posted last night or what Sheriff Dubnik, a hero way before yesterday, but his heroism renewed last night, told the nation, is an absurdity. They said it all. Yet, all of us with a keyboard need to vent, and to say what we all know to be so.

But, for me,time is precious today and, rather than write something new, I want to just republish something that appeared first on November 22, 2009. I post every year on that date: a searingly important one to so many of us of a certain age, but this one addressed the issue of today. I make no claims of special insight or eloquence, but linking to it does not seem sufficient since this diary says almost exactly what I want to say now after what happened yesterday. The Sheriff, a true hero and not just because of yesterday, said it all, but that won’t stop me from saying more.

This is what appeared here (well, TPM Cafe) in 2009:



It means only one thing to those of us of a certain age. It was the day of days, the event of our national lives. That it no longer is the focus of every succeeding November 22 tells us that one day even September 11 will pass without substantial notice. Yet whether cable television devotes every moment to reliving a national nightmare, its importance remains the same and, as Mad Men showed so well a few weeks back, any recollection of that day can trigger many floods, even among those who, unlike some of us, were very, very young that day.

Yes, I was called up short when Mad men's creator, Matt Weiner, mentioned that not everyone knows that Oswald was murdered only a few days after the President was killed, since there is no American who was over five years old at the time who doesn't remember that and the sense, at that very minute, that we had spun completely out of control exactly as Mad Men reminded us.

And, yes, Mad Men was also right in the sense that the world just ended that day and began again, with different values, different history, and different rules. The guilt and sadness over the death of our young President resulted, it is true, in the seminal legislation of our time, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively, and medicaid and medicare also in 1965. But the spirit of the era was gone and gone, it seemed, forever.

Ask not what your country can do for you: ask what you can do for your country.

That sense of obligation to our fellow citizens, the articulation of the underpinning of Roosevelt's New Deal but now in the hands of

a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world

President Kennedy's death marked the end of an era, not the beginning he had promised us and his hopeful ideals for the country were replaced, first, by the war in Vietnam, followed by the war on the Great Society and then of the New Deal itself. The election of President Obama is the first thing that has happened since then which provides even a hint that we can get back on the path President Kennedy set for us.

But as much as Matt Weiner offered a reminder of how many people have no recollection of November 22, 1963, a diary on Daily Kos the other day shows that the path to darkness remains before us as well. We live in a time when a person with a Jewish sounding last name who blogs about the limits of Sarah Palin's appeal receives an email about "Why People Like to Stuff People Like You into Ovens." This is the combustible atmosphere that existed in 1963. Deny that at your own peril.

The diarist advised that we not fear the people who are out there---the "crazies" as Regina Spektor calls them---and that advice is worth trying to heed, but it will not be easy.

Over and over the reminders take over this space.

We are living in a time when a doctor providing abortions is murdered and people cheer or try to justify it.

We are living in a time when elected officials can appear on Meet the Press and justify threats of violence and even the overthrow of our government and are not hooted into an apology or oblivion.

We live in a time when a man proudly brags about the gun he brought to a rally where the President of the United States was speaking and yet this incident gets less coverage than whether some guy tried to hoodwink cable tv (big woop) by claiming his boy was in a balloon.

We live in a time when people are "praying" for the President of the United States hoping for his death.

We live among hate.

Hate cost us a president and almost two generations of progress. It is countenanced today by people who should know better and there appear to be nobody or very few in the Republican Party willing to speak out against it, the way the otherwise racist William F. Buckley did against the John Birch Society
or even Sen Prescott Bush spoke out against, tepidly, the "methods" used by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his anti-Communist crusades.

Part of this day, as every November 22 since 1963, will be spent mourning our late President, but the day should also be dedicated to never allowing this hatred to change our world again.

Politics

If, as seems reasonable, you read everything posted under this name and carefully consider all the biases expressed here, you would know how much Rachel Maddow has contributed to what gets regurgitated every week. Hers is the most significant broadcast there is, and the sanity she projects in this land of crazy may be all that keeps us from just running outside and screaming into the night.

It was Timothy Crouse and Hunter Thompson who first explained to this blogger the pack mentality of what used to be called "the press" although if I weren't s young when I read the Drury Advice and Consent series that education might have come earlier, albeit from the right hand side of our politics. Which is fine.

What Rachel Maddow has become is the antidote. Much like Jon Stewart does (sorry, Jon, we take you more seriously than you would like) she takes the Official Meme of the Moment and examines it critically to see whether there is anything to support it. Sometimes there is but never to the level the blow dried haircuts try to convey, and usually she, or Jon, or Keith Olbermann or Lawrence O'Donnell are able to put what passes for thought in the perspective it deserves, which is usually to say, none.

My favorite recent for instance is a line that has come at us fairly slowly but which seemed to pick up steam around 2007 which, not coincidentally was the most recent time when the Democratic Party won what might be called "organizational control" of both houses of Congress from the Republican Party. A little research tells us, indeed, it was Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in waiting following the 2006 election, who announced that, with that "everyone knows this" voice that almost always fools the beltway crowd:

the minority in the Senate is almost never irrelevant, particularly a robust minority of 49. The Senate was constructed by our founding fathers, and then the subsequent evolution of the filibuster rule has turned the Senate into an institution that really can only operate on a bipartisan basis. It takes 60 votes - not 51 - to do virtually everything in the Senate. Neither side has had 60 in the two decades that I've been in the Senate. So in order to accomplish something for America, we have to be able to put together deals that make sense. Otherwise, the minority party's in a position with a mere 41 votes to prevent passage of almost anything. The majority leader's job is much tougher. He has got to get 60.

