Blood Sausage

It's probably easier just to not parse every statement coming out of the Congress on health care. This is the sausage-making period, and it's rarely pretty. But everyone is reporting that, a day after Harry Reid asked his caucus to support the majority's goals by not supporting a filibuster and told Max Baucus to drop bipartisan efforts on the health care bill that would lose Democratic votes, he reached out to a limited group of Republicans and asked them for help on the bill. And Max Baucus and Charles Grassley, according to the LA Times, continue to move forward on their centrist bill in the Senate Finance Committee.

Well, sure. This is the talking phase, and I wouldn't expect a stonewall of silence at this point. Chasing exactly what will remain in the bill or not is like chasing a rainbow.

However, a couple elements to the chatter seem significant. Politico adds up the numbers:

But taxing health benefits to pay for an overhaul? That's still dead, Democratic leaders made clear again Wednesday.

And another thing that's increasingly in doubt: any hopes of getting a health reform bill voted out of the Senate by August, a byproduct of the leadership's decision to lay down the law on finding a new way to pay for it.

Reid's move blows a gigantic hole in efforts to find $1 trillion to pay for health reform - and set off a scramble Wednesday to come up with a replacement for the suddenly missing $320 billion over 10 years.

And if Democrats thought taxing health benefits was unpopular, the second-least-popular idea might be a tough sell, too - a straight-up income tax hike on people making more than $250,000 a year. That idea gained new currency in the Senate and the House Wednesday in part because it would not divide the Democratic base as much as taxing health benefits, which could hit the middle class, and unions strongly oppose it.

Sin taxes on sugary sodas and drinks were back on the table - despite being dismissed weeks ago as too small to be worth the fight it would take to pass them. A few Democrats were talking again about resurrecting President Barack Obama's plan to lower income tax deductions for wealthy Americans, an idea that died barely weeks after Obama first floated it earlier this year.

It does look like changing the employer deduction is right out (which is kind of a shame - I support capping that deduction). But if we're only talking about $320 billion to go, then they should just adopt the Obama Administration's plan to return the rate of deductions for charitable donations to where it was in the Reagan Administration. It's the most defensible (I envision rhetoric like "you mean you give charity for the tax break, not out of the goodness of your heart?") and has already been vetted by the White House.

Now, to get a bill that spends more than $1 trillion a year, you might need something else. But add in the charitable deduction piece and you're up to $1 trillion, which is definitely a better place than I thought.

There's also the wrangling over whether Democrats will join Republican filibusters. Dick Durbin implored the caucus on this:

If they will stick with us on the procedural votes, we at least know that we can move forward.... They may vote against final passage on a bill, they may vote with Republicans on an amendment. That's entirely their right to do. But this idea of allowing the filibuster to stop the whole Senate.... We ought to control our own agenda.

Just making this public is probably part of the strategy. Sadly, plenty of Democrats have swallowed the notion that procedural votes equal the votes themselves:

"Most Senators vote their conscience and they do what they think is right. They didn't come here to be told what to do by somebody else," moderate Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.) said [...]

"You know how this place operates. Very often, it's the procedural votes that determine the substantive outcome. Sometimes not, but it's not uncommon that that is the case. So those votes on procedural issues will be cast as if they are the ultimate substantive vote," he said.

That's really only true if someone like Evan Bayh believes it. He can separate procedure and the final vote to his constituents if he wanted to. So we can only conclude that he'd rather not.

Good to know.

Lies My Insurance Lobby Told Me

I know I'm heartened by the news that Democrats plan to develop a plan to communicate on health care. Who thought of that, give him or her a cookie! To think, political parties can create a "message" that they can "argue" to the "public." It's really heady stuff.

Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, said many Democrats felt “unease that we did not have a strategy” to answer the criticism coming from Republican members of Congress and Republican consultants like Frank I. Luntz, an expert on the language of politics.

Senate Democrats met for more than an hour at the Capitol with David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, and Jim Messina, a deputy White House chief of staff.

“Axelrod came to reassure us that they do have a strategy,” Mr. Bayh said.

Wouldn't want to make Evan Bayh nervous that there wasn't a structure in place for him to defy. Oh, and the Luntz talking points are 16 years old, so if you were caught flat-footed by them you're not much of a politician.

Incidentally, the details of the Democratic messaging on this give me a little pause. Max Baucus explained that “You can choose your own doctor, you can choose your own health plan. There’s total choice here. I do not want to say this defensively, but this is not a big government plan.” If you're saying "I do not want to say this defensively," then you're saying it defensively.

The overall message is one of "shared responsibility," which just doesn't sound all that consumer-friendly. Especially when the "sharing" part of the responsibility has already started to collapse.

Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.

Mr. Obama invited health industry leaders to the White House on Monday to trumpet their cost-control commitments. But three days later, confusion swirled in Washington as the companies’ trade associations raced to tamp down angst among members around the country […]

Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts.

“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members,” said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. “I’ve spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it.”

These are out and out lies coming from the industry. We have their pledge in writing, calling for a reduction of 1.5 percentage points to the annual growth of health care. Now they're trying to hedge that the 1.5% would be achieved eventually. You knew they would backtrack, I guess I'm surprised it happened within five days, but since $2 trillion dollars in savings equals $2 trillion dollars in their profits, this idea that they would patriotically put the good of the country ahead of their bottom line was always suspect.

So I have another "message" for David Axelrod, Max Baucus and the gang. How about this: "the insurance companies are thieves, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, and we need to both enforce their proposed savings and institute a public health care plan to compete with them on price and quality of service."

Has the benefit of being true.

