House Democratic leaders banned Wednesday the practice of doling out multimillion-dollar, no-bid contracts to private contractors, a move that will shake up the lobbying industry that has come to rely on securing these so-called earmarks for their corporate clients.

At a meeting of the Democratic caucus, leaders unveiled the new rule that forbids private contractors from receiving earmarks, part of the party’s effort to reclaim the reform mantle that it used successfully in its 2006 midterm campaign to reclaim the majority.

House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., whose panel issues thousands of these line-item grants each year, estimated that the fiscal 2010 budget included more than 1,000 earmarks to private companies, through which businesses reaped billions of dollars. Most of those earmarks were culled from the Pentagon’s annual budget.

Republicans weren’t going to just sit there, and let Democrats snatch the reform mantle away from them. Not when they are the true party of reform. They struck back swiftly and surely the very same day:

House Democratic leaders on Wednesday banned budget earmarks to private industry, ending a practice that has steered billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to companies and set off corruption scandals.

The ban is the most forceful step yet in a three-year effort in Congress to curb abuses in the use of earmarks, which allow individual lawmakers to award financing for pet projects to groups and businesses, many of them campaign donors.

But House Republicans, in a quick round of political one-upmanship, tried to outmaneuver Democrats by calling for a ban on earmarks across the board, not just to for-profit companies. Republicans, who expect an intra-party vote on the issue Thursday, called earmarks “a symbol of a broken Washington.”

How’s that for oneupmanship? The funny thing, though, was that the Republican leaders who had spontaneously erupted in that anti-earmark fervor had blood on their hands. Enough blood to bring to mind Lady Macbeth’s wonderful turn of phrase about turning the multitudinous seas incarnadine.

On March 10, 2010, ten Republican congressional leaders released a joint statement announcing their intention to ban earmarks because they have “become a symbol of a broken Washington.” Yet despite their new found disdain for the earmarking process, those same ten Republican leaders have requested over $240 million in earmarks since 2008.

And then an even funnier thing transpired. Turns out there was also some imperfectly disclosed fine print attached to the Republican resolution. Fine print that has the effect of turning the Republicans’ lovely sounding across-the-board ban on all earmarks into the equivalent of a diet till dinnertime.

The AP gave it the kind of headline the Republicans wanted to see: “House GOP adopts earmark moratorium“. But that’s when professional scruples kicked in. They burst the bubble in the lede itself:

In an election-year appeal to voters frustrated with Washington, House Republicans promised Thursday not to stuff any of this year’s spending bills with pet projects for their districts.

And the article later amplifies:

House Republicans promised a one-year pause in earmarks instead of a permanent ban. Boehner said Thursday that suspending earmarks shows Republicans are serious about fixing Washington.

Boehner’s chief qualification for the job is his ability to say, with a perfectly straight face, things that even his own mother wouldn’t credit.

And even that “one-year” ban is only for the rest of 2010. For all practical purposes, what the GOP is saying is: “Only till the midterms, baby! Only till the midterms!”

Now we find that many of them don’t even have the courage of their own obstructionism.

When the weak-and-watery Senate jobs bill came up for a cloture vote, it passed 62-30Ben Nelson voted against the bill; Frank Lautenberg was in New Jersey undergoing chemotherapy.) The final vote was 70-28. Six Republicans who had voted against cloture crawled out of the woodwork, and discovered that the bill they had decided didn’t even deserve to come up for an up-or-down vote actually deserved to be passed into law. Two others who had not voted on the cloture vote — which boils down to voting against cloture, since every “absent” has the same effect as a “nay” — also emerged to vote for the bill.

The gang of six is: Lamar Alexander (TN), Thad Cochran (MS), James Inhofe (OK), George LeMieux (FL), Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Roger Wicker (MS). The timid twosome is Orrin Hatch (UT) and Richard Burr (NC).

All eight of these perfect cowards were perfectly willing to kill the jobs bill, but want to be able to deflect any future criticism — on the campaign trail, for example — by saying they voted for it. Only when it didn’t matter any more, of course. But in the he-said-she-said-therefore-it’s-a-draw world of our political discourse, they have positioned themselves to dispute — and, therefore, to dispel — the charge that they opposed the jobs bill.

