I’ll be glad to see Evan Bayh go because he’s basically a moron. His political worldview is so lazy and conventional that he spews nonsense like this:
Q: What is the state of your political party?
A: It’s momentarily very strong. It’s not common for a party to control the White House and both Houses of Congress. But I think that the election this November is going to be a very difficult one for the Democratic Party. I think the Republicans are going to score big gains. And it’s largely because we’ve lost the independents, and that’s largely over deficit and debt.
And so there’s a natural tendency for any group, when they’re riding high, to overreach and I think the most progressive elements in the Democratic Party have and are about to be rebuked by the public.And the irony of that is the cause that gets hurt the most when the liberals overreach is the liberal agenda, because they play into the hands of the conservative Republicans. And it’s an unfortunate fact, but it is a fact. The last election, the base of the Republican Party is just bigger than the base of the Democratic Party by about 10 percent.
The only way progressive Democrats have a role in governing in this country is if they make common cause [with] moderates — otherwise, numerically, it’s just not going to work out. They have not embraced that perspective.
Part of this I agree with, unfortunately. The Republican base probably is a bit larger than the Democratic base. And the public really is mad about deficits and the debt. But Bayh says the Democrats are going to be rebuked for liberal overreach and for creating new debt. That’s the most simplistic nonsense. All we have to do is imagine what the economy would look like if the Democrats hadn’t injected nearly a trillion dollars of stimulus into it, bailed out the auto industry, and stabilized the financial market and sector. In other words, if we hadn’t increased the debt, we’d really be in a world of hurt. So, we aren’t going to get punished for doing something necessary, we’re going to get punished because jackasses like Evan Bayh refuse to explain how the Republicans created this mess and what we’ve done to clean it up. You can blame the media or the Democrats or the president or the opposition, but the problem is a failure of communication and not some kind of liberal overreach.
It’s pretty obvious that liberals have not gotten what they advocated on a whole host of subjects, from the size of the stimulus, to the public option, to the shape of the Wall Street reforms, to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and DOMA, to the closure of Guantanamo, to the policy on Afghanistan. It’s hard to argue that the Democrats would be worse off with lower unemployment, a more popular health care bill, and stronger Wall Street regulation.
I can’t really think of any area where the Democrats have fully embraced the liberal position, let alone pushed it at the expense of the moderate wing of the party.
Think about the next part:
Q: What is it like to be a moderate in the Senate? And what role do they play in politics?
A: The moderates are the key to getting anything done, because most of the time in the Senate you need 60 votes. We’re in a rare moment now where the Democratic Party has close to 60 votes. But usually it’s far short of that and so you have to get four or five or six members of the other party to agree to get anything done.
This is precisely right. And what does that mean? It means that everything we’ve done for the last year and nine months has had to pass Evan Bayh’s sniff-test and (for all but three months of that time) the sniff-test of at least one Republican. And what does that mean? It means that Evan Bayh considers himself guilty of liberal overreach.
Or, it means he’s a dunderhead.
And the public really is mad about deficits and the debt.
Compared to what? Jobs? To the extent it shows Pete Peterson can buy influence? To the extent that the right only drags this shit up when Democrats are in power but never when Republicans spend like drunken sailors on shore leave? Do you read Atrios at all?
What an ass. And it’s doubly strange since his father was an honorable Senator in the progressive tradition.
I believe that upon leaving the Senate Bayh intends to take on new responsibilities as the spokesman for the Lucky Sperm Foundation, which is losing its incumbent in the same position, Harold Ford, Jr.
Don’t agree with the last part. His view that you need 60 votes to do anything in the Senate is his interpretation of the formal rules and norms of the Senate- an interpretation that makes himself extremely important. A more reasonable interpretation (and one consistent with the history of the Senate) of the institutional norms of the Senate is that a lot of the extreme rules to muck things up should only be used rarely and in instances that are no longer applicable (like a Senator needing days to get to Washington by horse and buggy). Its lazy on your part Booman to not correct this. Bayh (and Gregg and McConnel) is the one with the radical interpretation of the rules and norms of the Senate, not us- and he only interprets the rules and norms as such because he’s a self-important idiot.
Sorry, but the current rules of the Senate make it a requirement to get 60 votes if even a single senator withholds his consent to proceed. That is not an interpretation. It is the rule.
It’s a requirement because one of the parties refuses to act like a dignified political party of grown-ups
Institutions are comprised of formal rules, informal norms and the enforcement characteristics of each. Historically, the legislative institutions of the Senate did not require 60 votes to do anything and everything. Lots of stuff got done just because most Senators followed accepted norms about when such arcane formal rules would be employed. Sticking to what precisely an arcane formal rule says is not a practice we do in regular life (see speed limits for example) and Im confused why you’re defending the far-right’s and their conservadem enabler’s ability to simply shove aside accepted norms and dust off arcane formal rules in a way that is adverse to the progressive cause.
Informal norms matter a lot and they are frequently abused and twisted by the powerful and the majority to harm the weak and the minority. Someone’s gotta call them on this sh*t.
