(originally posted on my blog at
http://www.meldroc.com/?p=190 .)
Well, this is what Milquetoast of the Week is all about. Not people like Barack Obama who make understandable mistakes, but don’t make a pattern out of them, but people like Harry Reid, who keep showing a pattern of shameless capitulation through their entire political careers.
And Harry, you’ve earned it this week. You’re the Democratic Milquetoast of the Week. What did you do this time? You bungled the handling of Al Franken, and as a result, allowed the Republicans to make a mockery of the entire Democratic Party, again.
Al Franken should be sitting in the Senate Chamber right now, having sworn in as the 59th member of the Democratic Caucus. But noooooo, he’s still in Minnesota, because Reid didn’t have the gonads to confront John Cornyn and the rest of the Republicans. Even though there’s plenty of historical precedent for Senators to be provisionally sworn in while election court battles are fought (Mary Landrieu for example,) this week the Republicans threatened to filibuster and Reid left the fight with his tail between his legs.
It is because Reid refuses to fight that the Republicans are doing so many filibusters.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com does the numbers.The number of cloture votes skyrocketed in the 110th Congress following the Democratic takeover of the Senate and Reid’s assumption of the majority leader position. The Senate voted on 112 cloture motions in the 110th, exactly double the number (56) of cloture votes in the 109th Congress, and two-and-a-half times as many as the average number of cloture votes (44) over the previous nine Congresses. Of these cloture motions, 51 were rejected (meaning that opponents of a bill succeeded in blocking an up-or-down vote) and 61 were passed.
Not all of these cloture motions, it should be noted, were necessitated by obstructionist Republicans. In some cases, such as on FISA and on certain resolutions related to the Iraq War, a minority of Democrats were seeking to prevent a vote. Undoubtedly, however, a majority of these cloture motions were in fact triggered by Republican floor action, and the vast majority of them were also procedural filibusters — the actual filibuster, in which Mitch McConnell wets his pants while reading from the phone book for 19 hours, is now exceedingly rare.
There are basically two mechanisms that a majority leader can employ to limit filibusters: firstly, he can threaten to block votes on certain of the opposition party’s legislation (or alternatively, present carrots to them for allowing a vote to proceed), and secondly, he can publicly shame them. Reid managed to do neither, and the Senate Republicans did fairly well for themselves considering that they were in a minority and were burdened by a President with negative political capital.
There it is, folks. The only reason why Republicans in the Senate are able to get away with this kind of behavior is because Senator Reid lets them. He could be going on the talk show circuit every time the GOP threatens a filibuster, demanding an up-or-down vote, attacking the Republicans as obstructionists. He can be enticing Republicans with tasty earmarks, or threatening to take away tasty earmarks. He could be making phone calls, wheeling and dealing in those smoke-filled rooms, and working to keep the Democrats in line and get individual Republicans to vote for cloture. He could even call the Republican’s filibuster bluffs and literally make them stand at the podium 24/7, reading from the dictionary and peeing into catheters.
He does none of that. He capitulates. And his pattern of capitulations is rather long. He capitulated on Iraq War funding. He capitulated on FISA. He capitulated on the auto bailout last month. And now he capitulated on Al Franken. This is unacceptable.
Reid, you should be forcing the Republicans to wet themselves while reading from law dictionaries on their first day of the new session of Congress. Skip that. You should have been on top of this days ago, having come to some arrangement to ensure Franken’s swearing-in would go smoothly today. That’s your job. It’s the Majority Leader’s job to push legislation through, figure out ways around filibusters and rally his party to get things done. Clearly, you don’t have your act together.
So Reid, you get to walk away with this week’s Democratic Milquetoast of the Week award. And chances are good you’ll be getting next week’s, and the next’s, and the next’s.
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