So the pack described by Drury, Crouse and Thompson repeated that teaching, with the knowing, insider's wink, about how all the rest of us fools who think that legislation can pass the Senate if a majority favor it, hadn't a clue about the real world. Everyone knows it takes a supermajority: a vote for cloture, to pass anything in the Senate. Founding Fathers, y'know, and all that....

Never mind that only 3 years or so earlier, Vice President Cheney got to vote to break a 50-50 tie and remove taxes on dividends and in 2005 so that they could cut medicaid benefits. Everybody knows you need 60 votes, not 51.

Yes, yes, I know the Cheney votes were critical because of the budget reconciliation rules, or exception, or something about Senator Byrd, and will address that in a way, in the following few paragraphs. Moreover, we need here brief aside about researching the vote on historic legislation. Because of the way legislatures, including both houses of the federal Congress, operate, it is difficult in retrospect to figure out what vote, if any, was the reason something passes. Often the key vote is on an amendment and, when that passes, everybody jumps in and supports the bill so that their vote cannot be used against them in a subsequent election. This is known as the "I was for it, before I was against it" doctrine, named after Senator Kerry's well meaning, but ultimately wrongheaded attempt to explain this to a public which prefers slogans to reality.

The point is not whether 51 votes should be enough, or 60 or 67. The point is that it is not because "everybody knows" that 60 votes are needed. The point is that 60 votes are needed because somebody has demanded that. The first person with access to large numbers of people to notice this was, at least to the ear and eyes of this consumer of news, Rachel Maddow early in 2007:

Traditionally, constitutionally, you need a majority of votes to pass something in the U.S. Senate. In extraordinary circumstances, a weird rule called “the filibuster” could be used to block an upper down majority vote on something. Sixty senators would have to vote to shut down the filibuster—extraordinary circumstances. That‘s how these filibusters worked for—I don‘t know, say the entire existence of the United States Senate.

Through, say, the 1980s and 1990s, it was normal to have 20 or 30 cloture votes, 20 or 30 filibusters during a given session of Congress. That started to pick up a bit in the mid-90s to about -- 50 votes. When Democrats were in the minority in 2005/2006, there were 54 cloture votes, Republicans freaked out about that publicly. They threatened the nuclear option to end the filibuster rule to take away that power in the Senate.

Then what did the Republicans do in the very next Congress when they became the minority? One hundred and twelve cloture votes. That‘s 112 --

One-one-two.

Look, I am all for the Constitution, I‘m all for as being protected from the tyranny of the majority. I dig it. I like arcane rules that protect minority rights—duh. But this seems sort of anti-small “d” Democratic. It seems like this rule is not being used as intended.

Exactly. Perfect. Except she should have stopped there. She did not, and what she said next was wrong. So wrong, in fact, that in its wrongness she made the real point in issue. Here is what she said:

The Republicans search for meaning by the way of the filibuster threat is having a tangible effect. It‘s making the American people hate them. The approval rating for congressional Democrats, just that you know, it‘s up 25 points from a month ago. Independents, their approval rating is up 12 points. The approval rating for congressional Republicans is down, that‘s fallen four points over the past month.

The GOP‘s “obstruct at all costs” strategy is making them unpopular. The practical policy effect they‘re having is to essentially just water down things that the Democrats are passing anyway. And they are behaving in such a radical way that it‘s causing even constitutionalists minority rights dorks like me to seriously consider the wisdom of scrapping some of the rules that I would otherwise cherish because it turns out that those rules assume a level of good faith and keeping the country‘s interests at heart. That just isn‘t in evidence right now.

We know Rachel was wrong because, rather than make the Republicans unpopular, as it should have, the strategy actually worked. People on our side of the political fence jumped all over the President for compromising on legislation even though his party supposedly "controlled" both houses of Congress. People who flit back and forth between the various schools of what passes for political thought watched Congress' vacillation, its inability to get anything done and the weak tea it produced and cast a pox on anyone who has anything to do with it. By last November, it was out with the ins and in with the outs. Republicans take the House, and gain in the Senate.

And that is where the issue is. It is not the rules that need to be changed, even if they could be, something quite unlikely in any material sense, as will be discussed below. The reason for the rise in the use of the filibuster, the reason Senator McConnell's "everybody knows" moment was brilliant---as in Lex Luthor brilliant---was because if requiring 60 votes to do anything is accepted as a reasonable thing to do, then it is a reasonable thing to do, and the ploy becomes reality---you really do need 60 votes.

Reconciliation, and later, the so-called "Byrd rules" were, in a way, the cause of all of this, as it attempted to be, and is in some ways, a solution. But it is a band-aid placed out there, where it was agreed that a filibuster could not be used to prevent the passage of legislation that keeps the government in operation: budget reconciliation. The Byrd rule, named after Senator Byrd because he was the majority leader when this was all agreed to, meant that this no filibuster thing would be limited to bills that actually have something to do with the federal budget.

It is a good thing we have this exception, but it is a bad thing, too. It meant that filibusters would not be used in the way that the public would object to the most, and object to to the point of wanting the whole filibuster thing ended. It took the pressure off.

When the Senate was a collegial body, say, up until the Byrd rules, it often acted as a secret, somewhat bipartisan, club. Except on the big things, what was called senatorial courtesy kept the filibuster from being overused, but also prevented a federal judge from being confirmed if one of the Senators from the nominee's state objected to the nomination. The filibuster was limited to things that a vocal minority, not necessarily on partisan grounds, objected to.