But maybe I’m being too unkind? Maybe there is some other explanation for the sequence of their votes that doesn’t reek of cowardice and hypocrisy and cynicism?

So let’s sit down, and scratch our heads together, and see if can’t puzzle out some explanation that’s logically consistent, and doesn’t do violence to any of the facts, and doesn’t insult even the meanest intelligence (I don’t know who you’re thinking of here, but I’m thinking Sarah Palin).

I think that we can probably dismiss one this at the outset: “On Tuesday I genuinely believed that the jobs bill was a stinker, but I prayed on it when I went to bed that night, and Wednesday morning I saw it in a whole new light.” It clearly fails the Sarah Palin test.

So if we rule out a genuine change of heart, what else is there?

I’m afraid the only other thing I could come up with (after praying on it when I went to bed, and thinking again in the morning) is this: “See, the cloture vote was on Tuesday. I don’t know what it is, but I can never get my votes right on Tuesdays. Go ahead and look it up. My Tuesday votes never make any damn sense. But Wednesdays? Ah, Wednesdays are a totally different matter. Honest! I promise you!”

Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the panel’s senior Republican, released a draft $85 billion plan that would give employers a payroll tax exemption for hiring those who have been unemployed for at least 60 days. The bill would also provide a $1,000 income tax credit for new workers retained for 52 weeks. (A draft of the bill is available here.)

The measure, which is scheduled to be reviewed by Senate Democrats this afternoon, also seeks to spur capital investment by extending tax benefits, by providing a federal subsidy for bonds issued for public works projects, and by taking steps to improve highway and transit construction. Jobless benefits and health care coverage for the unemployed would also be extended in the measure.

The costs of the bill would be offset by closing tax loopholes and shifting some money to be made available for future improvements in the Medicare program.

Calling the provisions time-sensitive, the two lawmakers said the bill was drafted in an effort to respond to current economic conditions, “We believe they reflect a balanced set of member views and priorities,” the two senators said in a joint statement.

Mindful of the difficulties of bipartisan cooperation in the polarized Senate, the lawmakers warned their colleagues not to alter the shape of the plan too significantly if they hoped to rally both parties behind it.

In addition, they said the measure should not be rushed and that lawmakers must have ample time to review and react to the plan since it did not go through the usual Finance Committee process.

And in a warning to Republicans who have blocked other major Senate bills, the lawmakers said “any efforts to needlessly delay Senate completion of consideration of this package through partisan means will undermine our goal of timely action in the current economic climate.”

The announcement immediately threw up a bunch of questions:
Will the bipartisan ship reach port safely? Will it founder and sink? Will its co-captain find it necessary to abandon ship halfway (for no apparent reason)? Will it be hijacked by pirates? Will its precious cargo be found one morning to have suddenly suffered crib-death? Stay tuned!

But as it turned out, the ship barely made it out of port. Within hours of the Baucus-Grassley announcement, there was a mutiny. Apparently, the crew had see this movie before. There were concerns that Baucus had, once again, given away too much to Republicans at the very outset. And that “(t)his was about to get bogged down again”. The mutineers appealed to the Rear Admiral (nullus), who promptly relieved the co-captains of command:

Bipartisan agreement on jobs lasted all of a few hours. This afternoon, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus announced he’d reached accord with ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). They unveiled what was supposed to be a final jobs package. But the agreement didn’t sit well with many Democrats, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has pulled it out of their hands (nullus), and announced he’d move ahead with a smaller bill.

“I think Reid saw the writing on the wall,” said one top Senate Democratic aide. “This was about to get bogged down again so he pulled it back.

Liberal Democrats were not pleased with the Baucus-Grassley compromise. Among other things, Baucus and Grassley said that jobs could only move forward if the Senate agreed to take up a bipartisan “reform” (a.k.a. slashing) of the estate tax. They registered their dissatisfaction at a weekly caucus lunch this afternoon, and when it was over, Reid emerged to make the announcement.