America's Worst People

I mentioned that Congress passed a budget yesterday. In the Senate, the vote played out almost exclusively among party lines, with only two Senators - Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson - crossing the aisle. They are the two most conservative Democrats in the 111th Congress, by voting record. And they didn't only vote against the budget - they voted definitively FOR a motion to recommit, which essentially would have substituted this budget for a Republican version.

Enter Mike Johanns, the freshman Republican senator from Nebraska whose amendment preventing the Senate from passing climate change legislation through the reconciliation process passed on Tuesday.

He also authored a different measure--not an amendment, but a "motion to recommitt"--which would have scrapped the budget that passed and replaced it with a much more conservative version. Most significantly, it would have indexed non-defense, non-veterans discretionary spending to the expected rate of inflation. It failed 43-55--for all intents and purposes a mirror image of the vote on the final budget resolution. Which is to say that Bayh and Nelson voted for the "Johanns Budget".

So how did these two Republicans, who voted affirmatively for a Republican budget, justify their votes? They said it costs too much.

Nelson defended his vote in a prepared statement:

"The administration inherited a lot of red ink in this budget, along with our ailing economy. But this budget still has trillion dollar-plus deficits in the next two years, and adds unsustainably to the debt. These are tough times, and the federal government needs to take a lesson from American families and cut down on the things we can do without.

I respect the Administration offering an honest budget…but it just costs too much."

Similarly, Bayh issued a statement saying he opposed the budget in an attempt to be the voice of “fiscal responsibility“:

"[U]nder this budget, our national debt skyrockets from $11.1 trillion today to an estimated $17 trillion in 2014. As a percentage of our gross domestic product, it reaches a precarious 66.5 percent. The deficit remains larger than our projected economic growth, an unsustainable state of affairs. This budget will increase our borrowing from and dependence upon foreign nations. I cannot support such results. We can do better, and for the sake of our nation and our children’s future, we must."

These same two Senators, the ones whining and crying about fiscal responsibility, voted last night to shield millionaires from taxes on their estates, costing the government $250 billion dollars.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate has voted to cut taxes on multimillion-dollar estates as it gets ready to pass a budget backed by President Barack Obama.

By a 51-48 vote, the Senate embraced a nonbinding but symbolically important amendment by Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln and Arizona Republican Jon Kyl to exempt estates up to $10 million from the estate tax. Estates larger than that would be taxed at a 35 percent rate.

Tim Fernholz has more on this nonsense, including the good news that this will likely never make law. But let's just soak in this for a minute. The two ConservaDems who voted against the budget on the grounds of fiscal responsibility voted to give a handout to families with estates over $7 million dollars. Tremayne at Open Left has a chart showing just exactly who this tax policy would affect.

Hard to see it, but those with annual incomes in the millions are represented by the vertical red line on the left and those making less than a million (i.e., almost everyone) are the horizontal red line on the bottom. Lincoln and Kyl are concerned about the people on the vertical red line.

So are Bayh and Nelson, America's worst people.

The Problem Of The Senate

Last week saw a paroxysm of opposition to Barack Obama's budget plan from leading Senate Democrats. Evan Bayh formed his moderate working group, and Kent Conrad whittled down the budget proposal (in many respects by reinstating helpful budget fictions that make the deficit look smaller). And opposition to the Administration-supported cram-down proposal may scuttle that piece of the housing bill.

Jonathan Chait senses a pattern.

The last Democrat who held the White House, Bill Clinton, saw the core of his domestic agenda come to ruin, his political support collapse, and his failure spawn a massive Republican resurgence that made progressive reform impossible for a decade to come. The Democrat who last held the White House before that, Jimmy Carter, saw the exact same thing happen to him [...]

George W. Bush came to office having lost the popular vote, with only 50 Republicans in the Senate. After his disputed election, pundits insisted Bush would have to scale back his proposed massive tax cuts for the rich. Instead, Bush managed to enact several rounds of tax cuts that substantially exceeded those in his campaign platform, along with two war resolutions, a Medicare prescription drug benefit designed to maximize profits for the health care industry, energy legislation, education reform, and sundry other items. Whatever the substantive merits of this agenda, its passage represented an impressive feat of political leverage, accomplished through near-total partisan discipline.

Obama has come into office having won the popular vote by seven percentage points, along with a 79-seat edge in the House, a 17-seat edge in the Senate, and massive public demand for change. But it's already clear he is receiving less, not more, deference from his own party. Democrats have treated Obama with studied diffidence, both in their support for the substance of his agenda and (more importantly) their willingness to support it procedurally.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, no co-equal branch of government SHOULD be a rubber-stamp (certainly the Hastert/DeLay/Frist Congress under George W. Bush shouldn't be emulated), and Congress has every right to carry out their legislative agenda under their own terms. At the same time, the endless whining from Democratic "moderates" to modify the Obama agenda, not out of any principle or belief that a middle course makes the most sense from a policy standpoint, but because they have been seduced by the high Broderist idea that the middle distance between two points is a virtuous end in itself, is both grating and irresponsible. The moderates use selective outrage - we must close the deficit, but we can't cap subsidies to wealthy agricultural interests to save money, just to use one example - to frustrate progress and make recovery more difficult.

However, Ezra Klein argues that the peculiar structures of the Senate are a far greater obstacle than the glory-seeking Senate moderates:

Which isn't really to argue with the substance of Jon's article: The Senate is a broken branch. If we don't properly respond to the financial crisis or avert the crushing blow of rising health costs or slow the advance of catastrophic climate change, it will be because the institution is no longer capable of governance. But that is not, as Chait would have it, a purely Democratic problem. It's an institutional issue. The local obsessions that Chait attaches to Conrad and Nelson are similarly prevalent among Republican Senators. The tremendous power of swing senators is as undeniable and capricious when Republicans rule as when Democrats hold power. The allure of obstruction is an compelling to minority Democrats as minority Republicans (the early Bush accomplishments were actually more bipartisan than Obama's, though that was because Democrats controlled the chamber rather than because Bush was the gracious and cooperative type).

