Obama Defends Liberalism, attacks Libertarian Vision of Impoverished Society; Harry Reid takes up Obama's Fallen Arms to Defend Illusion of DC Not Bound in Institutional Gridlock, Fights Possibility of Future Progress. Future Unclear.
Yesterday, President Barack Obama gave perhaps the most important speech of his presidency (you can watch it, his second term inaugural, here): important for what it said, and important for what it says about how he'll handle the political landscapes to come--all in all a bracing draft for those of us wary over his softball bargaining over the fiscal slope just before the new year (hint: Obama was initially correct when he asserted that the dynamics of the bargaining were such that he could get 800 billion dollars in taxes on the rich 'for free,' but he ultimately caved to a smaller number to avoid short-term economic chaos). Though it wasn't reported as such at the time, many of thought his first inaugural a dud in practical terms, and in retrospect it has come to be seen as such: a promise of a bland vision of post-partisanship premised on the idea that if we could all come together and bridge our nasty rhetorical divides, we could move forward as a nation.
This was, of course, a false dream--the Conservative right was then undergoing a regime of ideological purification that only began to end on election night, 2012, when the extremity of their ideological vision, only on something like full display after they retook part of Congress after the 2010 elections, was broadly defeated at the polls. Before that, the controlling portion of America's right-wing party (representing perhaps only some 20-40% of the populace, depending on the question at hand) accepted neither the legitimacy of any sort of centrist or centre-left government, nor the desire to compromise with the opposing party for the (imperfect) benefit of all.
This time around, though, Obama had it right. Before January 21st 2013, he's had a disconcerting tendency to campaign on popular center-left platforms such as preserving Social Security, raising taxes on the rich to reduce the deficit, and regulating Wall Street, but compromised away many of his promises once in office--since his tendency seems to be to negotiate with whoever's in the room, and, in DC, on economic issues (which are the fulcrum issues of our day), the range of who's in the room tends to range from centrist ex-Clinton/Rubinites (Larry Summers, Tim Geithner), to the mainstream right (fast disappearing after 2006), to the radical right that mobilized in 2009. Yesterday, though, was different. Obama's 2013 inaugural was a broad, if measured, defense of Social Liberalism, including implicit rebukes to Paul 'innumerate con-man' Ryan's vision of America as one in which benefits like social security, rather than stabilizing our society, preventing poverty, and giving us a platform from which to take economic risks (points Obama made), encourage a sort of economic vampirism. Obama's won the election, but he's going outside the bargaining room to build support for conserving the vision of the social contract that's existed since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. It's uncertain how much he'll be able to accomplish under a second term, but this is a strong sign that he'll not only defend operational Liberalism (which most Americans support) rhetorically, but that he'll play that game rather than relying on gestures of good faith and overly generous fiscal offers to the opposition (i.e. trading away grandma's--and your--economic security) to build a governing consensus.
Given this important development, it was probably impossible that some Democratic leader somewhere wouldn't be doing some political strategizing and advocacy that was both profoundly stupid, and utterly at odds with the reality of what's necessary for America to have a functioning Federal government. Sure enough, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) of the US Senate has stepped up. The situation? The necessity for some first steps in Filibuster reform. To quote Johnathon Chait on the issue:
"The filibuster is a longstanding problem of American government, and one that some of us wanted to solve even when Democrats were the ones using it. Once a rarely used tool of strong dissent, it has become a routine supermajority requirement that the Republican party has now turned into a device to halt even the basic workings of government. Republicans have regularly blocked even non-controversial appointees to essential government agencies."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/05/harry-reid-turns-against-filibuster.html
In the same column, Chait quotes a May, 2012 speech in which Reid laments not supporting the very filibuster reform effort he is now opposing behind the scenes, for reasons, apparently, of institutional tradition that seem to this reader to ignore the very real problem the US has right now with legislative gridlock at the Federal level, much of it stemming, since 1993, from the filibuster (for history buffs, the filibuster has been problematic for over a century; a previous attempt at reform in the seventies worked for a while by making it less disruptive, but has now become part of the problem--because now any senator can block a bill without even making a speech about it or taking the senate floor; it's easy, practically anonymous in terms of public exposure, and increasingly common on anything of consequence, with the result that it takes sixty percent of the votes of the upper chamber to pass anything). So this is not a new problem.
Here's the history that led to Reid's well-justified meltdown (quoted above). In the 110th Congress (i.e. 2009), minority Republicans seized on the procedural trick known as 'filibustering' to kill any bill that didn't have a supermajority of 60 votes. They almost killed healthcare reform with it, and they used their 60 vote leverage to block all sorts of other important legislation, such as a measure making it easier for workers to form unions and bargain for better pay; they used it to bargain down Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the economic act that stopped the 2008 recession, but was too small to lead to a recovery any time soon) until it was too small to do anything but prevent utter disaster. They blocked whatever they wanted, except for the seven weeks or so during July of 2009 when Democrats held a 60 seat majority. The 'filibuster' has a long history, much of it ignominious (the House got rid of it in the 19th century, and Progressive champion "Fighting Bob" LaFollette had poison slipped into his water by one of his colleagues when he was declaiming a currency bill in 1908), but the rule was more or less restrained by a collection of social norms in the Senate until, in 1993 and 2009, minority GOP congresses escalated the blockages to previously unheard of levels, both times in largely successful efforts to block Democratic initiatives when that party was in the majority. After 2009-10, Reid demanded a shift for the 111th Congress, and received assurances from (senate Minority Leader) Mitch McConnell that there would be less filibustering in the following session. The result? Consider the promise unfulfilled: there's been so much blockage that little more than half as much legislation was passed in 2011 and 12 as in the previous session. And, obviously, dire problems the US faces have gone unaddressed.
As a result, the Democratic majority has demanded a rules change at the start of the new session, i.e. in Obama's second term, with Senators Tom Udall of Colorado and Jeff Merkley again leading the charge.
http://www.merkley.senate.gov/
No one's even advocating getting rid of the 60 vote limit (everyone knows the Senate is too hidebound in its own traditions to consider such a thing), but on the first day of the session, the Senate can constitutionally reset its rules with a mere 50 votes, to make sure that anyone filibustering a bill (i.e. preventing it from coming to an up-or-down vote) at least has to get down on the floor and talk, the way Senators did it in the old glory days when they were blocking the tyranny of the Federal Government's civil rights bills. However (!) Reid finds this change, a return to the talking filibuster, such a violation of the (non-functional) Senate body of traditions, that he's using a technicality to keep the Senate on its first 'day' in the new session while he lobbies his own caucus to water down the make-them-talk reform in favor of something that, as far as anyone can tell, will amount to nothing substantive at all.
Harry's not a bad man, my friends--he's an ex-boxer with a pretty good record of fighting for good things for the American people (and against bad ones), though he's not nearly so confrontational in the Senate as he was in the ring, and has not often distinguished himself as a leader. But why exactly is Reid doing this, this trying to maintain the status quo in a non-functional legislative body? I can't say for certain, but sometimes people who are part of an institution for many years are unable to see the flaws within it, even when they deal with them every day, right in their faces.
Update: NY Mag has this quote from Harry Reid's book, in which he discusses his objections to Republican gestures toward reforming the filibuster in 2005 (though I should note they were talking about a more radical reform: eliminating the filibuster completely, or else eliminating it for confirming judicial appointees. For the record, I support (and supported) both these measures, but right now we're just talking about making the filibuster visible on C-SPAN by changing it from an invisible procedural blockage that doesn't even require being in the room to the visibility of talking on the Senate floor, so the public can see who's responsible for holding up bills that may be necessary for the common welfare):
Reid:
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