The famous ones of my youth, 1958, 1962, and the failed 1964 and 1965 ones against the civil and voting rights acts, were largely the work of what were then called "southern Democrats" but largely against the interests of the national Democratic Party. The Senate Majority Leader in 1958, himself a nominal southerner, tried to stop that filibuster before the bill became worthless mush, because he had national ambitions. (Maybe that leader, his name was Lyndon Johnson, by the way, did not have his heart in that fruitless exercise as some have charged. Maybe he did. No matter. It was not to be broken, and really took the murder of President Kennedy and a nation's feeling of guilt and remorse over that, to finally get these bills passed, to be signed, ironically, by President Johnson whose work, and speeches made up for any failures in 1958.)

But that clinches the argument. It is the public that needs to stop this. Rules changes will not do it, since there are always other ways to stall and tie up the Senate which requires "unanimous consent" to do anything at least one hundred times a day. The public needs to see what Senator McConnell has accomplished and revolt in the way Rachel Maddow thought they were doing in 2009.

Some blogger expressed the idea in late 2009 that Senator Reid could stop what Senator Byrd had agreed to:
the idea that the threat of a filibuster was the same as the filibuster itself.

The blogger said:

If Republicans want to keep suggesting the absence of a quorum, to prevent the Senate from voting on a good health care insurance reform bill (preferably a medicaid for all bill, but one with at least some government agency which will provide competitive insurance for those unwilling to accept the gouging of a private money making company with a ballpark named after it) then let them do it. No, it will not be covered on live tv except C-SPAN (the cable nets have flying balloons to cover and would not have time to show quorum call after quorum call, but the fact that the Senate is unable to do any business for this reason will be reported, and, from time to time in this ordeal, perhaps over 50 some odd Democratic Senators could sit in the chamber so that the absurdity of the suggestion of the absence of a quorum was illustrated in a way the fools we live with could understand and the American people would see why they are being denied what a majority of them want.

A House of Representatives that spends its first days reading, a sentence at a time, the parts of the Constitution that seem biblical in tone, and then devote a week to passing a bill with a name that shows its political intent as much as anything, which cannot pass the Senate and would be vetoed if it could, is not interested in governing as much as it is in politics. That is what the Senate has been about since 2006. If the answer to that is a pox on all their houses we are sunk. If the truth be told---that one party has abdicated any interest in the the fate of the nation and cares only about elections (witness, for instance, the obscene number of Senators who voted against the nuclear arms treaty with Russia---including much of the Republican leadership), then maybe we are on to something.

Those of us who have worked in government, as appointees of politicians, have a firm idea of what is government and what are politics. A politician who briefly was a boss, misunderstood the constant line drawing that is done and asked what we had against politics. Your blogger said he had nothing against it---loves it, as a matter of fact---but that is not what he is paid to do. That line seems almost quaint today, though most of us appointee types still follow it. The electeds, at least those in legislative bodies, federal and, at least where I live, state as well, seem to no longer recognize that there is a time for politics, but a time for governing.

So, that brings us back to the filibuster and the need for the public to curb it by showing disgust for its misuse. Changing the rules will not end it---there is always a loophole and a trick around a rules change. Moreover, my beloved Ms. Maddow, her fellow traveller, Keith Olbermann and their frequent replacement, Chris Hayes, three real heroes to me without qualification keep saying something about the Senate's right to change its rules on the "first day" of the "session" as if this is some clearly expressed thing in the Constitution.

It is not. All the Constitution says, as relevant here is that

"Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings..."

ART 1, SEC 5.

It doesn't say anything about the beginning of a "session" but only that that "The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year" art 1, sec 4, and, under the 20th Amendment "such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day."

So while someone might say the "first day" of the Senate is that day, that would be
so if the Senate stopped existing every two years, but the Constitution does not say that. And "the rules" which the Constitution says each house may adopt, include this rule which the Senate (or "a Senate," if you insist), adopted:

"The rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules."

Rule 5.

Some may not like this rule and there is an argument that it violates at least the spirit of the Constitution in that it allows dead people to bind the Senate forever, but laws passed by dead people continue, and there is not hard and fast answer to this question. All there is an argument. And given the fact that the Supreme Court is quite unlikely to intrude on the Senate's view of its own rules, that's all we have: an argument.

And, just so we don't get further confused there's this: If the Senate rules continue from Congress to Congress, without being adopted anew (the House has a different approach), those rules include this little kicker in the Mondale amendment of 1975, in Rule 22 about how to invoke cloture:

"if that question shall be decided in the affirmative by three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn -- except on a measure or motion to amend the Senate rules, in which case the necessary affirmative vote shall be two-thirds of the Senators present and voting -- then said measure, motion, or other matter pending before the Senate, or the unfinished business, shall be the unfinished business to the exclusion of all other business until disposed of."

Sen Mondale agreed to this. It means that rules changes go by the old rule: not 2/3rds or even 3/5ths of the body as a whole, but 2/3rds of the Senators in the room at the time of the cloture vote.

It is a great disservice to all those who fought against filibusters to make it sound so easy to change the rules. If that was so, the Senate Majority
Leader Johnson of Texas, would absolutely have done the deed in 1958. He was no fool, and knew what had to be done to break the Southern filibusters of civil rights legislation. He wanted to run for President two years later and knew that he had to do something to distance himself from the deep south, but this was something he
could not do. Neither could his successor Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, another strong leader, who would have done what you suggest if it were that easy.

There is one way that comes to my mind, and it is the so-called "nuclear option" dreamed up by Vice President Cheney. It would have Vice President Biden rule
that the Senate ruled need to be readopted from scratch every two years and cannot be subject to unlimited debate (though the second half of that flies in the face of 240 years of precedent). But he is the president of the Senate. The Senate parliamentarian would certainly disagree, but his determination is not binding. It can be upheld by a majority vote under Rule 20 which requires that it be
decided "without debate."

