Chris Graham: Thanks, Filibuster!
Republicans have found a handy tool – the filibuster – in their ongoing battle to kneecap Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.
That’s the good news. The bad news – well, good luck to the GOP when it gets the keys to the White House and majorities in Congress back.
“With little time left in this congressional session, legislative scheduling should be focused on these critical priorities. While there are other items that might ultimately be worthy of the Senate’s attention, we cannot agree to prioritize any matters above the critical issues of funding the government and preventing a job-killing tax hike,” reads a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid signed by all 42 Republican senators promising to block consideration of legislation in the lame-duck session of Congress until the dispute over extending the Bush-era tax cuts is resolved and an extension of current government funding is approved.
Read more columns by Chris Graham at TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
The threat is just the latest in a series of successful filibuster threats by Republicans that effectively hamstrung Democrats from being able to do anything in terms of meaningful public policy in recent months. This with barely enough senators, 42, to be able to use the filibuster, or more accurately, again, the threat of filibuster, to steer policy discussions from the unusual minority bully pulpit that the unique parliamentary device provides.
Republicans were able to do a lot more in the 2000s (the Bush tax cuts and No Child Left Behind are two notable examples) with a lot less in terms of partisan-majority strength in large part because Democrats didn’t make the filibuster a top tactic in their arsenal.
Which isn’t to say that they haven’t seen how effective it can be with the success that Republicans have had in the halls of Congress the past two years now translated into success at the polls with the sales pitch to the voters that Democrats weren’t able to get anything done.
Oh, yes. As in sports, success breeds imitators.
The approach reminds me of something I’ve observed about the game of soccer, in which overmatched teams can pack it in by putting all of their efforts into the defensive side of the field in a strategy that accepts as a given that they’re not going to be able to score and thus win but also makes it so that their more talented opposition will have difficulty scoring a goal themselves. It’s a bargain that accepts 0-0 as the best possible outcome, but hey, you can’t lose 0-0, right?
The success of going all-filibuster, all-the-time means we can almost guarantee more of the same when the political winds shift, and the political winds are ever shifting.
Say goodbye to meaningful policy direction from either side from here on out. The race to a long line of 0-0 ties has already commenced.
And in the process, American power, economic, military and otherwise, already on the wane globally, has now officially jumped the shark.
The World According To ChrisGraham.com: Hey, we’re a 3-9 football team right now
“Unemployment remaining unchanged at 9.5 percent and the loss of over 130,000 jobs once again confirms that President Obama’s economic policies have failed to create sustainable job growth.”
This is what passes for statesmanship these days, I guess. The quote is from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.
I get it. He has to say something bad about President Obama, because Obama is a Democrat, and Steele is a Republican. Republicans have to say bad things about Democrats. Democrats, in turn, have to say bad things about Republicans.
Link to column on TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
The World According To ChrisGraham.com: A Democratic surge?
Polls are what they are – snapshots in time with value dependent upon a variety of factors. They can tell us a lot, or they can tell us nothing.
Trouble is most of the time there’s a fine line between them telling us a lot or nothing, and we’re usually not aware of the distinction until after the fact.
Case in point: Recent polls by Public Policy Polling and Gallup measuring voter attitudes toward Congress on a generic congressional ballot. PPP measures a 43 percent-to-43 percent dead heat in voter preferences between Democrats and Republicans. Gallup, for its part, has Democrats surging ahead of Republicans by a 49 percent-to-43 percent margin.
Link to column on TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
Poll: Dems damned if they do, damned if they don’t on health-care reform
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
A new Public Policy Polling survey seems to buttress the case that Democrats might be well-advised to go ahead and pass a health-care reform package – because the majority party seems destined to at least lose seats and possibly its upper hand in Congress whether they pass a reform bill or not.
Republicans lead 43 percent-to-40 percent on the most recent PPP generic congressional ballot. The pollster then tested voter preferences in the event that health-care reform was passed and in the event that a reform is not passed. The margins were similar in both cases – 45 percent-to-41 percent in favor of Republicans in the event of passage, and 43 percent-to-38 percent for the GOP in the event that reform legislation was not passed.
The slight move downward for Democrats came from self-identifed Democratic voters, who will be slightly less likely to support Democratic candidates in the fall if the party isn’t able to follow through on its 2008 campaign promise to enact health-care reform. Read more
What is ‘the right direction’?
Column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
My first reaction to the news that Republican Scott Brown had upset Democrat Martha Coakley in the special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat – Damn, there goes the country.
The pundits were laying out the course for the next few months in the political give-and-take on Capitol Hill, and it sounded to me like a whole lotta nothing. No movement on health-care reform, meaning we get to continue to pay more for less in the way of services, with insurance companies that don’t do a thing to provide health care getting richer while doctors and hospitals struggling to make ends meet at their end. Yeah, perfect.
Certainly we’ll see nothing substantive on environmental issues or immigration reform. Health care was supposed to be relatively easy compared to those briar patches.
The message to Democrats, according to the pundits, sent by voters in Massachusetts, following up on the GOP wins in governor’s races in New Jersey and here in my backyard in Virginia, is, loud and clear, Focus on the economy. Read more
Focus | Webb, Warner back health-care reform
Virginia Dems join 60-39 majority to move legislation forward
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
U.S. Sens. Jim Webb and Mark Warner joined the 60-39 party-line Democratic majority that voted on Christmas Eve to move health-care reform forward in the Senate. Neither seemed to be jumping-up-and-down happy about it.
“I voted today in favor of health care reform legislation in the Senate. I did so despite my disappointment with some sections of the bill, which I will continue to address in the future. But the final package presented by the Majority Leader reflects many improvements that take into consideration the concerns that I and others brought forward during the debate,” Webb said in a statement to the media on Christmas Eve.
“While this legislation is far from perfect, I believe it will start to curb soaring health-care costs for consumers and businesses, reduce our federal budget deficits over time, and extend the life of the Medicare program,” Warner said in his Christmas Eve statement. Read more
Chris Graham: Need to stand for something
Posted by afp on August 29, 2011 · Leave a Comment
Why? Because the GOP is on message, and Democrats … are rudderless.
I’ll give President Obama credit, before then lobbing a critique. The credit: He’s tried to work with the other side of the aisle. The health-care reform that Republicans hate so much is a Republican health-care reform. The insurance mandate is a Republican idea dating back to the early 1990s and the conservative Heritage Foundation and the mid-2000s and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Obama embraced it early in his administration because he thought Republicans would have to support their own idea.
Same as he’s jumped on board the race to the bottom that is the Republicans’ plan for addressing the jobless recovery from the recession that was the doing of six years of spending recklessness on the part of Republican majority rule in the Bush years. Wait, you say, maintaining tax breaks for the wealthy while opposing the continuation of payroll deductions that put more money in the pockets of the working and middle class isn’t a plan for addressing the economic troubles we continue to face? Whatever.
To the critique: It was plainly obvious early into the Obama presidential term that Republicans weren’t going to be willing to do anything to work with him on … anything. His repeated overtures to find common ground, thus, have only served to move the country back to the right at a time when economic policy needs anything but a rightward lurch.
It’s easy to point the finger at Republicans – hell, they were willing to drive the country to the brink of bankruptcy to score political points, which is beyond reprehensible. I don’t see too many pointing at the person we could start calling the Enabler-in-Chief, because it takes two to tango.
Here’s to Obama developing a spine, and fast, at the risk of the total collapse of the U.S. economy.
More columns at TheWorldAccordingToChrisGraham.com.
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