Filibuster today, filibuster tomorrow, to impede filibusters forever / P.M. Carpenter

[Demeter]

http://buzzflash.com/articles/carpenter/307

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

I won't go pop-psych clichéish on you and use 'Freudian' to describe Claire McCaskill's verbal slip yesterday, but I will get down with Merriam Webster and say, true enough, it really did seem to "reveal some unconscious aspect of mind."

"We were compromised," blurted the lady Missourian on 'Meet the Press' about the Senate's reformulated stimulus bill, a tidy little phrase that exposed the concise power of an auxiliary verb. But Sen. McCaskill swiftly recovered -- just before, I imagine, her co-guest of honesty in overdrive, Barney Frank, could scream, You got that right -- and emasculated the passage to the mere, "We compromised."

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...Look, a bloodbathing showdown is coming, one way or the other, and the timing might as well have been now, right now, and over the stimulus bill as any other. Some would object that this particular bill is too urgent to be used in a test case of overcoming filibuster madness, but isn't every major piece of legislation in some manner urgent? And in meeting this economic crisis head on, if Senate Dems settle for only a partial offensive in what should be a resolute display of overwhelming force, they're establishing an immeasurably poor precedent: Hey Republicans, just yell Filibuster! and we'll bow and bend over. We won't force you to carry out your obstructionist threats; your word will suffice and we'll promptly proceed to watering down whatever more genuinely effective legislation is before us. And for what? Three GOP votes they might have picked up anyway, given Pennsylvania and Maine's dicey electoral configurations?

Rather than quietly cutting, for instance, $40 billion in aid to states -- portending massive layoffs of public employees in critical service areas -- or nearly $20 billion in school construction -- ensuring that countless children will continue to be educated about too many adults' disgraceful priorities -- Senate Democrats should have welcomed Republicans to play Jimmy Stewart as the grinchy Dark Knight....You go ahead, boys, you get up there on the Senate floor and explain to the American people 24/7 why they don't deserve adequate policemen and firefighters and their children don't deserve school buildings that won't collapse on them. You go ahead. We'll wait. Meanwhile we'll be appearing on every cable network program and visiting every newspaper editorial boardroom explaining that you, dear Republicans, are hijacking the 2008 elections.

Instead, now it's Senate Democrats who must first do the explaining.

Keeping cops on the job was pork, right? Providing for non-collapsible schoolrooms was pork, too. And all that other porky stuff that was (bafflingly) attacked as mere spending, not stimulus -- it had to go also, right? That's the price of "compromise," correct?

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These soi-disant budget hawks also threw away billions in future revenue through -- what else? -- the creation of new tax breaks, such as additional incentives to buy a home or car. That is no doubt a thank-you-very-much windfall for better-off folks who were already planning to buy a new car, but won't exactly spur the unemployed fellow -- perhaps one of those former state or local employees, or some chap not engaged in constructing a needed new school -- to run out and get himself one...The economic logic -- nay, the economic illiteracy, as the Washington Post's business columnist Steven Pearlstein described it last week -- of these pro-tax cut and anti-spending clowns may be a parliamentary circus at which, free of charge, we can all marvel in amusement, but in the long run it is bad and very costly policy...So, too, is the Senate Democrats' determination to avoid a showdown. For in the decisive absence of such a duel, responsible legislation will forever be pecked to death or disability by the ideological turkey buzzards of neoHooverism.

[bemildred]

1. There is nothing in the Constitution about filibusters.

It can be changed at any time by a majority vote. Well, several majority votes, it's well defended in the rules. But in the end, the Senate can do whatever the heck it wants, and that's what the Constitution says.