We win that one, but the precedent that any Vice President can make ad hoc rulings where his party controls the Senate is a very dangerous precedent, I think, which is why most liberals opposed it when Vice President Cheney floated it.

Don't let anybody fool you. This is a very tricky issue and not one easily resolvable. The only solution is, as always, citizen action and that, when against the money that disguised as campaign contributions is where the heart of Congress lies, and the pretend news that doesn't have a clue about how to report on any of this, is a daunting task, to be sure, but it is the only way.

Facing the Music

It was observed in passing yesterday, and probably not just here, that as a day of reckoning, today---New Year's Day---is a bit scary and never painless. The Jewish version of the new year adds the little "book of life contest"---who gets to be in it, and, ummmm, who not, but the secular version, with its resolutions and such, could drive a person to drink, which explains a few things. At least it is not the occasion a decade ago when we all had to consider how we managed to waste a whole millennium.

Rather than look backward, then, it might be a good time to look ahead. Loudon Wainwright III, singing about the beginning of the school year as summer ends described a time when

the hiatus is ending
the lax living has to stop
get rid of that beer belly
do wind sprints til you drop

and this seems to be as good a time as any for us to follow the President's invocation as he took office almost two years ago

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history;

To do that, we need to face facts, yes the actual things themselves, not to pretty pictures painted for us. We need to understand this

And the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say, to them, "Read my lips: no new taxes."

is what inevitably leads to this where streets remained unplowed in a major city two days after a storm:



or bridges begin to collapse near another metropolis



or coal mines, no longer subject to rigorous inspection or regulation, explode.

By the way, how did that whole deregulation of the financial industry work?

While we are at it, did you hear this one? You can cut taxes without any cost to our government:

Surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to -- if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

An entire political movement has been built on pretend, and its purveyors make no secret of that. Indeed, as frequently mentioned in these parts, it was some senior member of the Bush II administration who explained to Ron Suskind, writing for the New York Times Magazine that those in what he called

the reality-based community, [defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from ... judicious study of discernible reality' don't understand that t]hat's not the way the world really works anymore...We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do

But now it is 2011, and we need to get back to reality and put away our fantasies. Let's start with some truths, not subject to serious debate:

1. Nothing is cost free.

2. Taxes are how government has the means to do what only government can do. Yes, there is some sense of community in this process: we pool our resources to most effectively do what needs to be done, whether it be picking up the garbage (or the snow) or educating our children.

3. The progressive income tax, where the tax rate increases for those with the highest incomes does have a little Robin Hood aspect to it, but it is hardly a radical idea eighty years after its inception and reflects an ingrained view that the better off one is, the more he or she can be expected to help the community which allows them to make all that money.

Of the many falsehoods we have been sold (the estate tax as a crushing burden on our citizens, for instance, when it effects only the most wealthy among us), the idea that taxes are bad and cutting them the true calling of any decent politician, as well as the answer to every problem, is, perhaps the most pernicious. It sounds good to everyone---who doesn't want to pay smaller amounts of tax---but is simply a way for the wealthy to allow everyone else to fend for themselves. It is a foolish goal even for the rich, since the economy that feeds their wealth cannot survive on solely what they have, but depends on as many people as possible having as much as possible to spend, but there are no slogans or sound bytes to capture that idea.

It is so much easier to just rail at things which inanities such as a pox on both their houses, as if there are forces beyond control that makes our lives so miserable. But the easy answers, the ones that tell us it is not our fault, are almost always wrong.

For instance, we were sold a bill of goods all summer long in the form of a movie called Waiting for Superman, which apparently said (according blather that surrounds it) that it is not that we have chronically underfunded our public schools that we have all but given up educating broad swaths of children, it is ust that malicious bureaucrats and unions have protected poor teachers at the expense of great ones.

These unions do their dirty deeds, apparently, only in districts where the poor live since everyone else's children seem to get educated. And, the only way to tell whether children have been educated well is how they do on standardized tests.

It's magic. Sell education to private forces which call what they do "charter schools" and all our problems go away.

A career teacher, one whose insight on historical moments frequently inspires some of the scribbling that appears under the name Barth, does his own blogging under the name Teacherken. He is just one person---a teacher, and a defender of teacher's unions to be sure----(though he quotes Michael Martin at length, which makes two people) and maybe all that is wrong. What
Teacherken and Mr. Martin say, though, seems to make more sense than any hill of beans for a beanstock and what it amounts to is this:

The American people are being sold a bill of goods about educational policy. The media is complicit, as anyone who paid attention to the atrocity of NBC's education summit learned.

So let's try to make 2011 the year we grew up.

Merry Christmas

This is not my holiday, but it is hard to miss the signs that it is one celebrated by many others in this country, though Bill O'Reilly and his colleagues think otherwise. Oddly, by mystical coincidence, Shabbat and Christmas coincide this year. To many confused people, Chanukah is a supposed equivalent holiday to Christmas, but it's not. Shabbat, on the other hand, means Jews and Christians will be praying at roughly the same time. My faith in faith is not sufficient to think this is going to make much of a difference except maybe more people will be a bit more spiritual today than otherwise. (Wonder if anybody is being bar/bat mitzvah on what some of us call "December 25").