I don't argue this point to be churlish. You can understand the problems of the Senate in two ways. The first is that it's a problem of party discipline. The second is that it's a problem of rules. If you think it's the first, the answer is to put resources and effort into mounting a primary challenge against Ben Nelson. If you think it's the second, then the answer may be to put time and energy into repealing the Byrd Rule, or lowering the filibuster limit, or making it easier to replace chairman, or otherwise transforming the structural incentives that makes legislative success such a delicate and unlikely outcome and thus allows individual Senators to exert so much control over it. Moreover, if you think it's the second, you can actually make something of a bipartisan argument, rather than a purely partisan one. The Senate, as currently composed, doesn't work for Republicans any better than it works for Democrats. And it really doesn't work for the country. And that's probably an easier argument than trying to convince Nebraskans that Ben Nelson's incredible power isn't good for them.

We have already seen and may yet see more progress from this Congress - the ConservaDem backlash to using budget reconciliation, for example, may just be a pose to force Republican compliance. But I think I lean more toward this being a structural problem requiring structural solutions, particularly in the Senate. The country really cannot afford a set of rules that tilt so heavily in favor of the status quo, especially in this time of profound challenges. In fact, the resultant reaction we've seen continually by the executive branch is to usurp the power of the Congress in the name of getting something done, which is unadvisable. Only by empowering Congress to actually act can we really have equal branches of government.

Back Off So I Have Room To Stick The Knife In

Harry Reid wants all these liberal groups with their ideas and principles to just take it down a notch.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that liberal groups targeting moderate Democrats with ads should back off, saying pressure from the left wing of his party won't be helpful to enacting legislation.

"I think it's very unwise and not helpful," Reid said Friday morning. "These groups should leave them alone. It’s not helpful to me. It’s not helpful to the Democratic Caucus.”

Reid, who said he hadn’t seen or heard the ads, added that "most of [the groups] run very few ads — they only to do it to get a little press on it."

In one respect, Reid is fulfilling his traditional role. The left pushes on the ConservaDems, and the Majority Leader comes to the rescue of the members of his caucus, and the ConservaDems thank him. Thusly bonds are made. Reid won't stop the calls to Senate offices, especially when the likes of Ben Nelson are vowing to vote asking the budget if it includes reconciliation.

In another respect, I have to agree with David Waldman.

But the thing is, you really need to add your two points together to get to something meaningful about how things are going in the Senate. There really are people who only join these groups so that they can say they're moderate. That's true. There's a lot of gaming of the system going on. And at the same time, you really don't like being told it's "my way or no way." No one does.

But just as there are people in those "moderate" groups who aren't really all that "moderate," it's also true that some of the people who say they're "moderate" really are people on the extremes, who are saying to you "it's only my way or no way."

That's the reason -- the only reason, really -- that voting blocs like Evan Bayh's exist. They're formed precisely so that they can use their numbers to say to you, ultimately, that "it's only my way or no way." The power of a voting bloc lies in its ability to deliver or withhold its votes. And as you know, there are only two ways to vote in the Senate. Further, because there's no way to set up a vote in the Senate such that you get to vote all at once for one or the other of two competing proposals, every single vote is really essentially a choice between "only my way or no way." Yes, the very next vote can be on whether or not to adopt some other, compromise way. But each vote, taken by itself, is "this way or nothing," and a no vote is a vote for nothing. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. But a no is a no.

That being the case, it's worth noting -- as I'm sure you do in your own internal dialogue -- that Evan Bayh's gang is all about "my way or no way." And that reveals them for what they are. (When and if they ever decide to actually hang together as a group, that is.) "Moderate" may be the label they're hoping people will allow them to cling to, but by your definition, they're people on the extremes.

In other words, Reid spends a lot of time and effort here calling out those on the left for making his life difficult, but precious little for those Democrats on the right who are... um, making his life difficult. Maybe that happens internally, but given this latest outrage, I think we can conclude that the Majority Leader believes exactly as the Evan Bayhs of the world believe.

Senate Majority Leader Reid said today he would drop a cram-down provision from a House-passed banking bill if the language threatened to keep the Senate from passing the overall bill. The provision would allow a bankruptcy judge to reduce a homeowner's mortgage principal. "If we can't get the votes for that, and I am hopeful we can -- I am semiconfident we can -- then what I'll do is take that off [the bill] and do the other banking provisions," Reid said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast.

Harry Reid doesn't want liberals to back off so he can manage his caucus without intrusion - he wants them to back off so, you know, they back off, without criticizing the decisions for which he is ultimately responsible. Deep-sixing cramdown is just the beginning, if progressives fail to hold their leaders accountable. Reid just made the entire argument for why these calls and advertisements have to go forward - because he will do nothing worthwhile without pressure.

Stop Picking On Us, We Don't Stand For Anything

Interesting move here by Evan Bayh, to deflect criticism from his role as chief obstructionist to the Obama agenda: claim that you don't have a single core principle:

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) is also unhappy with the friendly fire. Bayh…found himself targeted by an ad accusing him of “standing in the way of President Obama’s reforms.” “We literally have no agenda,” Bayh shot back. “How can they be threatened by a group that has taken no policy positions?”