I’ve been calling them on this shit, but not by distorting what they are doing. There is nothing arcane about the filibuster rule. It’s been with us in one form or another for over a hundred and fifty years, but it was updated in the 1970’s (cloture dropped from 67 to 60).
We used it and urged its usage during the Bush years.
The Senate approved its use in this Congress when they convened in January 2009.
That the rule is being abused goes without saying, but I’ve said it until I turned blue in the face.
Yet, as things stand, and have stood forever, a single senator has the right to object to almost anything, and forty-one senators can stop almost everything. That’s not an interpretation of some arcane rule, but the rule itself.
And you can’t properly understand the president or the Senate, or even the House, if you don’t understand that the cloture requirement puts a massive constraint on what it’s possible to do in this country.
Totally agree and im not calling you out at all- you get this stuff better than anyone. i originally misspoke with regards to interpretation. i should have said, “abused informal norms” instead of “interpreted formal rules.” Im not disputing what the formal rules say. But just because the rules say a certain thing doesn’t mean that the way Evan Bayh wants to apply those rules is the “right way.” Sometimes you can “break the rules” by following the rules to the letter of the law but blatantly violating accepted informal norms. We’re off in legal theory land right now, but i think its really important that this stuff not get lost down the memory hole and the way that Evan Bayh applies Senate rules become the new normal.
Citizens driving on the highway is not the same as senate procedure. Citizens don’t get away with driving over the speed limit b/c there’s some informal agreement that the speed limit has no validity. Furthermore, if the senate had an informal agreement to ignore the procedural rules they set up, and then ignored them, we’d have a big problem and some kind of oligarchy not a constitution based form of government not to mention issues about constitutionality of the legislation. This is one of the things I really like about Obama. Rule of law is everything, it’s all we have and in the primacy of law in the usa we’re way ahead of most of the world. Obama, imo, is trying to repair the damage to rule of law attempted by the Bush admin.
we’re talking past each other here. all rules have informal norms associated with them. the speed limit analogy was to illustrate that- Im not trying to pretend its a perfect analogy to whats going on in the senate. and im not saying the senate should ignore their rules-im saying they should apply them in ways that have worked in the past, ie, these arcane holds and 60 vote threshold should be used sparingly, not to obstruct each and every action of the senate. the goal isn’t to uphold the rule of law, the goal is to have efficient and fair institutions and the senate as an institution is flawed right now, both with respect to its formal rules and the informal norms in which those rules are applied.
I understand that you want to resist the idea that it takes 60 votes to pass anything, as if that is a valid way to run a democracy. But, those are the rules until they are changed. We’re not going to convince the Republicans to unilaterally disarm because it’s harmful to the comity of the Senate or violates the historic role of the cloture rule. We either scrap the rule, or we govern from the center-right to center-left (when we’re lucky).
While the rule exists, I expect the president to do what he has to to get things done, and that means some pretty mealy-mouthed progressive legislation. The rule protects us, too, but I’d be willing to give it up to make some more substantive changes in our policies over the next two years.
Agreed, but reforming Senate rules depends on framing the issue as reform actually restoring things back to the way they were, and the status quo as a radical departure from the historic norms of the Senate. We have to be clear what’s really going on here. We can’t just sit on our hands and pretend everything is normal just because Judd Gregg’s really good at manipulating senate rules.
disagree.
the no-good-son-of-a-Birch isn’t stupid any more than he’s moderate. He is a very well paid tool of the corporate class; his interests and theirs are different from yours and mine. By any reasonable standards he’s a conservative, and by my standards he’s a Republican.
We’ve got the same problem in a micro version here in my little town in upstate NY. The Democrats have their heads so far up their ass that in some cases they are worse than the Republicans.
Given that both major parties are such a mess these days, I’m a bit surprised that we aren’t seeing a really strong third party bid. Seems to me that the door is open.
Follow the money.
Third party bids require money to operate. If a third party can’t (or won’t) put together an infrastructure to run then it isn’t going to show up.
There are a lot of reasons that the last time a successful new national party came onstage in this country was in the mid 1800s when the Republican party emerged fusing the business interests of the Whigs with abolitionist activism. And one of them is that the amount of money you need to have a successful national party these days is obscene – and has been for generations.
No, it’s far cheaper to just co-opt an existing party than it is to start a new one. And that’s what the guys behind the “Tea Party” are doing with the GOP – making a power play to take over the leadership of the Republican Party.
Of course, Evan Bayh is speaking as a has-been lame duck. This might go far to explain why Evan Bayh is a has-been lame duck.
We won’t have Brad Ellsworth to kick around like we did Bayh. A rotten shame. What’s an overreaching librul to do?
Even if Ellsworth does pull off a win in November, I think we’ll just be stuck with a Bayh clone. Ellsworth was campaigning here yesterday.
It’s lose-lose for you. I feel your pain.
The Bloomington liberals are pretty disgusted.