Sense and Nonsense

Losing a Moderate Voice of Reason

What a shame that one of the few sensible people left in the United States Senate has chosen to retire. Olympia Snowe, Republican from Maine, offered this brief explanation in an op-ed piece in yesterday's Washington Post.

The flavor:

Some people were surprised by my conclusion, yet I have spoken on the floor of the Senate for years about the dysfunction and political polarization in the institution. Simply put, the Senate is not living up to what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Bayh's Good Sense

Good for Evan Bayh. The U.S. Senator from Indiana has announced that he will not run for reelection.  In his statement Monday (and in an interview with the New York Times), he took some pointed shots at the Senate.  

"For some time, I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should,” Mr. Bayh said. “There is too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving. Even at a time of enormous challenge, the people’s business is not being done.”

Amen. Good for Bayh for having the sense to get out of the congressional cesspool. And good for him for having sharply criticized the institution. Every little thing that brings more public attention to the dysfunctional nature of the Senate is good.

UPDATE:  Here's an educational moment, boys and girls.  I want to instruct you on the difference between a "hack" blog and an "intelligent" blog.  This one you're looking at right now is a hack blog. Note the snark, the cheap shots and put-downs, the vulgarities, the quick takes.  All signs of genuine class. Now, go look at this post about Bayh's retirement announcement at Jim Fallows' blog for The Atlantic. That's an intelligent blog.  Class dismissed. Wipe your snotty noses before leaving the room. 

A Perfect Example of What's Wrong

. . . with the United States Senate can be found in this news that Republican Richard Shelby has put a hold on seventy (!!) of Obama's nominees to high positions in the executive branch in an effort to extract some parochial policy concessions for his pathetic state.  It is grotesquely wrong that individual senators are accorded this kind of power.  We desperately need reform of Senate rules.  Hell, we need a constitutional convention to change (get rid of?) the Senate itself.  Unfortunately, we're not even going to get rules reform. On all this, see the column by Gail Collins in today's New York Times. 

Make Them Filibuster

See this article that accompanied the graph below.    I don't understand why the Democrats don't force the Republicans to go ahead and filibuster.  Don't let them get away with mere threats.  Make them actually take to the floor and obstruct the flow of Senate business for real.  Make them talk all night, for days on end.  Let the media focus on their real obstructionism.  Why let them get off easy?  The Senate is now, by far, the most dysfunctional part of American government.  Let the people see how screwed up it is.  

 

Coakley Might Lose This Race

If you've been following the recent news, you know there has been a dramatic tightening in the race for the open U.S. Senate seat for Massachusetts.  Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, had been well ahead of Scott Brown, her Republican rival.  But in the last two weeks, Brown has been gaining ground. Now, Republicans nationwide -- and opponents of the health-care bill pending in Congress -- taste blood and are pouring huge amounts of money into this race in its final days.  It's a smart move on their part. Brown may well win this thing.

If Coakley loses, it won't be because of the final gush of dollars spent on Brown's behalf.  It will be because Martha Coakley is one of the worst candidates for public office I've seen in recent years.  She is a bloodless technocrat.  A lifeless, plastic figurine.  Remember Kerry Healey -- the Republican who opposed Deval Patrick in the gubernatorial race three years ago?  Coakley makes Healey (an automaton as a candidate) look like a female Robin Williams -- a person so full of life that she has trouble controlling it.   Coakley is also a smug, complacent campaigner who somehow vanquished her Democratic rivals and went on to assume that she was then a shoo-in for the seat.  She now risks losing it.

I hope Coakley doesn't blow this.  If she takes a Senate seat alongside John Kerry, Massachusetts would have the distinction of having perhaps the most boring pair of Senators in the nation.  That's something, isn't it?

But if Coakley loses, the whole dynamic of national politics and government would change because the Republicans would have the magical 41st vote they need in the Senate to stop all progressive change. On this, see the wonderful column by Gail Collins in today's New York Times. 

Fix the Broken Senate: Change the Rule

The United States Senate is a defective, dysfunctional institution.  It has been rendered virtually ineffective not so much by its original design (though that, too, is problematic), but by the adoption in 1975 of a rule that essentially requires 60 votes to get anything done.

The rule requiring 60 votes to invoke cloture on a filibuster means that it takes a super-majority to prevail in the Senate.  As partisanship has grown more bitter on Capitol Hill, this has rule has become deeply problematic.  The New York Times this morning quoted  Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who, speaking on the Senate floor yesterday about the persistent obstructionism of Senate Republicans, said: "We have now crossed the mark of over 100 filibusters and acts of procedural obstruction in less than one year.  Never since the founding of the Republic, not even in the bitter sentiments preceding Civil War, was such a thing ever seen in this body." 

Writing about the "distorting and destructive effect" of this internal rule, Jim Fallows says that this situation "needs to be elevated from a background/insider's issue to absolutely first-tier consideration in mainstream political discourse."   (See a follow-up on this issue by Fallows here.)  I agree.  Even without this debilitating and paralyzing rule, the Senate is the most flawed element in our government's constitutional design, giving far too much power to Senators from sparsely populated states.  But the distorting effect of the 60-vote cloture rule makes the minoritarian tendencies of the U.S. all the more troublesome. 

UPDATE: I see that in his column in this morning's Times, Paul Krugman weighs in on the same issue.

Senate A-holes

Let's' be clear: almost every U.S. Senator is an asshole.  That's because the institution itself attracts such types.  And, if you're not already an a-hole by the time you get elected to the Senate, the institution quickly turns you into one by making you think you are OH SO POWERFUL AND IMPORTANT AND WONDERFUL.  And every last one of them seems to care about only one thing: getting reelected. 

But, let's also be clear about this: some of them are much worse than others.  All the Republicans are horrible because they don't care about people.  They prefer the status quo, because that way MORE PEOPLE DIE AND SUFFER ECONOMIC PAIN.   And some Democrats, such as Ben Nelson, are horrible because they are Republicans in disguise.  See more on Ben. 

Joe Lieberman: Worst Person in the World?

Possibly.  Why, oh why, do the Democrats continue to bow to this guy?  Kick him out of the caucus and let him go with the Republicans, whose positions he prefers.

UPDATES:

1)  See the op-ed piece by Gail Collins in Thursday's NY Times.  In an effort to explain Lieberman's flip-flopping and idiocy, Collins notes the simple theory that Lieberman "isn't actually all that smart."  I like that theory. He's as dumb as a brick.  And from years of teaching bricks, I know that kind of dumb.

2) See Colbert below.

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Vote Tuesday

For you Massachusetts voters: vote Khazei. He's the best of a sorry lot. Capuano and Coakley are horrible, and Pagliuca is a non-starter. 

Khazei for Senate

The campaign to fill the U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts has been a real snoozer.  It's worse than pathetic that the candidates running for the major party nominations are generally so uninspiring.  Is this really the best crop of people the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can cough up for a Senate seat?

That said, the one among this group who is clearly superior to all the others is Alan Khazei.  I agree with the Boston Globe, which endorsed Khazei in its editorial today.  I'll be voting for Khazei and urge you to do so, too.