(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)
Remember November 1, 2005? That’s the day that Harry Reid forced the Senate into closed session over the issue of prewar intelligence in Iraq. The blogosphere was full of love for Senator Reid that day; I even made a trek over to his PAC’s website and dropped a $10.01 donation for his efforts. In his comments, Reid had fighting words for the GOP and their obstruction of the investigation:
Despite the fact that the chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee publicly committed to examine these questions more than a year and a half ago, he has chosen not to keep that commitment. Despite the fact that he restated the commitment earlier this year on national television, he has still done nothing. …
Mr. President, enough time has gone by. I demand on behalf of the American people that we understand why these investigations aren’t being conducted, and in accordance with Rule 21, I now move that Senate go into closed session.
The Senate Republicans were outraged, none more so than their leader, neophyte Bill Frist.
Frist was indignant. As Senate aides shooed visitors from the galleries and shut down C-SPAN’s cameras, Frist told reporters that Reid’s leadership team resorted to a “political stunt” because it had no convictions, principles or ideas. “For the next year and a half, I can’t trust Senator Reid,” he said.
Most Americans had no clue what Phase II was supposed to be, but we all knew what it was after that day. It was supposed to be the beginning of accountability on the Iraq war. It was supposed to be the day that marked the unveiling of the truth, no matter how ugly and how twisted it was.
Eight months later, there’s been no mention of the bipartisan committee set up to deal with this problem. Each day that the silence passes, the more and more Frist’s claim that it was merely a ‘political stunt’ rings true. Harry Reid may speak softly, but he sure doesn’t carry a big stick.
In Daily Kos’ bimonthly approval polls, Harry Reid is doing quite well indeed – he gets a 71% approval rating from a blogosphere that is largely aligned to the left of the conservatively moderate Reid. It’s a far cry from the reception that Reid originally received in the blogosphere – just check out some comments from this diary (my first on dKos) regarding the race for DNC chairman. However, Reid really isn’t better leader for Senate Democrats: despite allegedly being a better leader and having getting Senate Democrats on the same page more often, if one looks at the record…well, you’ll see a lot of disunity within the Democratic caucus, as usual.
Perhaps the most apt place to start out is the bankruptcy bill. This bill arguably harms the lower and middle classes the most. In fact, despite being framed as reform, it didn’t really solve the root of the problem at all.
Illness and medical bills caused half of the 1,458,000 personal bankruptcies in 2001, according to a study published by the journal Health Affairs.
The study estimates that medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans annually — counting debtors and their dependents, including about 700,000 children.
Senator Joseph Biden is widely hated for his support of this bill, even though he probably has the most valid excuse of anyone – the corporations who supported the bill are arguably his constituents (most companies are incorporated in Delaware). This unfair bill that makes it even harder for Americans to shake off the stigma of being penniless was not even a close fight in the Senate – it passed 74-25, and yet nary a word is said about Harry Reid’s vote for it – or the other Democratic senators who voted for it:
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Byrd (D-WV)
Carper (D-DE)
Conrad (D-ND)
Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reid (D-NV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Stabenow (D-MI)
And that’s not even mentioning Joe Lieberman, who pulled his usual act of voting for cloture before voting against the final bill. No, Harry Reid didn’t even put up a damn fight against this bill. If we are going to say we’re the party of the working class, perhaps we’d best vote the way we speak – otherwise, our words will ring hollow. There is no way we can justify this action, which served to benefit credit card companies and other creditors, at the expense of the average American who may have fallen on unlucky times.
Another example of a bill where Reid utterly failed to lead (even though he voted the right way this time) was the Orwellian-named Class Action Fairness Act. This law shifts many large class-action lawsuits from state courts – where plaintiffs have a better opportunity to present their case – to the federal courts, where Republican-appointed judges (after all, they have dominated the presidency, for the most part, since 1968) that are more likely to be pro-corporation can rule on the claims. However, the main point of the law wasn’t to reform the system – it was a way to cut off lawyers, who are largely a Democratic lobby, from a large source of their income. The judiciary is the last bastion of sanity (mostly) in this environment, and once again, we didn’t stand up for the rights of ordinary Americans to stand up to corporations that treat them unfairly. In a 72-26 vote, here are your disloyal Democrats this time around:
Bayh (D-IN)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Carper (D-DE)
Conrad (D-ND)
Dodd (D-CT)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Nelson (D-NE)
Obama (D-IL)
Reed (D-RI)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Schumer (D-NY)
I will give credit where credit is due – on the issue of privatizing Social Security, Reid had his shit together when it came to this matter. Instead of even allowing for a fair debate, he came out and said right away – in a masterful strategical move that he needs to use more often – that it had absolutely no chance of passing.
“President Bush should forget about privatizing Social Security. It will not happen,” Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters. He initially said all 44 Senate Democrats had made commitments to oppose personal accounts. Later, acknowledging he had not spoken with all 44, Reid said: “I don’t know of a single Democratic senator” who will back the plan.
Both parties campaigned around the country on the issue, but at the end, it became clear that we had finally won a battle – but it was a battle that we should have expected to win from the very beginning. Protecting Social Security doesn’t require a leap of faith – it’s common sense. The mere fact that we had to wildly applaud the Democratic Party for finally taking a stand on an issue – one that is taken for granted in America – is a bit pathetic.
Finally, Harry Reid’s greatest failure of all: matters of the judiciary and nomination hearings. As I mentioned above, the judiciary is the last branch of the federal government where some semblance of sanity exists. Despite having ideologues on the Supreme Court such as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, it was imperative that we ensured that the balance of the Supreme Court would not shift greatly when Bush nominated his replacements. But Reid lost the battle before it even begun – and we will be paying the price dearly long after he leaves the Senate.
Fourteen Republican and Democratic senators broke with their party leaders last night to avert a showdown vote over judicial nominees, agreeing to votes on some of President Bush’s nominees while preserving the right to filibuster others in “extraordinary circumstances.”
The dramatic announcement caught Senate leaders by surprise and came on the eve of a scheduled vote to ban filibusters of judicial nominees, the “nuclear option” that has dominated Senate discussions for weeks. The deal clears the way for prompt confirmation of three appellate court nominees — Priscilla R. Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and William H. Pryor Jr.
Democratic leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) called the pact “a significant victory for our country.”
Two weeks before, Reid was going to call Bill Frist’s bluff. Instead, he let the ‘moderate’ members of our party cut out his legs from under him, removing any sort of leverage he would have in future battles over judicial nominations. ‘Extraordinary circumstances’ is a word that should live in infamy forever – because you will never get both sides to agree on what that means; it’s merely a way to address the problem without solving anything. And indeed, Democrats didn’t even bother trying to fight John Roberts’ nomination, and on the matter of filibustering Sam Alito – well, it never had a chance. As I wrote last month, this was the showdown that we could not afford to lose – and we didn’t even bother making it a contest.
Reid’s predecessor, Tom Daschle, hardly gets any recognition in the blogosphere; he is widely scorned for abetting Bush’s run to fight in Iraq (even though Reid, whose job it was to line up votes as minority whip, voted for it as well), and some folks even applauded his loss to Republican John Thune. But you know what? At least Daschle didn’t roll over on federal judicial nominations. Bankruptcy bills and ‘tort reform’ never came close to seeing the day of light. And privatizing Social Security wasn’t an issue then, either. I’m not arguing that Daschle was perfect; his inability to get Democrats to oppose the Iraq war resolution was a profile of incompetence. What I am saying is that Harry Reid, for all the accolades he receives, has little to show for it. He definitely talks the talk that the blogosphere likes to hear, but he has rarely walked the walk…and our country continues to be worse off for it.