Bayh’s claim that his group has no agenda is hard to believe. Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal explained yesterday, the group’s “stated goal is to…protect business interests.” Even before the group was officially formed, their efforts dampened a number of progressive policy proposals and they clearly have aspirations to expand their portfolio:

• Shrinking Economic Recovery: The group’s first significant “success” was “paring down the more than $900 billion economic stimulus bill to $787 billion,” reducing the government’s ability to spur economic recovery quickly. [Roll Call, 3/12/2009]

• Preserving The Bush Tax Cuts: Regarding Obama’s plan to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, Bayh said, “I do think that before we raise revenue, we first should look to see if there are ways we can cut back on spending.” [Politico, 3/3/2009]

• Delaying Cap-and-Trade: Bayh coaltion member, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), explained that the group might “push for a more lenient phase-in period for a cap-and-trade system and revenue-raising offsets to pay for expensive mandates.” [CQ Politics, 3/9/2009]

• Weakening Bankruptcy Protection: Centrist Democrats “forced changes to a House bill that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages, ensuring that the legislation better reflected the concerns of the financial-services industry.” [WSJ, 3/25/09]

If Bayh wants to disclaim all those "successes," maybe he can stop going on talk shows and receiving High Broderist love from his media fans. After all, he has literally no agenda.

Maybe Bayh can tell his own constituents that he has no agenda. Organizing for America is rounding up people to make calls to residents inside Indiana and other states to dog these Blue Dogs. Campaign for America's Future is doing the same thing. Bayh and his pals can play their inside game but they'll get some outside pressure, too.

Conservatives in both parties are assailing the president’s budget. Republicans seem virtually united in staking their lot with hoping that Obama fails. Having doubled the national debt under Bush when the economy was growing, they are now railing at Obama for threatening to “bankrupt the country.”

This is like a gambling addict squandering the family fortune in a Las Vegas blowout, and scolding his wife for borrowing money to keep the kids in college.

Now conservaDems are pushing to cut back needed investments, often to protect the same entrenched corporate interests.
It is vital that legislators in both parties hear from their constituents, and not just their contributors, so they get the message loud and clear: We have given the president a mandate for change and we want him to succeed. We expect you to support him or get out of the way.

The President told the nation exactly why Congress must pass his budget: "this budget is inseparable from this recovery, because it is what lays the foundation for a secure and lasting prosperity."

Our economy simply cannot recover without President Obama's bold investments in affordable health care, clean energy and quality education.

Click here to call Congress, especially if you're in Indiana. And watch this latest TV ad from Organizing for America. ConservaDems need to hear from the people who elected them.



...MoveOn is also mobilizing.

The (Blue Dog) Owls Are Not What They Seem

You have to be something of a Kremlinologist to decipher the true meaning of Senate Democratic statements these days. In all of these matters it helps to focus on actions. For example, Kent Conrad (D-ND). As the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, he has been the most vocal about the widening deficit, the new CBO scoring showing that deficit widening even further, and how President Obama's plans are simply too ambitious for words. Sounds like the old fiscal responsibility thing, right? Well, the actual budget summary from Conrad is entitled "Laying Foundation for Long-Term Economic Security With Investments in Energy, Education, and Health Care," and the proposals do track the President's major long-term goals. And the supposed "cost-savings" in his budget plan are mainly derived from a bunch of gimmicks.

...someone who was genuinely alarmed by the fact that the CBO scored Obama’s plans as leading to large deficits in the final years of his ten year budget would not have “solved” this problem by abandoning Obama’s ten-year budget window switching to a five-year window. Similarly, re-inserting the “let’s pretend will use the AMT to raise taxes on the upper-middle class and then not actually do that” approach to budgeting, though now a time-honored trick of the Bush years, is not an actual deficit reduction measure.

Long story short, Senator Conrad cares about the deficit and is taking some action to make it smaller. But he also cares a great deal about being seen as a deficit hawk, the kind of guy who’s not afraid to take an axe to the president’s proposals. And in this instance the administration rather smartly eschewed a lot of this kind of pain free “virtual” deficit reduction, thus making it possible for interested Senators to deploy favored accounting patches on their own initiative and take credit for more reduction than they actually produced.

The White House seems to have no problem with the changes made, because the changes for the most part are made of air. And in some sense, Conrad actually enhanced the prospect of health care reform, by offering revenue-neutral space for a reform fund and allowing that particular budget item to be scored on a 10-year timeline, so that the savings in the later years can allow for an up-front deficit. And while Conrad deleted reconciliation for health care and energy proposals, because they exist (at least for health care) in the House version, they can be imported at a later date, meaning the threat can still be held over the heads of Republicans.

So Conrad appears to me to be someone who wants to appear like a centrist while facilitating the needs of a progressive budget, in direct contrast to Evan Bayh, Tom Carper and Blanche Lincoln, who want to appear like supporters of the President while obstructing and hacking up his agenda:

We formed our working group because we recognize both the difficulty and the urgency of accomplishing a huge and ambitious agenda. We must act quickly and decisively to repair our financial markets and start to turn the economy around. In addition, we believe that President Obama is correct when he says that we cannot afford to wait any longer to fix health care and transition to a clean-energy economy.

These are titanic and complicated tasks, and we believe that many worthwhile policy solutions can be found in the practical center -- ideas that also have the benefit of appealing to vast segments of the American electorate. Unfortunately, the Republican leadership has basically decided to stay on the sidelines to let the Democrats carry the load of reform alone.

As moderate leaders, it is not our intent to water down the president's agenda. We intend to strengthen and sustain it. Moderation is not a mathematical process of finding the center for its own sake. Practical solutions are practical because they offer our best chance to make a difference in people's lives today without forcing our children to pick up the tab tomorrow.