(2)
The Hill presented a slightly different take on Reid’s announcement:

“We’re going to move this afternoon to a smaller package than talked about in the press,” Reid said.
[...]
“The message is so watered-down with people wanting other things in this big package,” said Reid.

Stand by for headlines reading: “Harry Reid Cutting Baucus’s Big Package“. (About time he was cut down to size, actually.)

We learned today of another Republican retirement in the House:

Florida Republican Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart will call it quits today, retiring after nine terms representing a heavily Cuban-American district in the Miami area, according to a source briefed on the decision.

Diaz-Balart, whose younger brother, Mario, also holds a congressional seat in Florida, is the 18th Republican to retire this cycle and the second in two days. On Wednesday, Michigan Rep. Vern Ehlers (R) announced he would not be running again.

Yesterday, after the Ehlers announcement, Jonathan Singer pointed out that the Republicans’ retirement rate is approaching 10%. Today, Diaz-Balart took them through the 10% threshold.

With Democrat Diane Watson announcing her retirement today, Democratic retirements will now be 13 out of 255. Which is just a tad above 5%.

So if Democrats are dropping like flies, and Republicans are dropping twice as fast, what does that make Republicans?

As it turns out, Senate Democrats may not be able to force healthcare legislation through the chamber on a simple majority vote.

Republicans say they have found a loophole in the budget reconciliation process that could allow them to offer an indefinite number of amendments.

Though it has never been done, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) says he’s prepared to test the Senate’s stamina to block the Democrats from using the process to expedite changes to the healthcare bill.

Experts on Senate procedural rules, from both parties, note that such a filibuster is possible. While reconciliation rules limit debate to 20 hours, senators lack similiarconstraints (double sic) on amendments and could conceivably continue offering them until 60 members agree to cut the process off.
[...]
House Democrats have said they would not pass the Senate healthcare bill unless changes are made through reconciliation, which is necessary because Republicans control 41 Senate seats, enough to block legislation through the regular process.

But Republicans may end up having that power even under reconciliation.

“You could keep offering amendments until you don’t have any more to offer,” said a congressional aide, who said he did not know how long senators would be willing to stay in the chamber to move the reconciliation package. “What the body’s tolerance would be is unknown.”

A former Senate Republican leadership aide said: “The limit is on debate, not on consideration of amendments.”

This would be practically like an old-fashioned filibuster. Republicans would have to stand there and offer amendment after amendment. After they ran out of anything that sounds remotely sensible, they would have to offer one totally ridiculous amendment after another. The obstructionism would be as clear and self-evident as standing there and reciting the phone book.

So, could this be the time that Democrats will say to Republicans: “Go right ahead, suckers, bring the Senate to a grinding halt. Let’s see how long you can keep it up. We’ll make sure it’s splashed all over the news every single night till you call it off. We’ll make sure every last American hears about it, and understands exactly where the process of government is broken, and exactly who is responsible. We’ll make sure every last American understands exactly what level of obstructionism Republicans have been displaying for the last three years, and how totally unprecedented it is.”

No, I don’t think so either. Healthcare reform seems to have suddenly become the new national security. Democrats just know that public sentiment is with Republicans. They are terrified of making an issue of it, of forcing this kind of showdown. They are worried-to-death that Americans will regard Republican resistance to healthcare reform as heroic.

So how else can Democrats fight this filibuster-by-amendment plan?

Reid or another Democrat could make a point of order that using amendments to stall a reconciliation bill violates the spirit of the Budget Act of 1974, which sets up for expedited consideration of budget-related bills.

Reid or another Democrat could argue that offering unlimited amendments violates the spirit of limiting debate.

The parliamentarian has ruled that the limit on debate does not allow senators to filibuster the motion to proceed to a reconciliation bill. The parliamentarian could rule that the same concept applies to amendments.

And here’s the considered judgment of The Hill on the possibility of Democrats seeking “a ruling by the parliamentarian that Republicans are simply filing amendments to stall the process”:

But such a ruling could taint the final healthcare vote and backfire for Democrats in November.

