It’s starting to look like our whole damn system of government is broken, and the best we can hope for is seriously imperfect legislative solutions to the most pressing issues of the day.
And the blame seems to lie fairly and squarely with the written and unwritten rules under which the Senate operates.
It is possible to get perfectly sensible bills written and passed in the House. But then they get to the Senate, where they come up against procedural rules and hallowed traditions, including the filibuster rule and the ability of a single senator to obstruct passage of a bill. On top of that, there’s the determined obstructionism of practically the entire phalanx of Republican senators to reckon with. Those Republicans who are willing to lend Democrats the precious votes they need, demand concessions which invariably weaken the legislation in question. And now maverick Democratic Senators with their own political agendas have obviously decided that the benefits of extracting their own political pounds of flesh outweigh any political costs of doing so. (The costs to themselves, that is. The costs to the Democratic party don’t seem to count.)
Once you reach such a decision, the first order of the day is to preserve the tyranny of the filibuster rule, which is what gives the maverick Republicans and Democrats the leverage they need. So when the administration floated the prospect of bringing up health care reform and climate change legislation under budget reconciliation rules, which would require only 50 votes to move forward and pass, the maverick alliance knew what it needed to do. The result was this hands-off warning to the Democratic leadership:
When President Obama submitted a budget that predicted passage of a revenue-raising climate change bill, hopes rose that Congress could successfully rein in carbon emissions this year.
But a cap-and-trade climate bill is almost certain to be filibustered by Republicans — and in a letter delivered to the Senate Budget Committee yesterday, eight Democratic senators joined 25 Republicans to defend the GOP’s right to set a 60-vote margin for passing emissions limits.
“We oppose using the budget process to expedite passage of climate legislation,” the senators, including eight centrist Democrats, wrote in their missive.
Using the procedure of budget reconciliation, which would allow a climate change measure to become law with 50 votes while preventing filibusters, “would circumvent normal Senate practice and would be inconsistent with the administration’s goals of bipartisanship, cooperation, and openness,” the 33 senators wrote.
It’s probably just a huge coincidence that the eight Democratic senators who signed on to the “Let the Climate Change Bill be Filibustered” letter — Robert Byrd (WV), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), Evan Bayh (IN), Mark Pryor (AR), Bob Casey (PA), Carl Levin (MI), and Mary Landrieu (LA) — all have a vested political interest in the coal industry:
Take a look at those names: six are from the midwest and the south, joined by Casey and Byrd. In other words, coal country senators. Nearly all the electricity generated in these regions comes from coal, and a lot of that coal comes from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the #2 and #4 coal-producing states in the country.
But these are not the only Democrats playing maverick Senator games.
There’s Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, who opposes a cap-and-trade system to curb carbon emissions:
The leaders of the Senate Budget Committee yesterday warned the Obama administration against pursuing the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation measure as a strategy for moving climate change legislation.
Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) did not explicitly say that using reconciliation is not an option for moving cap-and-trade legislation. But he warned White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag that such a path contained several pitfalls.
[...]
From a political standpoint, Conrad indicated that a number of senators who are on the fence or close to it when it comes to climate change legislation may jump ship if they stand to lose the opportunity to influence the legislation. “There an awful lot of senators who are on the margins of this issue who would be very concerned if their leverage was reduced by that mechanism,” Conrad said.
Then there are the five senators who find themselves unable to confirm their support for the Employee Free Choice Act: Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, both of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and newcomer Michael Bennet of Colorado.
(Lincoln and Landrieu, of course, are repeat offenders; they were also on the “Hooray for Filibustering Climate Change Legislation” list.)
Part of the problem here is that no matter how popular the White House’s agenda may be at the national level, and no matter how deeply committed the administration may be to delivering on that agenda, there is very little by way of political consequences for senators who choose to obstruct that agenda. Even causes that are key to the Democratic brand — like climate change or health care reform or the Employee Free Choice Act — can be obstructed with negligible negative repercussions for the individual senators who choose to obstruct.