The stakes are too high for Democrats to fear a policy debate. Such debates produce better legislation. On nearly all important votes, a supermajority of 60 senators will be needed to pass legislation. Without Democratic moderates working to find common ground with reasonable Republicans, the president's agenda could well be filibustered into oblivion.

It's really not possible to take these people seriously. The whole "practical solutions are great because they are practical" part really gives you the sense of who you're dealing with here. They live in a magical pony and fairy land where they, only they, can bring the nation together, despite all evidence to the contrary, by just clicking their heels and magically finding those "reasonable" Republican votes for anything but the most watered-down policy. They are also very worried that if Obama passes the agenda on which he ran, moderates who voted for him will be very upset and will throw Democrats out of office in 2010. That's really their response. And none of them, just like their partner in crime Susan Collins can actually name anything they'd cut, or explain why a 51-vote majority is undemocratic:

"I'm very concerned that the levels of debt that the president's budget would entail are simply unsustainable and would pose a significant threat to the health of our economy," said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who plays a pivotal role in Senate negotiations. "I've had conversations with several centrist Democrats who have exactly the same concerns I do."

Well, what would you cut? "One of the areas I would look at are the huge agricultural subsidies," she said. Those farm payments are one of the few cuts Obama has already proposed, which Collins added was "to his credit."

Anything else? "I thought I did pretty well coming up with one right off the top of my head," she said [...]

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said she leans no on Obama's budget because of its size but is open to being convinced. She's not looking forward to cutting it, however. "That's always the problem. How to cut back and what to cut back," she said.

Yet the main change that Landrieu would like to see highlights the political contradiction at work. Tax hikes on independent oil and gas producers, many of whom operate in the Gulf, she said, are a "non-starter." Removing that tax hike, though, increases the deficit [...]

"Reconciliation should not be used to impose a major policy change. It's unfair to those who hold a minority view," Collins added.

Isn't that undemocratic? Collins was asked why she and a handful of senators should wield so much power over the nation's policy.

"I don't really think I have all that much power but I'm glad you think so," she said, laughing.

"I don't think it has anything to do with the power structure of moderates," she added. "People want to see healthcare reform, want to see us deal with major issues, but not in an undemocratic fashion. I think people want to see fuller debate and deliberation and more involvement by the minority."

But isn't the need for 60 votes undemocratic? Didn't the nation have a full debate, followed by an election in which people voted for major change?

"I disagree totally with that," said Collins. "I do not believe the American people voted to short circuit debate and prevent people with a minority view on both sides of the aisle from having the ability to amend a bill."

Behold the reasonable, responsible moderates who will save us from this crisis and return America to glory again.

Pardon me while I go throw myself in the ocean.

And Now, Put Your Hands Together...

Ladies and gentlemen, here they are, your Senate moderates who will take a Democratic mandate and water it down to ensure a lack of progress and continued alienation in the electorate! At forward, from Indiana, the captain, Senator Evan Bayh!

“The group’s goal is to work with the Senate leadership and the new administration to craft common-sense solutions to urgent national problems,” Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), a co-founder, said in a press release from the group.

At the swing positions, from the First State and the Deep South...

Along with Bayh, the group also is headed by Sens. Tom Carper (Del.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.).

And rounding out this group of far-shooting low achievers...

Other members of the group are Sens. Mark Udall (Colo.), Michael Bennet (Colo.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Joe Lieberman (Conn.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Ben Nelson (Neb.) , Bill Nelson (Fla.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) and Mark Warner (Va.).

Give it up for your Moderate Dems Working Group!!!!

Now, Evan Bayh has put together umpteen moderate groups over the past several years. They always fall apart due to a lack of cohesion. In short, nobody votes as a bloc. Heck, three or four additional Senators who attended meetings of this group refused to identify with it. But that's probably not the point of this working group. Bayh just wants to be SEEN as leading something, so the fawning DC establishment can glorify him, so press reports back in Indiana can tout him, so he can be viewed as a PLAYER. I mean, these progressive policies aren't going to obstruct themselves.

The problem is that Indianans live outside of Washington, DC, and while Bayh is locally popular, so is the President. And the public face of obstructing his agenda is bound to draw some fire.

Progressive groups have pressured Republican lawmakers to support President Obama's economic agenda since he first announced his stimulus intentions before the new year; now the pressure is on Blue Dog Democrats.

Liberal activist group USAction will air TV ads pressuring four Blue Dog Democrats on the House Budget Committee to support President Obama's budget, the group announced today. It also started robocalls targeting the members last week. The members are Reps. Marion Berry (AK), Allen Boyd (FL), Charlie Melancon (LA), and Chet Edwards (TX).

Evan Bayh, incidentally, runs for re-election in 2010. Just sayin'.

Full Speed Ahead On The Budget

The Administration has obviously sensed discomfort among Blue Dogs and moderate squishes who think the change election of 2008 actually meant that nothing should change. So starting yesterday, we are seeing a full court press on getting his budget proposal passed. This is safe ground for President Obama, where he and the majority of the public are on the same side. And he's employing a multi-pronged attack:

During an appearance on Tuesday at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Mr. Obama took a swipe at Republican critics of his $3.6 trillion budget and its agenda for health care, energy, taxes and economic recovery.

“If there are members of Congress who object to specific policies and proposals in this budget, then I ask them to be ready and willing to propose constructive, alternative solutions,” Mr. Obama said. “ ‘Just say no’ is the right advice to give your teenagers about drugs. It is not an acceptable response to whatever economic policy is proposed by the other party.”

The strong words were the latest in a push that has come to resemble elements of the two-year-long presidential campaign. Mr. Obama may hold his second prime-time news conference as president, perhaps as early as next week, to talk up the budget.