As has become customary, Regina Spektor has posted a view of the Christmas season which is shared by your blogger:

i'm one of the many jews who really love when the christmas spirit gets everyone to light up New York all pretty...

but it is also the sense of generosity of spirit, the idea that we have an obligation to one another and the sense that we have a higher calling than to make as much money as possible. The formal religious rituals which move another wise person worth consulting, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, may not be as meaningful to all of us but, as Rabbi Yoffie says, it is a time when people

despite frenetic preparations and gift buying -- [are] simply friendlier, more relaxed, more outgoing and more inclined to smile at holiday time... [T]here is such a thing as the spirit of Christmas, and the goodwill of the season always manages to extend its reach, in a lighting-fast and almost effortless way, to Americans of all faiths and religious traditions.

Let's not get confused, though. The last weeks of the 111th Congress moved this country forward not because of Christmas spirit, but because Republicans would rather go home than keep fighting, and, the masquerade they have worn for almost two years seemed to be fraying at the egdes. Paul Krugman made a good point this morning about where the Republicans fit in as part of Dickens' Christmas Carol, and, as noted by many, you really cannot miss today's congressional struggles as portrayed in It's A Wonderful Life either.

Last week, those of you gathering as families were implored to start trouble by telling those who cannot see it, what has been going on, and why none of it is in anyone's interest, except that of the very wealthy and, frankly, not them either. (The czars had plenty of money, but things did not work out for them and the New Deal would not have been possible if the wealthy among us did not understand how all of that could apply to them. They hated and still hate FDR, but they know how he saved them, too.)

This week's offering is pointed more at the progressives or liberals at your dinner table: the ones quick to tell you how disappointed they are in the President, the ones who stayed home in November, or are mumbling things such as "Nader," "Kucinich" or, absurdly, "Hillary." And, of course, it is Rachel Maddow who, again, sets the stage:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Getting [the START] treaty ratified is a huge victory for President Obama and something that republicans said they would deny him. It is a political win for the president because it has been on his agenda for a long time.

It is a signature issue for him, a tactical win because Republicans said he wasn't going to get it. It is a save the world win because if you care about, oops, it's the nuclear end of the world you care about treaties like this getting passed.

[Its ratification] caps an astonishing period in American political history.
For the last two years, democrats have held the White House as well as big majorities in the house and senate. The record of achievement in that time, even in the face of unified at times totally random Republican opposition, Republicans had proposed in the first place, unified Republican opposition to their own ideas?

Their track record even in the face of that is historic. Whether you agree or disagree with what democrats have done in the first two years of President Obama's presidency, they have freaking done it.

The Fair Pay Act for Women, expanding children's health insurance, new hate crimes legislation they said could not be done, tobacco regulation, credit card reform, student loan reform, the stimulus -- which in addition to helping pull this country back from the brink of a great depression, was also the largest tax cut ever, the largest investment in clean energy ever, the largest investment in education in our country ever.

There was also a little thing you may have heard of called health reform. Also, Wall Street reform, the improvements to the new G.I. bill, the most expansive food SAFETY BILL SINCE THE 1930s.

And tomorrow, president obama will officially sign a repeal of don't ask, don't tell....President Obama not only made a commitment to get it done and refused to cave on that commitment but he devised the strategy by which it could be done.

From the beginning of the term he worked to create the conditions in Washington, painstakingly to create conditions under which it was more likely that don't ask, don't tell would be repealed than not.

The conditions under which killing that policy was more possible than keeping it.
It took two years of solid work. He did not waver and in the end made it happen.

There are big things this administration said that it wanted to do that it hasn't done yet. Energy reform, immigration reform, the bush tax cuts for the rich were extended, closing Guantanamo.Those are some of them. Today it looked like one of the important judicial nominees will not get a vote to become a judge this year.

There is territory the White House has said it would like to cover that it has not yet covered. By my estimation it is halftime, right, in the first term and with this vote tomorrow they will have gone 85% of the distance they said they wanted to go in the first term of the president.

This is tough sledding, folks. We are a nation of happily ignorant people, with a government that goes where the money is, often in the face of public opinion. We are broke, angry, and watching a country in decline with little faith that we can reverse that slide.

But we have elected a man suited for the presidency as none have been since President Johnson had to leave after the war took over his presidency and as inspirational and well read as President Kennedy who told this blogger, and many others, what are our responsibilities as a citizen in a republic.

This president can be maddening, of course. He looks for the better angels in people trying to destroy him and harm us. His election was made possible by disgust in the fool who preceded him, but that man has been forgotten by a public that otherwise is made uneasy by a president who looks the way this one does and who has a name that sounds so foreign. We are not in a post-racial period, my friends, as much as we wish we were.

On top of all that, he is opposed by a political party which controls a television "news" outlet, which would rather endanger our national security than give the President a victory. There was less substance to the pig headed opposition to a treaty every reasonably serious person knew to be important, than in the absurd opposition to the League of Nations by roughly the same idiots who by keeping the United States out of it all but guaranteed the horrible events which followed.

Our fate, our hope lies in his presidency and in our efforts to support what we all want to happen. This will not be easy, and there will be days when it looks hopeless. As discussed last week, reforming the Senate rules, even if it is possible, will not turn the tide unless people get behind the issues before the Congress.

Nothing said here is meant to suggests one may not criticize the president. That criticism must, though, recognize his importance to this nation and to our cause and the imperative that he be re-elected and able to restore the House to Democratic control. A discontent that suggests we made a mistake in 2008 is both absurd and not in anyone's interest.

So, there are your marching orders. Nobody should be complacent and everyone has an assignment. It's really very important and the best Christmas present you could give to our posterity.

Again, Merry Christmas and, well, Shabbat Shalom.