I have no idea what the hell “could taint the final healthcare vote” even means. But it sounds like just the kind of phrase that’s capable of paralyzing Democrats.

One thing’s for sure, it certainly looks like House members were right to insist that they jolly well weren’t going to pass the Senate healthcare bill without ironclad guarantees that the Senate would make the agreed-upon changes via reconciliation.

It’s funny how Republicans are able to keep inventing a new killer obstructionist tactic every time they need one. And how Democrats keep finding new and inventive ways to demonstrate “No sir, no can do!” in glorious technicolor.

Now, with enough voters in the Massachusetts special election having stuffed their votes into Scott Brown’s g-string, we would seem to have come to the end of that phase of Obama’s presidency. What we have left now is a bittersweet sense of yes, we could have.

Despite Democrats still enjoying a huge majority in the Senate, what we can now look forward to is the entirely predictable outcome of a resistible force (you can read this as either the Democratic Party or the House) meeting an immovable object (the Republican-controlled Senate, which the Republicans control, of course, by virtue of having 41 seats out of 100).

Attention now turns to when Scott Brown will be seated. (Although Larry Craig, his passions doubtless inflamed by the sight of Scott Brown in the altogether, may be thinking of it a little differently, as in “seated in a Senate bathroom stall”.)

I can’t really speak to when he will be seated. According to Massachusetts law, not for another 15 days, at least. Although Ted Kennedy was seated right away after the special election in 1962, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth rejects that as a valid precedent.

I do have an opinion, though, on when he should be seated. I think the Senate should recognize, and celebrate, the truly historic nature of Brown’s election to the Senate. This is, after all, the first time that someone who is known to have posed in the nude as a young adult will be a member of the Senate. Hence my suggestion: Scott Brown should be seated only after every Senate member who so desires receives a lap dance from Brown. (Senate members who so desire should be allowed to yield their lap dance to other members. Maybe 58 extra lap dances from Scott Brown will be enough to buy Larry Craig’s vote for the healthcare bill?)

*** Update, 10:17 a.m. ***

Village Voice blogger Roy Edroso had the same thought that we did. The headline of his post this morning:
Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate.

(Looks like his post was actually published at 9 a.m. Eastern, even though it is now time-stamped 12:44 p.m., for some reason.)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will force a vote on President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration when the Senate reconvenes in three weeks.

Reid’s announcement Tuesday that he will file a motion for cloture, a procedural step to limit debate and lead to a roll-call vote, follows the alleged attempt by a Nigerian extremist to blow up a U.S.-bound commercial flight on Christmas Day.

Reid had sought Senate consent to confirm TSA nominee Erroll Southers without floor debate, along with multiple other nominations, before the Senate adjourned for its winter break on Christmas Eve.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., objected, calling for more debate and temporarily halting the confirmation, as part of DeMint’s opposition to unionizing TSA, a move he believes Obama will push.

In fact, DeMint didn’t just oppose the unanimous consent motion on Christmas Eve, he has had a hold on Southers’ confirmation ever since he was nominated. He is alleged to be singlehandedly responsible for Southers not having been immediately confirmed.

We keep hearing all the time about how Senate Republicans have crippled the confirmation process with endless holds and blocks and what have you. And because the Senate is full of all these so-called arcane rules, both written and unwritten, most people who haven’t spent half a lifetime studying this arcana just assume that there was nothing the poor old Democrats could do about the holds and blocks.

So it’s an eye-opener, isn’t it, that all you have to do is file a cloture motion and force a vote? (And this, after all, is now the routine procedure for almost anything to move forward in the Senate.)

Which raises the question: why the bleep didn’t Harry Reid already do this a long time ago? Especially since he has those magic 60 votes in the Democratic caucus to back him up, the magic 60 votes that are supposed to be so magical precisely for this reason.

Why the bleep didn’t he do it for Dawn Johnsen also, who was nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, and whose nomination was returned to President Obama when the Senate adjourned on December 24?