On Wednesday and Thursday, he is taking his budget show on the road to California, where he will hold two town-hall-style meetings and will even try to talk about the economy on Thursday on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

Supporters of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign have been receiving a barrage of e-mail urging them to call their Congressional representatives to voice support of Mr. Obama’s economic recovery plans.

In particular, Organizing for America is really taking an active role. They have a call Congress tool with an example script for those calls, and today they released a message from Obama himself urging people to either call Congress or participate in a canvass for the budget this weekend. And the messaging is right - that we cannot use the current crisis as an excuse to ignore the long-term challenge in our economy, that investing in the future will ensure that a crisis like this does not happen again. It's the post-bubble economic strategy.

What Congress really hates is the proposed use of budget reconciliation to evade the filibuster. Republicans like filibusters because they get a piece of the action. Moderate Democrats like filibusters because they hate being held accountable for their votes, and with only 50 needed they have to side with Obama and the people or the anti-progressive forces of obstruction. Peter Orszag makes a good case for reconciliation, which more than anything is a neogtiating tactic.

Orszag said he wouldn't rule it out, however. The legislative tactic is being considered to push through Obama's global warming and health care programs, and perhaps his proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy.

"We'd like to avoid it if possible," Orszag told reporters at a luncheon in Washington. "But we're not taking it off the table." [...]

There is plenty of historical precedent of using it by both parties, including Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who used it force through big tax cuts.

"Pretty much every major piece of budget legislation going back to April 1981, April '82, April 1990, April 1993, the 1990 act, the 2001 tax legislation, they were all done through reconciliation. Yet somehow this is being presented as an unusual thing," Orszag said.

"The historical norm as opposed to the exception is for a major piece of budget legislation to move through reconciliation."

Judd Gregg is whining about it, calling it "running over the minority." I would term it more as "giving the people what they want," but YMMV. Of course, Evan Bayh and his new Obstructionist caucus would be hostile to this tactic, but the members of it aren't even willing to admit their membership, so that seems less than cohesive.

I would be more excited about this if it wasn't coming on the same week as the AIG mess that represents a real threat to the Obama agenda. If they manage to take care of that, the White House has a real opportunity here to pummel Senate Democrats into acceptance.

Not A Good Time To Shut Down The Government

I'm struggling to find the explanation for why Democrats are aiding an abetting a potential government shutdown. Today Congress passed a continuing resolution to avoid this, but the threat remains. This is all over earmarks, about 2% of the bill, for a measure that Republicans and Democrats created together, last year. And given the current state of the economy, there's no such thing as wasteful spending if it means a job is created.

Even if there is principled opposition, there's no reason to vote against cloture on the part of Dems like Russ Feingold or Evan Bayh. If they don't like the final bill, they can vote against it. There's no reason to hold up the government's business by engaging in obstructionism.

Idiots.

The Scolds Never Stop

John McCain had another "old man yells at cloud" moment yesterday, complaining about earmarks in last year's spending bill, and trying to eliminate all of them. His effort lost on a bipartisan basis, probably because this is last year's spending needed to keep the government running, a shutdown at this point would be completely counter to economic fiscal stimulus, earmarks are 2% of the total bill and half of them were inserted by Republicans, including $76 million from Thad Cochran (R-MS), the overall leader.

However, this hasn't stopped the Democratic worry warts to fret about spending, at a time when there's practically no other economic activity other than that coming from the federal government.

Moderate and conservative Democrats in the Senate are starting to choke over the massive spending and tax increases in President Barack Obama’s budget plans and have begun plotting to increase their influence over the agenda of a president who is turning out to be much more liberal than they are.

A group of 14 Senate Democrats and one independent huddled behind closed doors on Tuesday, discussing how centrists in that chamber can assert more leverage on the major policy debates that will dominate this Congress [...]

Asked when he’d reach his breaking point, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, said: “Right now. I’m concerned about the amount that’s being offered in [Obama’s] budget.”

Another attendee, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), said she expected the newly formed caucus to shape Obama’s budget proposal as it moves through Congress.

“We want to give the president a chance, but our concern is going to be on the budget, looking forward,” Landrieu said. She added that she agrees with Obama that there needs to be “fundamental change” in fiscal policy, but she said “we do have to keep our eye on the long term, on intermediate and long-term fiscal responsibility.”

Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who assembled Tuesday’s skull session, added that he was “very concerned” about Washington’s level of spending, especially in a $410 billion “omnibus” spending bill to fund the government until the start of a new fiscal year in October.

As for the tax increases on high-income earners called for in Obama’s plan, Bayh said, “I do think that before we raise revenue, we first should look to see if there are ways we can cut back on spending.”

“The American people and businesses are tightening their belts,” Bayh added. “I think we need to show that the government can economize as well.”

Ladies an gentlemen, your almost-Vice President, Evan Bayh.

Once again, the path for a Democratic President must go through Democratic fiscal responsibility scolds. And this is coming in the middle of a Great Recession, where investment is non-existent, trade is stalled, and consumer spending isn't going anywhere, meaning that ONLY GOVERNMENT IS SPENDING. Cutting that spending translates directly into losing thousands of jobs. That's reality for the next year or so.

If anything, Obama is being modest in his plans. And he is paying for the big investments in his budget by making the tax code more progressive and fair. And that's the reality of the fiscal scolds - they want to protect the status quo for their buddies and contributors. They would rather the 30-year cycle of radical conservative economic policy continues unabated. Obama's budget is a a threat to the DC estabishment that is best represented by these "moderates."

