Did you know that Al Franken played baggage handler #1 in the Eddie Murphy/Dan Aykroyd movie Trading Places?
Month: July 2009
It’s Still About the Filibuster
One of the things I think politicians are least inclined to do is to create problems for themselves on bills that will never become law. So, for example, so long as ‘centrist’ Democrats knew that the Employee Free Choice Act would never become law, they were all willing to vote for it. But, once it became clear that a united Democratic caucus and a Democratic president could pass the EFCA into law, several Democrats flipped and decided to oppose it. They didn’t want to alienate labor unions and Democratic activists by voting against the bill when they knew it would fail, but they were more concerned about alienating Big Business when they knew it might pass.
The same thing is going on now with the debate over a public option in the health care bill. I don’t recall a single Democrat who was running for president who didn’t run on at least a public option. And I don’t remember when senators like Max Baucus, Jon Tester, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, and Tim Johnson were endorsing candidate Obama that any of them complained about his health care proposals. Well, Obama won and the Democrats have sixty votes in the Senate, and they can pass single-payer health care if they want to. If they thought that the health care bill would fail, they’d probably support the public option. But they know that they have to pass a health care bill. So…now a bunch of them oppose it.
While the public’s support for a public option varies by state and region, it is overwhelmingly popular on a national level. Obama wants a public option and because he campaigned on providing one and won the election by a wide margin, he has a mandate for one. Yet, nearly a dozen Democrats have expressed some degree of reservations or even outright opposition to a public option. This is true in spite of the fact that none of them said a peep about opposing one during the primaries or the general election.
Prior to reaching the magic threshold of sixty senators, the Democrats had the excuse that they needed at least one Republican vote to achieve cloture and bring a health care bill to a vote. But, now, their only excuses are either that due to the illness of one or two senators they are not at full strength or that one or more of their own members won’t support the public option.
Assuming the Democrats can count on Sens. Byrd and Kennedy to show up for a cloture vote, the only way the Senate can fail to pass Obama’s signature program is if they harpoon it themselves. And that appears to be exactly what they are intent on doing. And they are going to do it on an issue that has the support of approxinately three-quarters of the electorate.
There are a couple of obvious steps the Obama administration can take, but they are similar enough that only one of them makes sense. The administration can ask Democratic senators who oppose the public option to vote for cloture to break the filibuster and then vote their conscience on final passage. After all, it is unseemly for Democrats to filibuster their own majority leader’s agenda. Or, the administration can let the Ben Nelsons of the world kill the bill, and then attempt to pass it in October using the Reconciliation Process which only requires fifty votes.
However, there is no point in doing the latter if they can accomplish the former. In both cases, final passage requires fifty votes. In both cases, the bill passes over the objections of a few ‘centrist’ Democrats. But, in Reconciliation, only the elements of the bill that have an impact on the budget deficit are germane, and all kinds of mischief can be created by Republicans who are willing to raise points of order to strip the bill of budget-neutral but regulatorily critical elements.
Moreover, bills that pass through the budget reconciliation process have sunset provisions that make them vulnerable in future Congresses that might be unwilling to reauthorize them (see Bush tax cuts).
It is much preferable to pass the whole bill in the regular order. That means, the administration must attempt to get all the Democrats who oppose the public option to agree to support an up-or-down vote. And that is where activist pressure can be brought to bear to push health care with a public option over the finish line.
House Management Strategery
There are certain votes that are easy to attack and difficult to defend. I do not mean, necessarily, that these votes are morally problematic. They are often just the opposite. What I mean is that they take more time and energy to explain than is practical in a 30-second ad or an eight-second sound bite. If you are accused of not supporting the troops because you voted against a war-funding supplemental bill, you don’t want to have to explain that you voted for an alternative amendment to the bill before you voted against the final version. If you voted against the SCHIP expansion of children’s health care, you don’t want to have to explain complex budgetary concerns that provided your rationale. Not all votes are created equal, and the ones that are especially subject to demagoguery are the ones that will provide the rallying cry for your opponents in the next election. So far, the Republicans are attempting to demagogue three votes from this Congress: the stimulus package, the budget, and the cap and trade energy bill.
On all three bills, Speaker Pelosi gave her blessing to vulnerable Democratic house members to vote with the Republicans. The Democrats have plenty of votes to spare, and they figure that they don’t need to offer easy targets to the Republicans.
Here is how it plays out. Speaker Pelosi (or her whips) goes to a vulnerable Democrat (one whose district voted for John McCain, for example) and tells them that she needs their support for a bill that will be controversial in their district. When the member expresses reservations, Pelosi tells them to wait until the vote is almost over to make their decision. If the Democrats get to 218 votes, the bill is going to pass and the member is free to vote against it. But if the bill is falling short of that number, she needs them to bite the bullet and fall in line. Sometimes there are other inducements and promises thrown in for motivation.
There are two ways of looking at this strategy. The first way is to see this as smart, politically savvy management of the Caucus. Pelosi’s job is to pass her agenda, to keep her members happy, to beat the Republicans in the media war, and to protect and expand her majorities. Showing a keen understanding of her members’ districts and vulnerabilities is just part of keeping them happy and protecting her majorities. There is no real upside to padding the size of victory if it means more vulnerable members who it costs more money to defend.
The second way of looking at this is that it undercuts the Democrats’ message, makes their agenda less attractive, makes it more likely that House legislation will be watered down in the Senate, and punishes vulnerable members who actually do support the Speaker’s agenda. It’s harder to defend a piece of contentious legislation if all the Republicans oppose it and are joined by forty Democrats, than if the Democrats are united in supporting it. If the Democrats are lacking unity on legislation, it’s easy for the Republicans to raise questions about its wisdom. When the legislation reaches the Senate where Democratic unity is required, it is harder to maintain that unity on a bill where ‘moderate’ House members are opposed to it. And, a vulnerable Democrat who supports Pelosi’s agenda is more out on a limb when they can’t look around and find allies that voted the same way.
I might add, that trimming votes to protect vulnerable incumbents makes it look like the Democrats aren’t voting their conscience but only to cover their asses. That perception can be corrosive over time.
The truth is that a competent Speaker does need to protect her incumbents from time to time. But there is a cost, and that cost cannot be denied. In some cases, a better way to protect people is to get them all to commit together and then rigorously support each other’s votes. In other words, a good offense is sometimes the best defense. Nowhere is this more true than on issues like climate change or gay rights, where part of the goal isn’t merely to win votes but to change perceptions and win the national argument.
The Saudis Are Our Friends?
Bush held hands with Saudi Princes as if he were a blushing bride. Obama has been castigated for “bowing” to the Saudi King. Yet almost everyone on both sides of the political aisle agrees that Saudi Arabia is a key ally of the United States in the Middle East. Why?
They support the most extreme brand of Islam, the equivalent of White Nationalist Identity Christianity in the US. They exploit their dominance of the world’s oil reserves to keep us dependent on fossil fuels, adding to the danger of global warming. They suppled most of the individuals who attacked us on 9/11 and they supply most of the “foreign fighters” in Iraq responsible for suicide bombing attacks on US troops and Shi’ite communities. Oh, and they covered up Al Qaueda’s involvement on the most deadly attack on American troops stationed on their soil, the 1995 bombings of the Khobar Towers. Yes, your read that right, they covered upo the complicity of Al Qaeda, pointing the finger at Iran, when all the evidence suggested it was their own homegrown Sunni fundamentalist Islamic terrorists who were responsible:
On June 25, 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded at a building in the Khobar Towers
complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which housed United States Air Force personnel, killing 19 airmen and wounding 372.Immediately after the blast, more than 125 agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were ordered to the site to sift for clues and begin the investigation of who was responsible. But when two US Embassy officers arrived at the scene of the devastation early the next morning, they found a bulldozer beginning to dig up the entire crime scene. […]
United States intelligence then intercepted communications from the highest levels of the Saudi government, including interior minister Prince Nayef, to the governor and other officials of Eastern Province instructing them to go through the motions of cooperating with US officials on their investigation but to obstruct it at every turn.
That was the beginning of what interviews with more than a dozen sources familiar with the investigation and other information now available reveal was a systematic effort by the Saudis to obstruct any US investigation of the bombing and to deceive the US about who was responsible for it.
The Saudi regime steered the FBI investigation toward Iran and its Saudi Shi’ite allies with the apparent intention of keeping US officials away from a trail of evidence that would have led to Osama bin Laden and a complex set of ties between the regime and the Saudi terrorist organizer.
And these are our friends and allies? These liars and deceivers. These despots with American blood on their hands. The regime whose ass we saved from Saddam Hussein in 1991. The regime that is the one of the most restrictive of individual liberty, one of the largest a violators of human rights, especially the rights for women, and the spreader of an ideology that has metastasized into Sunni fundamentalist terrorist groups that plague Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan among other countries. The regime which has members among the royalty who no doubt still support the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.
Compared to Iran, these bastards have stabbed us in the back more times than you can imagine. They would like nothing more than to bleed us dry of our wealth and military power by attacking Iran, their religious and ideological enemy. Is protecting American oil companies access to the oil reserves of the Saudis really worth the price we as a country and a planet are paying in lives lost, in the past, the present and the future? Apparently too many of our politicians believe it is.
Do you?
Afghan Poppy Shift: Winning Hearts and Minds
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US changes course on Afghan opium, says Holbrooke
(Christian Science Monitor/AP) – The United States is changing course on anti-drug efforts in Afghanistan, a senior official said, shifting its focus from the destruction of opium poppies to fighting drug traffickers and promoting non-narcotic crops among Afghan farmers who depend on the poppy harvest for survival.
Many analysts criticized the old policy for ignoring the economic logic that draws Afghan farmers to opium production, and said destroying their crops was no way to win their hearts and minds.
Opium is used to make heroin, and although Afghan production has dropped 19 percent in the past year, it still produces 93 percent of the world supply, according to the Associated Press. Most of that production happens in the south, where support for the Taliban is highest, generating between $50 and $70 million annually for the group, according to UN estimates.
Poppy eradication has been a tenet of US policy in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001. But speaking to reporters at a G8 summit on Afghanistan in Italy, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke called it “a waste of money,” says the AP.
Mr. Holbrooke said that, rather than weaken the Taliban, the US anti-poppy effort may have actually made the group stronger, the BBC reports.
- “Spraying the crops just penalizes the farmer and they grow crops somewhere else. The hundreds of millions of dollars we spend on crop eradication has not had any damage on the Taliban.”
“On the contrary, it has helped them recruit. This is the least effective programme ever,” Holbrooke added.
The US will increase its funding of agricultural assistance programs to Afghanistan from “tens of millions of dollars a year to hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, says the AP. Holbrooke says the US will use that money “to work on interdiction, rule of law, [and] alternate crops.”
The policy shift comes after years of criticism for the poppy eradication program, which observers say ignored the economics of the Afghan drug trade.
Poppy link to Afghan bumper crop
(BBC News) – The Afghan government has said that the bumper wheat harvest expected this year can be attributed in part to its successful poppy eradication programme.
Officials say the success of the scheme – especially in Nangarhar province – has helped the country to reap its biggest wheat harvest in 30 years. However officials say the main reason for the bumper harvest is because of increased snow and rainfall. They say that the country is now almost self-sufficient in wheat.
Improved yields
An official in the ministry of counter-narcotics told the BBC that increased demand for wheat meant that it was selling for a higher price, in contrast to the the relatively low prices currently being paid for opium.
“Most farmers were not prepared to risk cultivating poppies because they were scared that the government would destroy them,” he said.
Agriculture Minister Asif Rahimi said that he was expecting the best wheat harvest for 32 years.
Karzai, Bush pledges to reduce Afghan Poppy turn out to be just one more Pipedream
(Global Research) – Douglas Wankel, an American who helped create an Afghan Eradication Force using Afghani fighters and U.S. contractors from Virginia’s private DynCorp firm, said, “We’re not able to destroy all the poppy—that’s not the point. What we’re trying to do is lend an element of threat and risk to the farmers’ calculations, so they won’t plant next year.” Wankel said it was premature to judge the eradication program by the poppy cultivation figures as his effort is just getting off the ground.
“Distracted by Iraq, the U.S. only belatedly began serious counter-narcotics and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan,” Anderson says. In the vacuum, the Taliban returned, and most foreign experts and Afghan officials Anderson spoke with said Taliban holds the initiative.
One of Wankel’s mercenaries described the Afghan war as “redneck heaven.” He explained, “You get to run around the desert on A.T.V.s and pickups, shoot guns, and get paid for it. Man, it’s the perfect job.” DynCorp men said they became contractors because the pay was much higher than civilian jobs back in the States. That’s the same reason Afghan farmers give for growing poppies instead of wheat. Drug running in the past has also been a source of illicit cash for the CIA, which can spend as it pleases without Congressional oversight.