which is why Ben Nelson will vote not to table the motion described here. It would stop him from feeling like the most Powerful Person in the Universe.
It’s really funny watching people shift their position on the issue of whether the senate should need sixty votes in order to wipe a drippy nose. George Will has been one of the more flagrant examples, and that’s why I laugh when people tell me what a Serious Conservative Intellectual he is, with his magic ability to use the same Gladstone and Chesterton quotes in column after column. But, in fairness, if I had been a famous liberal columnist in 2005, I’d probably have written words then that I’d be eating now. The filibuster is something people don’t really think about until it’s pointed at their own personal onions.
I’m going to state a position now and I’m going to try to be consistent about it when the Republicans retake one or both houses of Congress this fall: You shouldn’t need 60 votes just in order to, um, hold a vote. Also, if people want to filibuster something, let ‘em actually get up there and read the phone book till they’re all hoarse. Voters deserve to have some idea of what the legislative agenda they have empowered actually looks like, what it actually leads to. The supermajority-just-to-hold-a-vote requirement prevents us from getting any such idea. We finally got a health care bill, but it’s incredibly watered-down, and, if you consult the list of projects Democrats were talking about in early ’09, they’ve managed to actually do almost none of it. We were going to get prison reform, sentencing reform, an end to detainee abuse, a public option, further-reaching financial reform than we actually got, a stimulus big enough to do more than keep the patient alive, a climate bill, more aid to states, DADT repeal, civil unions, and shoulder-mounted jetpacks … am I missing anything? If Dems had been able to give voters even half of this, then the 2010 election would be about what the electorate thinks of Democratic policy ideas. Instead, it’s about what the public thinks of the kind of elitist Liberalism Lite that makes four or five centrist Democrats (plus Scott Brown) comfortable. And of course the public hates that, as anybody would. Likewise, if the Republicans gain control of Congress once again this fall, the public deserves to be reminded what their ideas look like in practice. Let them pass the Hookers and Blow Act and the Resolution To Burn Extra Oil Just To Piss Off Liberals. Let them throw taxpayer money at pro-Confederate thinktanks. Let them give BP’s executives a bailout and then call it “job creation.” Let them make drooling morons of themselves so the electorate knows what’s at stake. To know what the two parties are really about now, under these circumstances, you have to be a total politics junkie, and the millions who have to work two jobs just to stave off bankruptcy and childhood anemia are understandably unable to commit their two minutes of daily leisure time to The New Republic.