It was his boldest acknowledgment yet of what is slowly becoming clear to the rest of us: That his proposals represent such a dramatic reversal from the course the nation has been following over the last eight years -- and even the last three decades -- that they will inevitably face intense resistance from Washington's traditional power centers [...]

It's worth revisiting Obama's explanation of "how we arrived at this moment" from that joint address:

"The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight. Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank. We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy, yet we import more oil today than ever before. The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform. Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for.

"And though all of these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before. In other words, we have lived through an era where too often short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity, where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election.

"A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations... were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day."

The inevitable conclusion here is that establishment Washington is complicit in what went wrong. That includes all the people in positions of power who accepted what was happening as simply politics as usual -- even as the country was slowly but inevitably headed to that day of reckoning.

After all, since the Reagan era, even mainstream Democratic leaders have internalized the trickle-down, free-market, small-government mentality which Obama now blames for our woes. Few in the Democratic party -- or the mainstream media -- did much more than watch as the economic playing field tilted further and further to the advantage of the rich.

And yes, it's true that many of Obama's initiatives could well be described as pent-up Democratic goals. But you might also call them nearly-forgotten goals, as far as the current batch of Democratic leaders is concerned. Even when they controlled Congress, they failed to block budgets that turned out to be blueprints for disaster. And they either didn't fight for their principles or flinched in a pinch. I described some of their capitulations to former president George W. Bush in this December 2007 column. These very same leaders may well be motivated to -- at least -- complicate or modify Obama's proposals to validate their own previous inaction.

Exactly, I don't remember Evan Bayh or Ben Nelson or any of these scolds raising an eyebrow to any of the radically destructive policies the Bush Administration trafficked in on a daily basis. It's only with a Democratic President attempting to lead on Democratic principles that their spines stiffen.

Fortunately, Obama remains extremely popular, and he has shown an growing aptitude for this kind of conflict. However, his favorability is favored more than his policies at this point. I'm not sure if Republicans will get their act together to exploit this, but they can certainly get a boost from these "moderates" to revive their political fortunes.

Evan Bayh: Dupe

I actually watched this last night, and it was pathetic:

BAYH: I don't think this is about Joe Lieberman, Rachel. I think this is about maximizing our chances of making the changes that we need in America, maximizing the chances that President-elect Obama will meet those expectations you referred to by addressing the challenges that we face that you also reported on just a few moments ago.

And let me explain to you what I mean. If this was just about Joe Lieberman and the things he said in the campaign, well, I'd say we'll let it go. I mean, if people want to settle scores, fine. I mean, he's a big guy, he can live with the consequences of his actions.

But one of two things will be likely to happen if we were to kick him out of his chairmanship. No. 1, he might very well decide to just resign from the Senate. You know, he probably would not want to be a person without a home, wandering the hallways without any influence of any kind. And Connecticut has a Republican governor, who would appoint a pure Republican to that seat, who would vote against the wishes of the president-elect and the Democratic caucus, you know, the vast, vast majority of the time. That's No. 1.

No. 2, Lieberman, Joe Lieberman might decide to stay and be embittered. And what would happen there would be from time to time, we have close votes. You've been reporting on the Alaska race and the Minnesota race and the Georgia race. We could be at 58, 59, maybe even 60 votes. Every two or three or four months, there's going to be a critically important vote, very close, every vote will count. And it might come down to one vote.

Now, if Senator Lieberman has a strong view, he'll vote his conscience, but if he's conflicted, frankly, you know, doesn't really
know what to do, and we've exacted revenge on him, I suspect we could probably expect the same in return. That's really not where we want to go. Let's see if we can move this in a better direction.

And the final thing I'd say is, if he does retain his chairmanship, we still exert oversight over him and control over him. He doesn't have the ability to just do whatever he wants. The caucus still has the right to remove him from that position at any time if he starts going off on some kind of tangent.

Shorter Evan Bayh: we're a-feared of Droopy Dog!

If Senate Dems can't defend themselves, I really don't see why I should expend any effort helping to defend them. The danger of Lieberman at Homeland Security, as I see it, is that he'll play "fun with subpoenas" on the Obama Administration. Well, let him. Obama doesn't seem too concerned with it, so why should I be? And under no circumstances should Lieberman be tossed after given the gavel if he does anything untoward. Senate Dems will have had their chance, and stifling Joe after the fact would just be the same instance of using the Congress as a human shield for executive power, much as the Hastert/Frist Congress did from 2001-2006. In fact there's a Constitutional argument to be made that at least a confrontational Joe would be a check on the executive. It'll all be frivolous and based on faulty logic, but at this point any check might be beneficial.

As for appeasing him (Neville Chamberlains!) because he might go ahead and vote against the party, if I'm a sanctimonious windbag like Joe Lieberman I'm probably already embittered by having to fight for my chairmanship, so whether I get to keep it or not I'm going to be a thorn in the side of the Democrats. After all, it's in my nature. And furthermore, important legislation rarely hangs on one vote, and each victory in these remaining races makes Joe that much more irrelevant.

I could tell you to call your Senators but I'm not really interested in helping dupes.

Resisting Evan Bayh Puns...

When I first heard all the speculation around Evan Bayh as a Vice-Presidential pick I thought that was a sure bet, given the Obama campaign's button-down approach, that he wouldn't be selected. But many in the DC establishment are ferociously pushing him as a choice, and Steve Clemons' very informed take leads me to believe that the option is credible.

Word has reached me that at Barack Obama's Hawaii retreat, Evan Bayh's chances to find himself the next Democratic VP candidate have moved to better than 50/50.

The conflict between Georgia and Russia has been one of several factors that has helped boost his status. Bayh's support of the Iraq War and general hawkishness are seen by some as a balance to Obama's call for a new and different kind of global engagement strategy that McCain's followers consider naive.

