Bernie Sanders Can Now Get Stuff Done (In Theory)

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It’s just one of the encouraging changes in Washington. From The Guardian:

As Democrats take control of the Senate, Bernie Sanders has taken on his new role as chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee. [Correction: No, he hasn’t. The Republican leader in the Senate is using the threat of a filibuster to stop Democrats from becoming committee chairmen. See “So Much For Unity — U.S. Senate Edition”. I assume this is a temporary problem.]

At the helm of the Budget Committee, Sanders will be in charge of the reconciliation process, which allows Congress to move through legislation without the 60-vote supermajority needed to overcome filibuster. Reconciliation can be used to move through key coronavirus relief measures, including stimulus payments.

Sanders has said that he’d love for a bipartisan effort on coronavirus relief, but he won’t let a desire for bipartisanship delay action.

“We should hear what my Republican colleagues have to say, but we are not going to spend months and months and not address the incredible pain millions of families are experiencing,” Sanders said.

Senator Sanders described his goals in The Guardian today:

In this moment of unprecedented crises, Congress and the Biden administration must respond through unprecedented action. No more business as usual. No more same old, same old.

Democrats, who will now control the White House, the Senate and the House, must summon the courage to demonstrate to the American people that government can effectively and rapidly respond to their pain and anxiety. As the incoming chairman of the Senate budget committee that is exactly what I intend to do.

What does all of this mean for the average American?

It means that we aggressively crush the pandemic and enable the American people to return to their jobs and schools. This will require a federally-led emergency program to produce the quantity of vaccines that we need and get them into people’s arms as quickly as possible.

It means that during the severe economic downturn we’re experiencing, we must make sure that all Americans have the financial resources they need to live with dignity. We must increase the $600 in direct payments for every working-class adult and child that was recently passed to $2,000, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, expand unemployment benefits and prevent eviction, homelessness and hunger.

It means that, during this raging pandemic, we must guarantee healthcare to all. We must also end the international embarrassment of the United States being the only major country on Earth not to provide paid family and medical leave to workers.

It means making pre-kindergarten and childcare universal and available to every family in America.

Despite what you may have heard, there is no reason why we cannot do all of these things. Through budget reconciliation, a process that only requires a majority vote in the Senate, we can act quickly and pass this emergency legislation.

But that is not enough. This year we must also pass a second reconciliation bill that deals with the major structural changes that our country desperately needs. Ultimately, we must confront the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality and create a country that works for all and not just the few. Americans should no longer be denied basic economic rights that are guaranteed to people in virtually every other major country.

This means using a second reconciliation bill to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and constructing affordable housing, modernizing our schools, combatting climate change and making massive investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

It means making public colleges, universities, trade schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities tuition-free and forcefully addressing the outrageous level of student debt for working families.

And it means making the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes. We cannot continue to allow profitable corporations like Amazon to make billions of dollars in taxes and pay nothing in net federal income taxes. And billionaires cannot be allowed to pay a lower tax rate than working-class Americans. We need real tax reform.

There is no reason Joe Biden could not sign into law two major bills that will accomplish most of the goals I listed above within the first 100 days of the new Congress. We cannot allow Mitch McConnell and the Republican leadership to sabotage legislation that would improve the lives of millions of working Americans and is wildly popular.

Let us never forget. When Republicans controlled the Senate, they used the reconciliation process to pass trillions of dollars in tax breaks primarily to the top 1% and multinational corporations. Further, they were able to confirm three rightwing US supreme court judges over a very short period of time by a simple majority vote.

If the Republicans could use the reconciliation process to protect the wealthy and the powerful, we can use it to protect working families, the sick, the elderly, the disabled and the poor.

Unquote.

Now all the Democrats have to do is to overcome McConnell’s scheme, so Sanders and his Democratic colleagues actually become committee chairmen.

So Much For Unity — U.S. Senate Edition

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As part of a good news agenda, I’ve got a post lined up about Bernie Sanders becoming chairman of the Senate’s Budget Committee. Sanders ascends to that powerful position because Kamala Harris is now the vice president and three new Democratic senators were sworn in yesterday. That means the Democrats get 51 votes in case of a tie and the Republicans only get 50.

But as of now, Sanders isn’t chairman of anything. The odious Republican senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, is already up to his old tricks.

You see, the Senate requires something called an “organizing resolution”. According to the Senate’s official site:

At the beginning of a new Congress, the Senate adopts an organizing resolution listing committee ratios, committee membership, and other agreements between the parties on the operation of the Senate. Typically a routine matter approved by unanimous consent agreement, on occasions when the Senate has been closely divided, the organizing resolution has provoked fierce debate.

The Democrats have said they’re willing to organize the Senate the way it was organized the last time there were 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. That was the situation in 2001, the only difference being that Republicans had the White House, giving them the ability to break ties in their favor.

But organizing the Senate the same way as last time isn’t good enough for Mitch McConnell now that Democrats have the edge. He wants to change the organizing resolution so that the Democrats agree to never require majority rule in the Senate, i.e. to never abolish the  filibuster. That’s the ability of a single Senator to stop vital legislation without even identifying himself in public.

In 2021, if a senator wants to filibuster legislation, they don’t even have to hold the floor by talking for hours, the way an exhausted Jimmy Stewart did in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

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Today, senators can simply say “No” to a piece of legislation — without even publicly identifying themselves. To override a senator’s filibuster, it takes a supermajority of at least 60 senators (a 60-40 vote). So unless your party has 20 more senators than the opposition, a filibuster can kill important legislation, even though most senators (and a majority of Americans) want it.

So here’s what McConnell is doing: 

McConnell is threatening to filibuster the Organizing Resolution, which allows Democrats to assume the committee Chair positions. It’s an absolutely unprecedented, wacky, counterproductive request. We won the Senate. We get the gavels (Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii).

Because of McConnell’s new demand, the U.S. Senate’s organizing resolution is still the one they had last week when the Senate and White House were run by Republicans. That means they’re still in charge of the committees that approve legislation before it can go to the whole Senate for a vote (and before the Senate can approve many of Biden’s nominees). Bernie Sanders and his Democratic colleagues who are supposed to be in charge of those committees are as powerless as they were before the inauguration!

It sounds like Democrats have to agree to keep the filibuster or they (and we) are screwed.

Except for one thing. Kamala Harris can take the gavel whenever she wants. Being Vice President of the United States automatically makes her President of the Senate. And that makes Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York the Majority Leader of the Senate, instead of the odious Mitch McConnell. In other words, the Democrats can now tell Mitch McConnell to go to hell if they want to. Whoever is Majority Leader of the Senate gets to control the proceedings, deciding, for example, what legislation the Senate gets to vote on. It’s quite a system.

Of course, the Constitution doesn’t mention the Senate Majority Leader. The Constitution doesn’t even mention political parties. Nor does the Constitution mention the filibuster. Someone who’s written a book about the filibuster and used to work for a Democratic senator explains where the filibuster came from:

The filibuster was not part of the original Senate because the Framers knew exactly how it’d be used — they saw McConnell coming. The filibuster represents Calhoun’s vision, not Madison’s. Calhoun wanted a Senate where the minority could block the majority (Adam Jentleson).

That’s John C. Calhoun, the Southern senator who wanted to protect the South and slavery from the Northern majority.

Calhoun was profoundly racist. He was slavery’s leading defender in the Senate. He argued on the Senate floor that slavery was a “positive good.” And he was motivated to innovate the filibuster by the desire to protect slavery — to give the South veto power. Bad, bad guy.

The filibuster means that, in many cases, you need at least a 60-40 vote to get something done in the Senate.

The de facto supermajority threshold was first forged against civil rights. Jim Crow-era segregationist senators repurposed a 1917 Senate rule to force every civil rights bill to clear a supermajority threshold, blocking them all. Only civil rights bills were blocked in this way.

The authors of the Constitution favored majority rule, except in a few special cases, like overruling a president’s veto or removing a president from office. Mr. Jentleson quotes an article in The New York Times:

The supermajority threshold of today flies in the face of the framers’ intent. They wanted the Senate to be a place where debate was thorough and thoughtful, but limited, and where bills passed or failed on majority votes when it became clear to reasonable minds that debate was exhausted. Originally, Senate rules included a provision allowing a majority to end debate, and an early manual written by Thomas Jefferson established procedures for silencing senators who debated “superfluous, or tediously.” Obstruction was considered beneath them.

The reason the framers set the threshold at a majority is that they wrote the Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation, which they saw as a disaster because it required a supermajority of Congress to pass most major legislation. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22, the idea that a supermajority encouraged cooperation had proven deceptive: “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison.” Rather than encourage cooperation, he prophesied, the effect of requiring “more than a majority” would be “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices” of a minority to the “regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

So here we are. The Democrats can now make any rules they want for the Senate and adopt those rules by a 51-50 vote, as long as those rules don’t conflict with the Constitution. They could then pass any legislation they want and get President Biden’s signature on it. That would include things like Biden’s massive Covid relief bill, elements of the Green New Deal and statehood for Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico (giving the Democrats four more votes in the Senate). They could even expand the Supreme Court to cancel out the Republican majority’s ability to find reasonable laws unconstitutional.

Will they use their authority to defang Mitch McConnell, get rid of the filibuster and restore majority rule to the Senate? Before today, it was doubtful, because there are conservative or “traditionalist” Democrats who worry about changing Senate rules (see “Fear vs. the White Male Effect”). Back to Twitter:

The fact that Mitch McConnell can use the filibuster to prevent the majority from taking control of the Senate is a pretty good argument against the filibuster (Dan Pfeiffer).

McConnell makes mistakes and this may have been one. His obstruction playbook relies on stringing Dems along and keeping them believing a bipartisan deal is just around the bend. Filibustering the organizing resolution to prove he won’t filibuster Biden was too clever by half (Adam Jentleson).

Democrats who want to save the filibuster claim it encourages the two sides to work together for the common good. But they’re wrong:

To those who say the filibuster encourages bipartisanship, Hamilton addressed this directly in Federalist 22: “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison,” he wrote of a supermajority threshold. It doesn’t encourage cooperation, it encourages obstruction (Jentleson). 

The fact is that the Democrats are the party of Yes and the Republicans are the party of No. It’s time to stop making it so easy for them to say No to the majority, especially today when we face so many crises that require urgent action. 

Relief and Rage

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Charles Blow writes an opinion column for The New York Times:

I watched as [he] left the White House on Wednesday, tacky and lacking in grace and dignity — consistent with his life and presidency — and I watched as Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of America.

I had many feelings as I observed this pageant of customs. The first was the feeling of having — remarkably, improbably — survived a calamity . . .

To be sure, [the former president] has done real and lasting damage to this country. He has tested the rules we thought might constrain a president and found them wanting. He has shown the next presidential hopeful with authoritarian tendencies that authoritarianism can gain a foothold here.

[He] taught us, the hard way, that what we took for granted as inviolable was in fact largely tradition, and traditions are not laws. They have no enforcement mechanism. They are not compulsory.

There is the feeling of releasing resistance, of allowing the tension in the neck to relax and the shoulders to drop. It is the feeling of exhaling. It is the feeling of returning to some form of normalcy — a normal presidency, a normal news cycle, a normal sleep habit. . . .

But then there is also the lingering feelings of disappointment, betrayal and loss of faith.

How is it possible that enough Americans — mostly white, it should be noted — voted for [that person] in the first place, sending him to the White House? And how did he receive the second-highest number of votes in the country’s history in November?

[He] is a racist and a white supremacist. And yet, millions of Americans — again, mostly white — either agreed with his views or were willing to abide them. I know that there will be those who warn that I should just let this go, that holding on to it is “divisive.”