The Road Ahead or Barth Wants to Ruin Family Get Togethers

There is nobody on "our side" of the political gulf who did not cheer, feel vindicated, or thought of the many people in their lives who just have to read the University of Maryland study of the misinformed viewers of what is laughingly called "Fox News." When we calm down a bit, it might occur to contemplate that a) what is being done is a deliberate political strategy and b) is working.

The general stupidity of our fellow Americans, and their consequent disdain for facts, history or context is a constant refrain in these pages. It can be tsked, tsked here, and can lead to all the pain that comes from banging one's head against a wall, but it is as much an operative fact about the country in which we live as any of the well accepted truths which Fox viewers are either not told about or about which they are taught falsehoods.

Your faithful correspondent has fallen into the trap of arguing against the obvious way too many times. Most egregiously , while railing against the foolishness that passes for political thought, the foolish blogger pointed to the comments of a high level member of the Bush II White House to Ron Suskind during their mysterious heyday following the 9/11 attacks

the reality-based community, [defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from ... judicious study of discernible reality' don't understand that t]hat's not the way the world really works anymore...We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do

as if this was the craziest, most foul thing ever uttered in the White House when, in fact, it was pure wisdom. Cynical, maybe, but the observation which seemed so shocking to this dense fool, was, in fact, the exposition of a brilliant political strategy.

It is by following that strategy that these forces of the the right, the protectors of all that is wealthy, the defenders of those who, in Senator Sanders' memorable words, want it all, win even when the are in the minority and then, by preventing anything from being accomplished, can run against Democrats by arguing that they have not done anything.

Once again (or, "as usual"), Dr. Maddow is called upon to frame this point:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

What you‘re looking at there is the breaking of the United States Senate as an institution. What these are is filibusters. This is when the Senate decides to take the extraordinary measure of making something take 60 votes to pass instead of 50 votes.

And that‘s impossible. Supermajorities are impossible. You cannot actually pass things with supermajorities in an ongoing way. This is not the way that legislatures function. It is never the way that America‘s legislature has functioned.

If you‘re going to require a supermajority, it means that effectively this body has ceased to function. It has ceased to function as a normal majority rules legislature.

This is how Republicans broke the Senate. They have turned the Senate into a Republican stronghold not while they were in the majority, but since they‘ve been in the minority. Since they lost the Senate, they have turned it into a stronghold for their own party by using power that the Senate minority is usually entrusted not to abuse. They‘ve used that power to break the institution.

Even though they are the minority, even though there are less than 50 of them, significantly less than 50 of them, they exert all of the leverage. They get what they want. Which not only means that policies get changed to try to appeal to them, it also means that the calendar just stretches on and on and on and on with nothing ever getting done. That is -- that‘s their preference.

They are filibustering the funding of the military right now. That‘s passed every year for 48 years. It is being filibustered by Republicans right now. It‘s on the docket.

They are filibustering the appointment of people to relatively low-level political jobs at middle management levels at cabinet agencies you cannot remember the names of—people who are not famous, people who are not controversial, but who are nevertheless subject to this extraordinary supermajority rule. This extraordinary thing that was never supposed to be used the way it‘s being used. But because Republicans are using it the way they are, nothing gets done. And they have found that strategy to be in their political interest—to get as little done as possible.

And here's the bad news, the part you may not want to hear, and the part that could make you even angrier that you wasted time on this post:

Why is this happening? How do they get away with this?

It is all your (our) fault.

OK. Not "all" but there is plenty of fault to be laid right at our doorstop.

Again, Rachel explains:

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One of the consequences of the big, big Democratic victories in the House in 2006 and 2008 is that it allowed us to see, it allowed us to know what sort of laws you can get passed if the Democratic agenda, President Obama‘s agenda is enacted. Health reform with a public option, no more “don‘t ask, don‘t tell,” energy legislation that finally cuts the carbon emissions, a greater amount of disclosure in corporate campaign contributions, no more bonus tax cuts for the rich—all of this was campaigned on by President Obama.

All of this has been done by the House. All of this has been achieved by Nancy Pelosi. And all of it died in the Senate slowly and painfully shortly thereafter.

The distance between that world—what is it Pelosi-stan, right -- the difference between that world, the House, where all of those things were achieved and the world that we have got with Congress now on the verge of extending bonus tax cuts for the richest Americans, even though Democrats are the majority in both houses right now. The distance between those things, the distance in what the House has done and what has been done overall, that‘s the enthusiasm gap. You‘re looking for it, there it is.

The right turned out in the last election and the left did not turn out in the last election. That‘s the gap they fell into. And, ultimately, that‘s what the United States Senate being broken has wrought. What the House has giveth, the Senate has taketh away, with the endless filibusters, with the endless obstructions and delay tactics, one of which proved to be successful tonight.

The margin that Democrats have over Republicans in the House and the Senate has been equal. Things have died in the Senate, not because Democrats didn‘t have the votes. They had the votes. The Senate broke.

Rachel and Senator Tom Udall believe the have the answer in a rules change to be brought on by a ruling by the Vice President, as president of the Senate on the first day of the new session, changing not only the Senate's rules by the longstanding view of the Senate as a continuous body, since only one-third are elected at a time as opposed to the House where everyone runs every two years. Many of us are dubious that this plan will work. And even if this dangerous tact did (remember that a prior Vice President, Cheney, was going to rule against filibusters of judicial nominees, to allow President Bush to seat even more hacks---see the Virginia health care decision of the past week) there are numerous other devices that a determined minority can employ---frequent quorum calls, or requirements that a bill be read by the clerk in full, or any number of other refusals to make possible the "without objection" that the Senate almost always needs to proceed further, to achieve the same end.