And for “Mary L. Smith, tapped to head the Tax Division (of the Justice Department); and Christopher H. Schroeder, proposed as assistant attorney general for legal policy”? And for “M. Patricia Smith, the New York state labor commissioner nominated as the Labor Department’s solicitor of labor”? Their nominations, too, were returned to the president, ostensibly due to Republican obstructionism. But now it’s clear that that’s just Harry Reid hiding behind the skirts of this whole they-put-a-hold-so-what-can-we-do myth.

Evidently, in the Senate, it takes two people to make a hold unbreakable. Obstructionists like Jim DeMint. And good old Harry Reid, shrugging and looking the other way. And pretending that he doesn’t have any damn choice.

True love is so touching, especially in Congress:

Just hours after federal agents charged banker Allen Stanford with fleecing investors of $7 billion, the disgraced financier received a message from one of Congress’ most powerful members, Pete Sessions.

“I love you and believe in you,” said the e-mail sent on Feb. 17. “If you want my ear/voice — e-mail,” it said, signed “Pete.”

The message from the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee represents one of the many ties between members of Congress and the indicted banker that have caught the attention of federal agents.

The Justice Department is investigating millions of dollars Allen Stanford and his staff contributed to lawmakers over the past decade to determine if the banker received special favors from politicians while building his spectacular offshore bank in Antigua, McClatchy Newspapers has learned.

Agents are examining campaign dollars, as well as lavish Caribbean trips funded by Stanford for politicians and their spouses, feting them with lobster dinners and caviar.
[...]
Sessions, 54, a longtime House member from Dallas who met with Stanford during two trips to the Caribbean, did not respond to interview requests.

Supporters say the lawmaker, who received $44,375 from Stanford and his staff, was not assigned to any of the committees with oversight over Stanford’s bank and brokerages.

His press secretary, Emily Davis, said she was unable to comment on the e-mail sent at 11:31 a.m. on the day Stanford was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “I haven’t seen it, so I can’t verify its authenticity at this time,” she said.

The McClatchy story also underlines this aspect of Stanford’s campaign contributions:

The money Stanford gave Sessions and other lawmakers was stolen from his clients while he carried out what prosecutors now say was one of the nation’s largest Ponzi schemes.

Perhaps that will allow the court-appointed receiver who’s trying to recover hundreds of millions of dollars of Stanford assets for defrauded investors to clawback the campaign contributions?

Of course, under the circumstances, shouldn’t any sensible politician with a shred of conscience just voluntarily hand the money over to the receiver? That’s not what Pete Sessions did, though:

Nineteen lawmakers gave back a total of $87,800 to the court-appointed receiver as of August. Others, including Meeks, Sessions, Sandlin, Sweeney and Crane, said they turned some of the money over to charities.

And did what with the rest? Just keep it?

Ian Fry, the lead negotiator for Tuvalu at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen seems to think his country’s future is in the hands of the U.S. Senate. And he seems to think there’s some future in trying to shame U.S. Senators into action:

It appears that we are waiting for some senators in the U.S. Congress to conclude before we can consider this issue properly. It is an irony of the modern world that the fate of the world is being determined by some senators in the U.S. Congress.

Someone should take the poor man aside and explain to him: “Dude, better men than you have tried to shame U.S. Senators into action. The ones who need to be shamed have no conscience. What they do have is a deep and abiding thirst for political contributions. And a fine sense of quid pro quo.”

After all, we’re talking about a bunch of men and women who are not just cheerfully willing but eager to sabotage healthcare reform, even though the reality is that in their own country, 45,000 people die every year due to a lack of health insurance. People who don’t care diddly-squat about killing off 45,000 of their own countrymen each year in order to achieve narrow partisan political ends, can hardly be expected to care if a few island nations vanish off the face of the earth because of a rise in sea levels. It’s not even as if the people will die. They’ll just be displaced. Hey, it might even improve their lives.

Can there be any doubt that if these rights were not already enshrined in our body politic, if they were being proposed for the first time by President Obama, there is no way that the Republicans (and Joe Lieberman, in all probability) would allow them to be passed in the Senate?