1115.org

Business Sees Gain in GOP Takeover (Washington Post, 3/27/05):

Fortune 500 companies that invested millions of dollars in electing Republicans are emerging as the earliest beneficiaries of a government controlled by President Bush and the largest GOP House and Senate majority in a half century.
[…]
Bush and his congressional allies are looking to pass legal protections for drug companies, doctors, gun manufacturers and asbestos makers, as well as tax breaks for all companies and energy-related assistance sought by the oil and gas industry.

Senate Battle Over Judges Concerns Business (Reuters, 4/8/05):

Paul Miller and other business lobbyists are worried that a battle over President Bush’s judicial nominees may tie the Senate into knots, endangering legislation they want turned into law. “We are alarmed,” said Miller, a lobbyist on Capitol Hill since 1996 who has headed the 700-member American League of Lobbyists since January. “If things break down and nothing gets done, we and others will tell them, ‘Enough is enough’ … ‘Get things done or else you won’t be back.”‘

Republicans threaten to change the Senate rules to ban procedural hurdles known as filibusters that Democrats have used to block 10 of Bush’s most controversial judicial nominees. Democrats vow to retaliate to such a rule change by using other procedural tactics to stall action on legislation that they consider nonessential.

The Republican party is at an important crossroads, and if it was a publicly traded stock we would be issuing a “sell” order. In 1998, as attention turned to the 2000 Presidential election, Republican power brokers were set on avoiding the mistakes of the previous election, where unknowns fought with the unbalanced for the right to take on President Bill Clinton. Their choice for the nominee reflected the times, a reliably pro-business governor with the sole advantage of a famous name, George Bush. I’m still convinced that a non-trivial number of people went to the polls that fateful November day in 2000 to vote for former President George H. W. Bush, but either way, it seems quaint looking back now on a Republican party not yet in thrall to the religious right. The balance of power was such that lip service was enough (the figurative kind rather than the current flavor: literal), to the point that both the man at the top of the ticket and the man who chose himself to ride shotgun were not known for their faith in the almighty, but their faith in free markets. A media hostile toward Al Gore and bored with eight years of peace and prosperity provided just enough of a tailwind for Bush to lose, yet win, though it was a bit more of a scare than strategist Karl Rove was comfortable with. While the votes in Florida were still being recounted and examined for pregnancy, Rove was forming a strategy to make sure that in the next election evangelicals would abandon the sideline they shared with Nader voters in 2000 and provide a more comfortable margin in 2004.

Rove’s strategy for winning the election worked, but in the immortal words of William Shatner a.k.a. Buck Murdock in Airplane II, “Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.” Rove’s goal has always been to create a lasting Republican majority, and through his ability to focus the President on tax cuts and outlawing gay marriage, he has won a few in a row. But the success of the various tax cuts and the failure to even hold a vote on a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage has driven a wedge into a party where an uneasy alliance previously existed.

Immediately after the 2004 elections, the religious right seized on some polling information and managed to evade the bullshit sniffing devices of otherwise intelligent people. Despite their claims of having won the election for Bush, the actual facts paint a different picture:

The post-election survey finds that, when moral values is pitted against issues like Iraq and terrorism, a plurality (27%) cites moral values as most important to their vote. But when a separate group of voters was asked to name ­ in their own words ­ the most important factor in their vote, significantly fewer (14%) mentioned moral values.

Needless to say, the mullahs wouldn’t let the facts spoil their victory, and the threats started almost immediately when it became clear that Social Security privatization (yet another giveaway to the business interests) would take precedence over the codification of religion on the President’s agenda. With the President on the “Monsters of Privatization” tour, the responsibility for pacifying the American Taliban fell to Senate Majority Leader Bill “AIDS from tears and sweat” Frist, a man basing his future candidacy for President solely on the backs of people eager to see the bible recognized as the controlling legal authority in this country. The best Frist could come up with was the threat of “going nuclear,” eliminating the filibuster in the judicial confirmation process in an attempt to install the 10 judges blocked out of over 200 nominated.

Normally, internal Senate rules (even one as hallowed as the filibuster) wouldn’t make waves, but lightning struck twice for James Dobson, Randall Terry, and their angry, oppressed band of Christian soldiers. Feeling their oats from November’s declaration of victory, they lassoed the vegetative body of Terri Schiavo and cracked the whip on Frist and the drowning Tom DeLay in a manner that evoked P. Diddy sending Da Band to “walk to Brooklyn and get my ass some cheesecake”.

Well, Frist and DeLay did figuratively walk to Brooklyn, but they did so without checking the polls that would have proven it a bad idea. After their midnight heroics didn’t produce quite the result they were looking for, they realized that they had walked past the point of no return and may as well use the loss to prop up support for the nuclear option.

But that’s where the problems start: the first cracks in Rove’s coalition for Republican dominance. Big Business has been doing just fine under this administration, getting almost everything they have asked for so far. They would of course like a few more judges like Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and a pack of junior Antonin Scalia clones on the lower courts to deal with messy lawsuits that arise when they sicken their employees or rip off their shareholders, but generally they can get what they want from simple tax legislation and deregulation bills. The same can not be said of the bible thumpers’ Christmas list. Congress can keep piling restrictions onto a woman’s right to choose, just as they can pass all the federal laws they want banning gay marriage. But only the Supreme Court can overturn Roe v. Wade, and only state courts can uphold states’ gay marriage bans. While Big Business benefits from boutique tax cuts, when Congress tried the same for Terri Schiavo they were handed a painful defeat. And despite all efforts to the contrary, they haven’t been able to pass any laws restricting the jurisdiction of the federal courts.

So the fundies are pushing Frist and DeLay hard to go nuclear, and with Frist captive to his Presidential aspirations and DeLay’s legal and ethical issues, they really have no choice. The Democrats’ threat to shut down the Senate through procedural means is not an empty threat. What good does a Congress, bought and paid for through campaign contributions, do Big Business if they aren’t relieving them of their obligations and passing the burden to workers and consumers? At least now we all know why it’s called the nuclear option, it’s set to blow apart a coalition that, if handled properly, could continue winning elections in perpetuity.

But Social Security privatization, the issue that was supposed to distract Democrats from everything else, seems to have distracted the Bush administration from the land mine onto which they have stumbled. On Sunday, their hand-picked Senate leader participated in a telecast that sounds more like a parody found on South Park than a place for a Presidential hopeful:

Under the heading “The filibuster against people of faith,” a flier for the telecast reads, “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith.”

Frist will be held responsible if the Senate ends up tied in knots by parliamentary procedures. He can have all the bible thumpers he wants in his corner, but without Big Business writing the checks, he won’t get past the primaries. Not exactly the situation he could want, prompting some Photoshop science from Billmon: