By Judith Gayle | Political Waves (the Planet Waves politics blog)
During the Massachusetts special election, and punctuated during Obama’s State of the Union, the American public learned something it didn’t know — that it takes 60 votes to pass a bill through the Senate. A Pew Poll found that only 26 percent of those questioned knew it took such a majority to break a filibuster threat, now used as a de facto tactic by the minority party.
That includes the use of something called the “blanket hold.” This is obstruction taken to an art form. According to the White House blog, “The Senate cast more votes to break filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and ’60s combined, making it nearly impossible to come to agreement on key legislation.”
We now have an example of the blanket hold in the demands of Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, who is standing in the way of Obama’s appointments until he gets billions in pork-barrel spending to fund his pet projects. According to Michael Keegan, president of People for the American Way, Shelby’s hold “… effectively blocks votes on more than 70 executive branch nominees, including officials in the Army, Air Force, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and Department of State.” Some 2000 appointments of ambassadors, federal judges, and regulatory and law enforcement officials must be signed off in the Senate.
Keegan’s comment highlights the unyielding belligerence of the the GOP, who tout themselves the party most attuned to national security yet have shown no hesitation in leaving these necessary posts hanging for the first year of Obama’s presidency. Indeed, Shelby is citing his pork spending as critical to security, as it involves military contracts dear to his state. The administration has taken the heat for being ineffective while the Republicans have obstructed not only his staffing requirements, but bill after bill designed to ease the burden of the average American.
The public has remained clueless about the inner workings of the legislative branch until recently and we can only hope that this dust-up with Shelby will open their eyes to a process that is less legislative give and take than a gridlock that smells more like holding competent governance for ransom. This also points to the distressing ability of one legislator to hold progress at bay; we watched that play out during the summer with people like Olympia Snowe and Max Baucus effectively slowing healthcare negotiations to a crawl.
There’s a movement afoot encouraging Harry Reid to call the ‘Pub bluff and require them to act on their cloture threats — it would be interesting to watch one of the Republican senators on C-Span, standing in place for hours, reading from their Aunt Martha’s collection of recipes or the like — and give us a real civics lesson. I doubt they would be as sympathetic to the public eye as Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, especially since the bills being threatened are most often those that assist the little guy in this economic downturn. Perhaps such political pageantry would open a few minds.
Or not. The righty blogs are of one mind in seeing Shelby’s demands as a climate change for Republican dominance and a mighty blow against a ‘socialist’ agenda. The senator from Alabama may be playing to this questionable sense of euphoria and we’ll see more of this aggressive posture as a new jobs stimulus is considered. The same players — Snowe and Baucus — are mulling the particulars, which will now require more tax giveaways to corporations to get the reluctant GOP on board than were necessary before the Dems lost their supermajority.
Since the Congress is under fire to move quickly on so many important issues, it’s unlikely Reid will approve a three-day filibuster but there’s every possibility that Obama will consider recess appointments to staff the more vital positions. You may remember Bush using same to install John Bolton as controversial ambassador to the United Nations.
In the ‘all politics is local’ category, I’d like to see the national press pick up some of the inner workings of this Alabama pork case, but that’s unlikely. Shelby is a Foghorn Leghorn look-alike, thickly invested in the military industrial complex. It’s Alabama’s judgeships that lead to darker corners, however. This snip touches on the problem.
Alabama Democrats have been alarmed for months because the Obama administration has allowed Shelby and U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to block two highly regarded nominees — Michel Nicrosi and Joseph Van Heest — for the U.S. attorney position in Montgomery, Alabama. The delay means that Bush appointee Leura Canary, who oversaw the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, remains in office more than a year after Obama became president.
This story has threads that tangle all these players in the Bush/Rove attorney scandal that exposed the Department of Justice as a partisan leg of the the Republican party, resulting in the questionable prosecution of Democratic Governor Don Siegelman. You can remind yourself of the details here.
If the public wants a good look at the dysfunction of our system, Shelby is case in point. He’s pretty arrogant for someone with questionable business alliances with the providers of his earmark proposals, but we’re unlikely to get that far into to the issue thanks to a sleepy press. We make much ado in this nation about ‘one person, one vote’, but when we elect cartoon characters like this, we forget that under the right set of circumstances, they can bring the national good to a halt. Think that over, Massachusetts.
Jude