I basically agree with the New York Times’ editorial board when they say that Obama should push hard for a cap and trade energy bill. But, I wish they would be a little more clear about the problem with pushing for that than they are here:
The politics won’t be easy. Some big oil and power companies will push back hard, as will nearly all Republicans and many Rust Belt Democrats.
The politics won’t just be difficult, they will be impossible. Contrary to Rachel Maddow’s fantasy, the Senate explicitly rejected using the budget reconciliation process to pass an energy bill. That’s not an option, so any bill must reach the magic 60-vote threshold to cut off debate and get an up-or-down vote. The Democrats are not united and, even if they were, they only have 59 members in their caucus. There is no way to get to 60 votes for a Cap and Trade bill.
So, why do I agree with the New York Times? Because this is a battle worth losing. There is time to come back and pass something whittled down and inadequate, but that should not be the starting position. Before compromising, the president should make it crystal clear that the 60-vote threshold is creating gridlock and preventing him from delivering on his promises. The final compromise will be stronger this way, and the public will learn something important about procedural obstruction. This will make voting for Republican senators in November less attractive and help build momentum for filibuster reform in the next Congress.
But, we should be clear. We’re asking the president to intentionally stake out ground that he knows he will have to concede. That’s not often a wise move on the president’s part, but this, I believe, is an exception.
Fifty-one-votes-and-Biden-but-Bush-passed-everything-and-he-didn’t-have-sixty-votes-LBJ-arm-twisting
-FDR-real-leader-bully-pulpit-strip-committee-chairs-primary-challenge.
I saved it as a macro. Cut the time I spent on the net by a third.
Not sure where the snark begins and ends in that comment.
But Bush didn’t pass much of anything after his NCLB bill and his tax cuts.
Don’t worry booman, it’s all snark…. like Pratchett’s turtles, snark all the way down. Too much time at DU has warped my brain.
I’ve had it up to here with people who should know better, smart people (I’m looking at you, Famous MSNBC Persons), who came out of the voting booth in 2008 — if they vote at all — saying to themselves “Now, it’s our turn. We’ve got our Bush. Son-of-a-bitch better start breaking shit…”
Too many on the left are engaged in an exercise roughly comparable to sending an ice-cream sundae back to the kitchen because it isn’t hot, and giving the waitress a raft of shit in the process.
Um, guys — con-law professors don’t break shit. They especially don’t break shit when they tell you up front that they’re not going to break shit.
They don’t break shit when they’ve made it clear that restoring actual, small-c constitutional government, with co-equal branches and stuff is not only a priority, but necessary for the survival of the Republic. So that Congress has to be more than the world’s largest studio green room, for example.
I like this comment a lot. Very good.
As regards the climate bill, Lieberman(!!) is making noises about having the votes to successfully include some kind of limited cap-and-trade language.
And Lieberman is suddenly reliable on the subject of reality?
Hope springs eternal, although folks are correct to treat everything Lieberman says with great skepticism. However, he is a wiley pol (that “I” in his I-CT designation counts for something), and if he wants to stay in the Senate past 2012 he’s going to have to do something to improve his dismal numbers with CT Democratic voters. Maybe that’s impossible, but seems like becoming a climate hero would go a long way towards it.
There’s not that much wiggle room on climate legislation that I can see. “Limited cap-and-trade” is near oxymoron territory. Unlike health care, it’s either comprehensive enough to make a dent or it’s nothing. An inadequate climate bill is simply a waste of effort.
Individual sources can be capped – one idea is to cap electricity generators of a certain type only. But are you saying covered polluters in such a scenario would just switch to different but equally bad energy sources that weren’t covered? Or that its ineffective in context of the larger climate problem (i.e. capping only one source wouldn’t be sufficient to keep things under 450ppm, or whatever number you prefer)? Because I agree, a limited C&T program would be inadequate, but it would seem to make at least a minor dent in the overall numbers.
I guess I’m saying both. Just today I was listening to a program about how natural gas is just as harmful as other fossil sources in many ways, including climate gases and massive water pollution.
I have no way to judge whether the target numbers make sense, but there is some level where either we hit the climate-change tipping point or we maybe avoid it. This is a pass/fail exam. We don’t get any points at all for giving it a good try. I think tepid carbon-tax-type legislation may do more harm by letting us think we’ve fixed the problem than it will do in precluding the tipping point. Let’s not forget that cap and trade was originally proposed by far-right economists. There’s a reason for that.
Interesting – thanks.
Agreed.
Greenwald was quite shrill today:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/21/pundits/index.html
he’s justified in his shrillness on that topic. I wish he would expand the scope of his blame-laying, however. While I find the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo to be just as indefensible as Glenn, I don’t see ANYONE in Washington willing to watch the administration’s back. Instead, they refuse to appropriate money to shut down the prison and they won’t allow trials in their backyard or allow the innocent to relocate within the US. No one on the left who has actually been elected has the president’s back.
I don’t see ANYONE in Washington willing to watch the administration’s back.
That’s not exactly acccurate. There are at least three that I know of. But then all three are written off as quacks and not serious people by the TradMed.
Anyone? Durbin was all for shutting down Guantanamo and moving the victims to Illinois. So were a bunch of other senators and house members. My recollection is that Obama decided to back away and leave those decisions to the Mendacious Majority.
Final vote in the Senate on not funding Gitmo transfers: 90-6. House: 282-131.
Today Obama announced that the feds are buying the prison in IL, presumably as a beginning toward making it ready for detainees. With the support of both IL senators. “www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2010/06/wh_moves_ahead_on_il_prison_pu.html” (Sorry, I keep using the damn Chrome browser and so can’t make links work.)
As to the funding vote, I have to think there were poison pills or some other parliamentary bullshit involved.
There wasn’t. It was just a vote on whether Obama could spend money to move detainees here.
That’s not really the part of his article that I focused on.
This:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/21/obama/index.html
is what I focused on. I mean, does Greenwald seriously think there are 60 votes for a climate bill?
Look, I get that people want him to try, but making a political calculation about which fights you’re going to fight to make your legislation the most successful is what Obama did. He bought off Pharma (and a few others); in his mind, he thought this was the only way to get a comprehensive bill through. Maybe he was wrong, I don’t think that he was. Picking your battles carefully and knowing how to play the game is important, it’s something Jimmy Carter never learned.
So, while the president is not “weak”, it’s completely outrageous for him to think that the president seriously has as much sway over “moderates” as he does progressives. Their ideologies do the math for you.
I agree completely that the President needs to draw a line in the sand and not accept anything else, while knowing he is going to lose. Then point out that he can not even get a vote on a bill that the House has already passed because of this undemocratic 60 vote Senate rule. This is the only path because Republican votes are just not there for anything and there is no deal to be had.
The White House has yet to really do this type of strategy and call people out by name to highlight their obstruction so maybe this Joe Barton episode will help them go for it.
not exactly true, as of his most recent saturday radio address, he’s begun to lay the ground work for just such a strategy, albeit, somewhat meekly. to wit:
granted, these weekly addresses have a dismally small audience, and, as davew points out below, it’s an extremely complicated issue not easily explained…especially within the media environment that exists… and not an issue the public has a strongly vested interest in, and the ratpublicans will control the spin and given that we’re in the run up to the midterm elections, urging this kind of political suicide is unwise, it’s a lose lose scenario for the dems all round.
the administration would be better served to focus on jobs, and more jobs; as that is the issue that’s really dominating the kitchen table discussions in middle america. that will have some resonance with the voters. certainly much more than a watered down energy/climate bill…which given the proclivity for premature capitulation of this administration is the best we could expect… and, like the health
careinsurance reform debacle, that’s an unacceptable conclusion, imo.The big problem I have with Obama statements like this is that he’s essentially adopting the bullshit that’s SOP for the media: “there will be plenty of disagreement and different ideas”>. But the truth is, there is no disagreement on ideas and there are no different ideas. There is only political obstruction calculated to Win through Anger.
Again, I think the one time Obama and the Dems listen to the left side they choose the worst issue to embrace. The public is interested in energy, jobs, and now maybe environmental destruction and restoration. Obama can make a vital, popular, and strategic breakthrough built on those issues. We’re paying now for the big mistake of trying to separate climate change from energy and environmental policy.
I agree Jobs, Jobs, Jobs should be focus but the fiscal fraud blue dogs want to create them by worrying about debt so there you go. The President sometimes calls out the Republicans in these addresses and Rahm was pretty good on ABC Sunday show but how much of the public knows about 60 votes or filibuster or how GOP doesnt allow votes to happen that already passed the house? The Admin should be drilling this into american populace over and over. We all know the Fox News/WSJ/Talk radio/Drudge Report cabal would be doing it if Dems were filibustering every piece of legislation in the Senate.