It is not a rules change that is needed. It is public opinion which needs to change. The get away with this because nobody cares: Nobody cares about parliamentary procedures, just as nobody cares about campaign finance reform which is just as boring a subject.

They are hardly as much fun to talk about as millions in tax breaks for millionaires, or calling President Obama a "sell out." But what is wrong with our politics, and why we are moving backwards as fast as Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson move us forward or tried to, is right there. Nothing will change if Republicans can just stop the Senate from doing business and not pa an political price for it.

If and when your family gatherings or parties with friends lead to political discussions, many will try to change or avoid the subject, lest unpleasantness ensue. We all know the rules: try to keep politics and religion out of social gatherings.

To do so this year, in this atmosphere, could be disastrous, though. The meme that the President can do whatever he wants but has failed to do what we want needs a response. This is not to say that the President is not without fault. He propagates the foolish Bush thing about being "the decider" or something close to a king, when he is not. The constant use of the first person as in

So I pass a signature piece of legislation where we finally get health care for all Americans, something that Democrats had been fighting for for a hundred years

is foolish and is not only wrong, but perpetuates the fiction that the all powerful sovereign has failed to do what he said he would do.

The reality is that Congress goes where the money is and the money wants to protect those who already have it. If there is a way to fight back, it is only by political action, by noise from those who expect something else from their government. That is where we, the people, come in.

So, we close with a couple of frequently quoted exhortations of presidents:

First from our greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he took office on March 4, 1933:

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective

The second from the most inspirational president of the lifetime of many of us, when he was sworn in on January 20, 1961:

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation,"² a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

What both presidents needed, and our current one needs now, is that we show those in our lives who will not see it, what is happening and why. It is boring, pedantic and may ruin a few dinners or even friendships. But, my friends, it is the only way.

This is how it works...

The founders of this nation did not, we have often been told, envision the formation of political parties and there remains a resistance to the idea that the party is more important than the actual office holder. There have been times, indeed, when the party label meant less than than the politics of the time. Stephen Douglas, for instance, was a Democrat when that party stood for slavery but, at best, it was unclear whether he did. In modern times, Clifford Case and Jacob Javits, both Republicans (Lincoln Chaffee even more recently) but far more progressive than people who were members of the Democratic Party, and not just southern Democrats.


Those days are over, at least for now. The Republican Party, minority in the Senate, have successfully transformed Rule XXII to make it impossible for any bill to be voted upon without the proponent having at least the technical ability to obtain cloture. They can do that for two reasons a) they stand to together as a bloc irrespective of the merits of a particular piece of legislation, thus insuring cloture cannot be invoked and b) they get away with it in what laughingly could be called "the court of public opinion."

These Republicans are no better or no worse than any other bloc that has formed in the Senate. If southern Democrats could have gotten away with filibustering everything, they would have done so, not simply to block civil rights legislation, but the New Deal itself. They could not, because the "public" or more accurately, the elites whose consensus means something in Washington and other power centers, would not allow it or stand for it.

The success in stopping serious civil rights legislation from being enacted in 1957. in 1958 (after Little Rock) and 1963 (at and around the march on Washington) was because there was insufficient outrage at the filibuster mounted against it. After President Kennedy was murdered in November, 1963, the public demand that legislation he championed be enacted in his memory made it impossible to prevent cloture and both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts became law. It was not that the public suddenly accepted the merits of the legislation (the country had been divided on the subject at least since 1957, but were it not for the filibuster, there were probably enough votes to enact it), but that filibustering the bill had become, with the president's death, unacceptable to enough people that the two bills could pass.

So it matters not, today, that Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are considered "moderate." If the Republican Party can block legislation by uniformly voting against cloture, all that matters is whether a Senator is a member of that party. After Arlen Specter voted against cloture as a Republican in 2009 he had to change parties (which coincided with electoral realities in his state). Senators Snowe and Collins say they are for repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell but Senator Snowe voted against cloture to prevent the Defense Authorization bill, which included the repeal, from being debated and voted upon this week, and Senator Collins did the same thing over the summer citing some objection to the way Senator Reid restricted the amendment process.

This is why voting last November, and not just in presidential elections, was important. This is why, whether you like the Senate leadership, or every White House position, it was important for Democrats to be elected. Even more importantly, this is why whatever anger there is over the failure of this country to address the so many critical issues facing us needs to be directed at the reasons for this.

It is not President Obama. Yes, he does not appear to be the best negotiator there is and his unreciprocated respect for his political opponents, whether real or (more likely) feigned, is almost childish but that it not why so much that needs to be done is not, and cannot. Mourning Joe and others can keep talking about the control of both houses of Congress, but it is not so, as anyone with half a brain can see.

If sixty votes are required to declare Arbor Day then "control" of the Senate means little more than control of the committee chairs, and the floor agenda; not insignificant, but not the stuff that makes history. If the stimulus was too little, which it surely was, it was because it could not get sixty votes. If the health care reform, historic though it was, did not have all that we wished it did, it was because it needed sixty votes. If we have done nothing to deal with the requirements of a green economy and competing with the many other nations which are galloping past us in that area, in education, and countless other areas, it is because nothing can get done unless Senator McConnell allows it to.

Yes, the bully pulpit is something, but citizen action means much more. We have a Supreme Court that is likely to prevent any serious campaign finance reform from becoming law, giving an even greater advantage to those who have the funds to bestow upon needy politicians seeking re-election and to overcome that, if it can be overcome, requires a daily onslaught of angry voters on an otherwise bought and paid for Congress. We have not seen anything like that in any sustained fashion; just blogging and whining. Lecturing the president will not do the trick. Bombarding Congress might, but we seem incapable of that.

