You need 51 votes to pass a law in the Senate, not 60

But you wouldn't know it from the way this NYT article is presented:

Obama’s Jobs Bill Fails in Senate in First Legislative Test

By ROBERT PEAR

The vote of 50 to 49 to open debate on the measure was shy of the 60 needed to overcome procedural objections, forcing the White House to consider breaking up the package.

When is the Washington establishment going to realize that you can't govern with supermajority requirements in the legislature, and that this way of doing business in the Senate is a radical departure from the past?

The Senate needs to abolish the filibuster, or neither party will be able to make headway with the gigantic structural problems the country faces.

Baseball and the law

Via Josh, an interesting article pointing out that it is far more accurate to say that a Supreme Court Justice is a commissioner of baseball, rather than an umpire:

The Supreme Court hears only a small number of cases. Most of its work consists of providing guidance to lower courts, rather than correcting all judicial errors on a case-by-case basis. Similarly, the Commissioner of Baseball relays instructions to the umpires regarding how to interpret the rules of Major League Baseball, rather than reviewing their every call.

In a related note, I always thought that it would be funny to try to change California's Three Strikes Law by way of changing the rules of baseball to increase the number of strikes needed for an out.

In yet another related note, baseball analogies are alive and well in our current political discourse. Here's Harry Reid, talking tough on filibuster reform:

For now, the process seems to be proceeding from the premise that Senate Democrats are fed up with the filibuster. "In baseball," Reid said in a clipped tone, "they used to have the spitball. It originally was used with discretion. But then the ball got wetter and wetter and wetter. So soon, they outlawed the spitball." The same, he said, had happened to the four-corner offense in basketball. "And just the way the spitball was abused in baseball and the four-corner offense was abused in basketball," Reid said, "Republicans have abused the filibuster."

What the hell is the "four-corner offense"?

All the conventional wisdom that's fit to print

Remarkably, there is an entire article in the NYT about "party gridlock in Washington" that doesn't even contain the word "filibuster", let alone any explanation of its historically unprecedented abuse. It's "analysis" like this that prevents me from feeling all that bad when I hear that newspapers are going under.

The broken Senate

Via Yglesias, a nice chart that demonstrates that the current abuse of the filibuster is historically unprecedented:



Though today's Republicans are really taking it to the next level, I'd say that the use of the filibuster has been problematic since the 1990s. Not coincidentally, there has not been any major tax increase or entitlement reforms (with the possible exception of Clinton's welfare reform) since that time. Those are the politically difficult laws to pass that will simply never get through the Senate so long as the minority party can block it with a mere 41 votes.

We're effed

Well: health care reform is dead. Coakley's loss means that the Democrats have one vote short of a filibuster-proof majority, which is giving centrist Democrats an excuse to run for cover. Democratic support for the bill is caving as speak, as Jim Webb volunteers that there will be no more votes on heath care until Scott Brown is seated, and no less a Massachusettes liberal than Barney Frank rules out this possibility as well. Senator Evan Bayh is already acknowledging the election as a rebuke to the Democratic agenda.

But this whole experience proves something more than a failed attempt by Democrats to reform health care insurance: it shows that the United States government is incapable of passing major legislation that will solve our biggest problems. Health care needs to be reformed, one way or another: its costs are spiraling out of control, and the ranks of the uninsured keep growing. If costs continue growing apace, the federal government will go broke paying for Medicare in the next fifty years.

Of course, broadening health care insurance isn't the only way to solve the looming budget problem; you could go the Republican route, and cut entitlements. The problem is: no Republicans are seriously advocating this. Scott Brown ran on a platform of not reducing a penny of Medicare spending, and he supports Massachusettes' own universal health care program. Indeed, the fact that the Dem's reform package would have resulted in Medicare spending cuts was used by Republicans as a talking point against the legislation. And of course, it was a Republican President and Congress that last decade passed Medicare Part D, the largest expansion of entitlements since the passage of Medicare itself--all of it funded with deficit spending (which is to say, none of it was funded at all).

Now, ultimately this failure is attributable to the rules of the Senate--specifically, the recently adopted practice of requiring a 60 vote supermajority to pass any legislation whatsoever. If a simple majority was all that was needed to get something through, the legislation would have passed in the middle of last year. But so long as this supermajority requirement remains, it will be impossible for either party to pass any legislation that is capable of solving our nation's biggest problems. I think it would behoove the leadership in both parties to agree to abolish the filibuster in a set period of time from now (6 years, say, when it is unknown which party will be in power). Otherwise crucial legislation--whether it is coming from the left or the right--will continue to crash on the shoals of arcane procedural votes in the Senate.

The right move

Lieberman stays in the Democratic caucus, keeps his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but is stripped of a subcommittee chair on the Environment and Public Works Committee--a symbolic retributive gesture.

This is a good outcome. First, it gets this distracting, inside-the-beltway melodrama overwith and out of the news well before Obama takes office; second, it gives Democrats a shot at nabbing a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority in the Senate; and third, it all but guarantees that Lieberman will be 100% on board with Obama's ambitious domestic agenda (although I think this would have more or less been the case no matter what).

Ah, conciliation! It gets legislation passed. And that's the only thing that matters.

The Senate race stays hot

It looks as though there will be a run-off in the Senate race in Georgia, which could get crazy if the Democrats can muster 59 seats:

If Franken holds on, if Jeff Merkley in Oregon can win (Multnomah is the big Portland Democratic engine and is largely outstanding), then it is increasingly likely that the Dems will converge on Georgia for the next four weeks to try to win the 60th Senate seat.

A lot has been made of the fact that two of the "Democrats" in that would-be filibuster-proof 60-seat majority would be Independents, and one of those Independents--Joe Lieberman--actively campaigned for the Republican side. However, despite his move rightward, Lieberman remains a centrist Democrat on domestic issues. Thus, I think we could count on him to block a filibuster on something like a big energy or healthcare bill.