Exactly. Obama and the Dems have too many wonks around, or something. Nobody wants to know whether the GOP is killing everything in sight with a .45 or a .38. What matters is that they’re trying to kill unemployment compensation, trying to kill health insurance reform, trying to protect BP from liability for its crimes, trying to kill every attempt to prevent climate catastrophe.
Ah, but I forgot: what really matters is incumbent protection. We have to make assholes of the Rockefeller/Nelson/Lincoln kind look good, so we can’t say bad things about killers. But never mind — Boo thinks America is fabulous just the way it is.
For somebody who’s been taking so much space ragging on “defeatism, pessimists, cynics” et al, we get this: “We’re asking the president to intentionally stake out ground that he knows he will have to concede.”
How does he (or you, Boo) know he has to concede before he starts? If he and the Dem congressional leadership went all in appealing to the public, wielding a big stick in Congress, and devoting their PR operations to getting a real climate bill passed, who says they can’t get to 60, or find a way around the 60 vote insanity?
It’s odd that you choose this issue for Obama to go all out for the ideal. The carbon-tax/climate-change options are complicated and hard to communicate. The public doesn’t seem to much care about them. OTOH, we had an issue that was important for policy and for politics: the public option. The public overwhelmingly wanted it, it was easy to explain, and as policy would lead to a better society and a more functional economy. But you, Obama, and the Dems all decided this was not a fight worth the risk. To my mind that was the opportunity to “make voting for Republican senators in November less attractive and help build momentum for filibuster reform in the next Congress.”
So what happened to make all the previous bad compromises not worth the fight, but this most difficult and nebulous issue suddenly worth it? Cap and trade is already a huge compromise. There’s no constituency for it and no way I can see to build one. I think if Obama’s going to go all-in on energy legislation it should be about restoring the Gulf environment and a huge push to replace the fossil economy with sustainable energy and conservation.
A cynic is someone who asks Obama to do the impossible, knowing that it is impossible, and then blames him when he fails.
To your point, how do I know?
How many Republicans currently serving in the Senate and seeking reelection are vulnerable to defeat in November?
The answer is two. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Richard Burr of North Carolina. That’s it. Those are the only two Republicans who might be frightened by White House pressure to vote for cap and trade. But Rockefeller and Byrd will never vote for Cap and Trade. And they are not alone among Democrats. We cannot get to sixty.
That’s not pessimism. That’s math. And not fuzzy math.
That wasn’t my main point. Why was a very popular proposal like the public option not worth taking an all-out stand on even though it could be won, while legislation that the public doesn’t care that much about, and which you say is a sure loser, is worth taking a defeat for. Makes no policy or political sense to me.
I agree that I hope Obama follows your recommendation, up to a point. I’d like to see him go all-out, lose, and then use it as an election issue. Unfortunately they will follow the rest of your suggestion, too, and settle for some warm pablum that only deepens the cynicism among those following the issue and once again gives cover to the Reps and the Dem whores, negating yet another Dem campaign weapon.
Because it never had a majority, even counting Biden, in the Senate. Never. In no sane whip count.
Neither does a respectable climate bill, according to Boo. The question is, what’s the difference? Why choose an issue to lose on that doesn’t galvanize the public over one that did?
I don’t think the public option ‘galvanized the public’. Sure, it polled well, but I think the public option was ‘gee, that would be nice to have’, else the lack of it would have killed the bill with the general public — not just blog readers.
You can announce that you’re prepared to die in the last ditch, parliamentarily speaking, on a principle only a limited number of times before it becomes clear that you’re not actually dying in the last ditch. In a Westminster-style system the public, and the opposition, know you mean it because you stand to lose office on it. In our system, it’s not so clear-cut, and the threat is subject to becoming worn by over-use.
I don’t know how many threats n of this sort Obama’s got per term, n > 1, I’m sure. But n is not a large number.
We’ll never know how many until he tries the first one.
Good post and interesting thread; thanks all.
There was a hopeful development a few days ago along these lines when when Sen. McCaskill announced she has the votes to eliminate “secret holds”. (Yes, holds are still a problem, but we walk before we run. At least she and her colleagues are moving in the right direction.)
Let’s be clear. Pushing for filibuster reform is not going to win the Democrats any Senate seats this November. (I’ve been wrong before, and I’d be happy to be wrong about this one, but I don’t see it happening.)
Forcing several filibuster votes in the next six months (and then passing what legislation can be passed with 51 votes) can help build support for reducing or eliminating the filibuster in January (or January 2013).
It’s worth repeating: if the Senate operated on majority rules like the House, this Congress would arguably have the most progressive set of legislative accomplishments of any Congress in the past 100 years.