6 thoughts on “The benefit of a Brown win in Massachusetts.”

1. .
   
   how does that go ?
   
   .

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2. is at the beginning of a session. Which means we’d have to wait until January 2011 to pass any legislation at all. Changing rules mid-session requires IIRC something like 67 votes.

   Unless you’re suggestion “the nuclear option,” but I think it’s important to realize Democrats would never ever do that. Republicans had the party discipline to say they had 50 votes for something like this; many Democrats would rebel if Reid actually tried to pull something off, and I don’t think he’d even have 50 votes for ending a filibuster using a rules-based challenge.

   Remember, one of the reasons we didn’t go right for reconciliation with this health care bill is that it wasn’t clear there would have even been 50 votes for it using that method. Several Democratic Senators explicitly said they wouldn’t vote for it if it were done that way (I think Bayh was the first one).

   With a party that just doesn’t want to win legislative victories if it might unfairly help their electoral chances, I think we’re pretty much screwed if Brown wins. The Senate would accomplish literally nothing but naming parks until the 2010 elections, and then Republicans will win a bunch of seats since Democrats will have had little to show for their work.

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      1. A senator makes a point of order saying that the Constitution calls for a bill to be voted on. The presiding officer (Joe Biden) then agrees with the senator’s point, claiming that the filibuster as used is unconstitutional. This would then set a precedent, and the filibuster could never really be used again.

         The Senate can then (and certainly would, since it only takes one senator to call for such a vote) have a vote to overrule the opinion of the presiding officer, in order to maintain the filibuster. To overrule it they’d need 51 senators. I think they’d certainly get that: all Republicans, plus probably 15-20 Democrats. Hence nuclear option fails.

         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N…

         There is a belief that Senators want the Senate to function in some way. I don’t think so. They want personal power, and the filibuster gives them that like nothing else. The last time there was a bill to abolish the filibuster (via Tom Harkin and Joe Lieberman), it got less than 30 votes.

         There is not a clear understanding in the country that the Senate is literally unable to accomplish anything at the moment due to filibuster abuse. It’s rather sad, especially since abuse of the filibuster just over Presidential appointments under Clinton or judicial appointments under Bush was treated as a serious and urgent issue in the media. (Well one of them was, I’ll bet you remember which one.)

         There are several main reasons for this:
         
         1. Democrats suck at using the media, partly because the media genuinely dislikes Democrats despite having generally liberal views.
         
         2. Nothing could have happened anyway in the 2007-2008 session since Bush threatened to veto everything.
         
         3. There was some idea it didn’t matter in this session since we somehow miraculously ended up with 60 senators, only about 15 of whom were complete assholes.

         But the nuclear option will not work, since those 15 asshole Democratic senators just don’t really care about legislation all that much.  

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         1. So, it clearly doesn’t really matter whether the D’s add to the current 59, protect the 59 or actually lose some of the 59.

            Unless we can get to 65+.  

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            1. Having 58 seats wasn’t the worst thing in the world (we still passed the stimulus bill and the budget with 2-3 Republican votes), and having 60 wasn’t all that great (as Senator Palpatine demonstrated). Having 59 will suck, but so did the other options.

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