To them I say, “Hell no.” You can’t have a feeling of unity after there was enforcement of a practice of cruelty. There must be acknowledgment and accountability. There must be contrition and repentance.

It is not enough to simply let the co-conspirators and abettors of a white supremacist president quiet down and cool off, biding their time, waiting for the next opportunity for their riotousness and wrath to be unfurled and unleashed.

How is it that people of good conscience and good faith are supposed to make common cause, to find healing and unity, with people who have demonstrated their contempt for the equal humanity of others? Where is the center point between my determination to be free and your determination to contain or constrict that freedom?

I still think about the children separated from their parents at the southern border and the children kept in cages. I think about the [that] administration arguing in court that those children didn’t need toothbrushes or soap or the lights turned out at night so that they could sleep. I still think about all those who died in custody and all those who have not been reunited with their families.

There are many transgressions of the [his] presidency. Some, like the mishandling of the pandemic, have even been far more deadly than the handling of migrant families. But there is something particularly cruel and inhumane about what [he] did to those children in the name of the United States government.

I will never forget that. And I will never forget that tens of millions of Americans were willing to accept that and give [him] a pass on it.

I am happy that [his] administration is now behind us and a new, more normal one is before us, but my relief still mingles with my rage.

A President, a Poet and Poor Deluded Souls

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Joe Biden gave an excellent speech at his inauguration. But as somebody said on Twitter:

Well that’s it. The ceremony is over and Amanda Gorman is now the president.

Gorman is from Los Angeles, is 22 years old and is America’s first National Youth Poet Laureate. She spoke for six minutes and made a huge impression. You can read read her poem, “The Hill We Climb”, but it’s better to see and hear her recite it:

Poet Amanda Gorman reads ‘The Hill We Climb’ – YouTube

Here’s something else that happened. The New York Times reported that QAnon believers are  “struggling with the inauguration”:

Followers of QAnon, the pro-Txxxx conspiracy theory, have spent weeks anticipating that Wednesday would be the “Great Awakening” — a day, long foretold in QAnon prophecy, when top Democrats would be arrested for running a global sex trafficking ring and President Txxxx would seize a second term in office.

But as President Biden took office and Mr. Txxxx landed in Florida, with no mass arrests in sight, some believers struggled to harmonize the falsehoods with the inauguration on their TVs.

Some QAnon believers tried to rejigger their theories to accommodate a transfer of power to Mr. Biden. Several large QAnon groups discussed on Wednesday the possibility that they had been wrong about Mr. Biden, and that the incoming president was actually part of Mr. Txxxx’s effort to take down the global cabal.

“The more I think about it, I do think it’s very possible that Biden will be the one who pulls the trigger,” one account wrote in a QAnon channel on the messaging app Telegram.

Others expressed anger with QAnon influencers who had told believers to expect a dramatic culmination on Inauguration Day.

“A lot of YouTube journalists have just lost one hell of a lot of credibility,” wrote a commenter in one QAnon chat room.

Still others attempted to shift the goal posts, and simply told their fellow “anons” to hang on and wait for future, unspecified developments.

“Don’t worry about what happens at 12 p.m.,” wrote one QAnon influencer. “Watch what happens after that.”

And some appeared to realize that they’d been duped.

“It’s over,” one QAnon chat room participant wrote, just after Mr. Biden’s swearing-in.

“Wake up,” another wrote. “We’ve been had.”

Followers hoping for guidance from “Q,” the pseudonymous message board user whose posts power the movement, were bound to be disappointed. The account has been silent for weeks, and had not posted Wednesday.

Ron Watkins, a major QAnon booster whom some have suspected of being “Q” himself, posted a note of resignation on his Telegram channel on Wednesday afternoon.

“We have a new president sworn in and it is our responsibility as citizens to respect the Constitution,” he wrote. “As we enter into the next administration please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.”

Unquote.

Wow. If more of the previous president’s supporters realize they’ve been had — and more of their leaders admit President Biden won a fair election — there may be blue skies ahead.