That would be such a crucial mistake. Bayh's "hawkishness" led him to co-chair the neocon "Committee to Liberate Iraq" in 1998, an astonishing lapse in judgment that gave credibility to President Bush to start his illegal and unnecessary war in 2003. Look who else was involved with it, beyond the usual neocon suspects like Bill Kristol and foreign agent lobbyist Randy Scheunemann:

The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI) is pleased to welcome Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) as an Honorary Co-Chairman. Bayh becomes the third U.S. Senator to join the committee after Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced their participation on January 28.

It could be, then, that 3/4 of the major party Presidential tickets, in a time of failed neoconservative policies worldwide, would have chaired this committee.

Bayh has renounced his Iraq vote. And Nate Silver considers him to be about as liberal as he can be given that he represents Indiana. But I agree with Tom Andrews - the neocon embrace in 1998 is a but much.

“He was not only wrong, he was aggressively wrong,” said Tom Andrews, national director of the Win Without War coalition, referring to Mr. Bayh. “In my view, he would contradict if not undermine the Obama message of change, turning a new page on foreign policy and national security.”

Exactly. Bayh is a milquetoast centrist who wouldn't upset the establishment and would recede into the background and not compete with the more charismatic top of the ticket. But as Swopa notes, he'd be a terrible President, and after all that's the point of the selection. And he would send a very loud message to the Democratic elites that they're back in charge and Obama will fall right in line.

I'm part of the Facebook group opposing Evan Bayh. You should join it too. Ari Melber has more in the Windy.

UPDATE: Al From:

"The antiwar people cannot define the Democratic Party," said Al From, a founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, of which Mr. Bayh was chairman for four years. "I think Evan’s real strength is you get someone on the ticket who has a record of being strong on national security, and that is a very important quality to have."

"Strong on national security" should actually read "wrong on the biggest foreign policy issue of his lifetime." I hope the NYT will make a correction.

UPDATE II: Bayh is STILL wrong. From Ari Melber's piece, this is the Indiana Senator about a year ago:

You just hope that we haven't soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle. That would be tragic, because Iran is a grave threat. They're everything we thought Iraq was but wasn't. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they've threatened us, too.

Boy, he sure learned his lesson, right?

Democrats Fight At The Iraq Hearings

As the Petraeus/Crocker hearings shift to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden is doing a great job, hammering the President's non-strategy on Iraq and the costs to prestige, operational capacity, the fight against terrorism, lives and treasure. Actually, several Democrats have had fine performances today, and I wanted to highlight some of them from the Armed Services Committee session.

• Bill Nelson (D-FL) gets at the heart of the "political reconciliation" question, hitting the familiar tactic that we've seen by the Administration of highlighting initial votes passing pieces of legislation without mentioning that they never get signed into law or implemented. Worse, laws like the de-Baathification statute are being used to target Sunnis and increase sectarian tensions.

"It is with a great deal of respect and deference to you," Nelson said, that he pressed the issue: the point of the surge was to create political reconciliation. "Has political reconciliation happened?"

Petraeus: "As the Ambassador laid out, there has been agreement among different political parties on a number of pieces of important reconciliation laws, if you will, that represent reconciliation... [laws on] de-Ba'athification, a provincial powers law, a pensions reform bill..."

But have the laws been implemented?

Petraeus: I believe the pensions law is in the process of being implemented. De-Ba'athification --"

Nelson wondered: To the extent of bringing about political reconciliation "that is the goal in the first place?"

Petraeus kicked it over to Crocker.

This is a common "kick-the-can" tactic to prove some sort of ephemeral success of the surge, and I'm glad Nelson called it out.

• Claire McCaskill (D-MO) bluntly stated that Sadr won the battle for Basra, which is obviously true despite Ryan Crocker's spinning. This was buttressed by today's events, as the religious leadership in the country lined up behind Sadr, which is a complete thumb in the eye of Maliki and his call for the Mahdi Army to be disbanded.

• Evan Byah (D-IN) - yes, Evan frickin' Bayh - did a nice job of discussing the intelligence community's assessment that our presence in Iraq is actually creating more terrorists than we are defeating there. And there was this great moment:

He also wins huge plaudits from me for mentioning, in response to something Ambassador Crocker said, that "I would only caution us not to take our marching orders from Osama bin Laden."

Exactly so. It's really lunatic of hawks to keep citing OBL's desire to fight us in Iraq as a reason for us to fight him in Iraq. He likes the fight in Iraq because it's favorable terrain for his cause and his propaganda and lets him pose as the defender of the Arab world against American domination. They're suggesting we act like bulls running at the toreador's cape.

• I mentioned Jack Reed's (D-RI) questioning before, but he pressed Ambassador Crocker on a central point - that Iran is supporting all kinds of groups in Iraq, not just those "special groups" but also our "friends" in Maliki's Army like the Badr Brigade and the Dawa Party.

• Jim Webb noted as a side comment that the Anbar Awakening began well before the surge. That's something that always gets lost.

• Even Huckleberry Graham missed a layup, asking Gen. Petraeus if we could get a brigade a month out of Iraq, expecting the answer no, and Petraeus replied "It clearly would depend on the conditions at that time... that might be doable." Whoops.

I don't expect that these key facets of the crumbling of the Bush Iraq strategy will get much notice - that Petraeus and Crocker have to answer these questions instead of the policymaker-in-chief ensures that he is shielded from the consequences of his actions. But it's important to note that many Democrats are fighting to get out the truth about Iraq, and to change the debate from whether or not "we're winning" and whether our continued presence in Iraq makes sense for our economic and national security.