In an interview in The Promise, Jonathan Alter's excellent narrative of the President's first year, Mr. Obama tells the story of a 2009 trip to South Korea where he was told about Korean parents pressuring their government to provide more English teachers to first graders to satisfy a demand that their children learn that language. President Obama lamented that when he, in a press conference he held while still in Korea, he tried to discuss the importance of American parents making similar demands, U.S. reporters wanted to know whether he had yet read Sarah Palin's book. Of this intense interest in fluffery and bullshit are the seeds of the decline we see and lament over and over.

'Twas ever so, of course. It's just that more people saw garbage to be garbage during the better parts of our history. Were they around today, of course, Father Coughlin or Westbrook Pegler, among others, would be spewing his hate on Fox News, instead of being snickered at by most of the movers and shakers. And you have to laugh when the "new Nixon" we kept being told had appeared in the 1968 campaign (while many progressives stayed home to protest against President Johnson and Vice President Humphrey since there was supposedly "no difference" between them and Nixon) is further unmasked to be just the rank nonsense the sane among us knew then, even if we were only 16 years old.

Just as there was not a word Senator Sanders said yesterday, at least among those which reached these ears, with which any reasonably sane person could have disagreed. Sadly, there are not sixty of them in the United States Senate.

What's about to happen and why

When we were young Joni Mitchell told us:

you haven't really changed...
It's just that now you're romanticizing some pain that's in your head
You got tombs in your eyes but the songs you punched are dreamy
Listen, they sing of love so sweet, love so sweet
When you gonna get yourself back on your feet?
Oh and love can be so sweet Love so sweet

but after a decade of Reaganomics, that whole dreaming thing seemed a bit darker:

The street was loud
From an angry crowd and
I thought of you, I
thought of you
Dreamer
Land of the free
No hungry bellies
Impossible
Impossible dreamer

Have you spent the week wishing President Obama would stand up to the Republicans? Are you stupefied by the prospect of a Congress that won't extend unemployment benefits and continue a middle class tax cut, unless the wealthiest get an even bigger tax cut? Can you barely sit still for a Senate unable to ratify an utterly uncontroversial treaty required for a thousand a half reasons, but mostly to lessen the chances we we will all be blown away by some fool and nuclear weapons? Because the Senate has not extended tax cuts for the wealthy?

Don't be.

There was nothing President Obama could have done. This is the Congress we have elected. It is the Congress that comes forth in a country which auctions its legislature off to the highest bidder and prevents any change in such a perverse system by expressing a sudden devotion to the principles of the First Amendment. (Yes, the same First Amendment which permits radio stations to be fined if a someone says a "bad word" on it or allows Congress to regulate how music should be played on radio stations which archive their programs on the internet. It means nothing then, but is an iron shield against any regulation of campaign contributions.)

Get used to this, my friends. John McCain has pointed out that elections have consequences and what we are seeing this week are just that. With the election of the Great Reagan in 1980, the dreams of those President Roosevelt called

the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering

to destroy the New Deal and the forward looking outlook that made it, and the great prosperity it brought with it, were realized. Government is bad, they told us, and we believed them.

And, except for eight years when a moderate Republican masquerading as a Democrat served in the White House (though they impeached him), they held the White House for almost thirty years.

President Obama, some thought, could just fix all of that with the snap of newly empowered fingers. Most of us knew better, but when he could not repair the damage of thirty years in just two, it was decided to go back to the exact way of thinking that has brought our country to its knees.

The other day, Bob Schieffer tried desperately on Face the Nationto get distinguished biographers of two of our greatest presidents to reassure him and us that as before something will happen or someone will come to save the day. Neither historian would bite, however:

RON CHERNOW (biographer of George Wahington in Washington: A Life)

Well, Americans like to look back on the Founding Era as the golden age. And there are good reasons and bad reasons for doing that. Indeed the Founding Era had these men who were brilliant and erudite and fearless. We had in a country of three million people simultaneously active in American politics, a Benjamin Franklin, a George Washington, a
Thomas Jefferson, a James Madison, a John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton and a John Jay.

We would all be hard pressed to think of a single individual of the stature of any of those seven people even though the population today is one hundred times greater.

EDMUND MORRIS (biographer of Theodore Roosevelt in Colonel Roosevelt):

the progressive middle class movement ... volcanically erupted in 1910, exactly hundred years ago. And reached its peak in 1912, the campaign where Theodore Roosevelt became the almost third party candidate for the presidency and humiliated the sitting Republican President William Howard Taft and split the Republican vote and elected Woodrow Wilson...[based on a ] feeling of exclusion, exclusion from
the privileged interplay of a conservative Congress, financial institutions-- ... the corporate elite, [wwhere] the middle class feels disenfranchised, angry, overtaxed and perplexed. And this anger is
something quite formidable. And I would not be surprised if it doesn’t ... give us real trouble in 2012.

We have, as Frank Rich explained last week, a bought and paid for Congress, out of touch with the issues facing our country and doing the bidding of elites who mean no good. This is what we elected and this is what we got.

-----

A brief word on today's events, happening as we type. When the Senate votes 53-36 to in essence, pass a middle class tax cut extension, they have not, as the Times has it right now, "rejected" the plan. They have failed to impose cloture which, under the new view of what the filibuster means, makes it impossible for the Senate to pass the bill. But a body does not "reject" something when 17 more of its members vote for it, than vote against it. In the Beltway, it may mean they "rejected" something, but not anywhere else.