Biden & Obama use Filibuster Scam to Block Elizabeth Warren from Full Appointment — by NormanB

It is possible that the Democrats will have enough votes to dull the impact of the this decision but to do so they will need to end the filibuster.

Earlier today, I wrote about “sidecar reconciliation” and the difficulty of passing it, and concluded, in light of Lawrence O’Donnell’s remarks on MSNBC about parliamentary maneuvers, encountered a number of times each day, still needing 60 votes to overcome them, that Republicans can block HCR through reconciliation if they want to. I said, further, that if they do that, the nuclear option would be the only way for the Democrats to pass a positive Main Street agenda that could save them from blood baths in 2010 and 2012.

Today the headline will read, “Democrats lose 60th seat”, which is true. But when we are thinking about those 60 seats we do have to remember that the Democrats in the Senate did not have 60 votes very long. Sen. Franken, who became the 60th member of the Democratic caucus, was only sworn in on July 8th. That is 166 days to today, if we add in the two weeks or so it will take to certify Senator-elect Brown that will make the 60-seat majority only 180 days long.

In some ways, we never really had a 60-seat majority. Leaving out the weak-sister Democrats like senators Nelson and Lincoln, there was always the problem of so-called Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman. Knowing as we now do that he was the first pick for Vice Presidential running mate for John McCain it is hard for anyone to really count him as a Democrat in anything but name.

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net”

Well, it’s official, or pretty official anyway. Scott Brown has been elected to Teddy Kennedy’s old seat and Martha Coakley has conceded. Some Democrats are blaming Coakley for running an inept campaign, and this may well have accounted for Brown’s margin of victory. But the real question is what allowed him to get close at all. The theory I subscribe to says that the Massachusetts special election for the Senate became nationalized around the pending health care reform bill. Brown dubbed himself the 41st vote against it, and Coakley obliged by calling herself the 60th vote for it, and also, in doing that, reneged on her strong pro-choice position taken in the primary, and then reinforced the narrative that she was part of the industry bailout team by interrupting her campaign to go to a fund raiser in which health care and Pharma industry lobbyists and contributors were prominent. Coakley was clueless about the strength of the anti-Wall Street feeling out there, just as her leader Barack Obama has been. Hopefully, the White House bubble has now been pierced and the President recognizes that an electoral disaster is pending unless the Administration can align against Wall Street and for Main Street. But whether he has or not recognized this, he now surely knows that the 60 votes in the Senate to pass critical legislation he favors, including health care reform, are not likely to be there on Party line votes. So, either he must work on a bi-partisan basis, not a good prospect with this band of Republicans, or he, along with the Senate leadership, must find a way around the 60 vote requirement in the Senate.

Over the past four days two mega-threads appeared at Firedog Lake’s (FDL’s) Seminal web site. The first was created in response to a diary by “realworld” called “Why I won’t be voting for Martha Coakley on Tuesday” received 604 comments, a very large number for that site. And the second responding to a diary by Jason Rosenbaum entitled “To the Pissed Off Progressives, Don’t Be Naderites,” which at this writing has received 851 comments.

The arguments of the two diaries are as follows

What’s wrong with the two of you, who after all these years of service are just picking up your remaining marbles and slinking home, without a peep about the corrupt Senate, its takeover by the corporatist interests, and your own inability to get good legislation through it for the people. As long as you’re leaving, how about a nice going away present for your very long-suffering middle and working class constituents and fellow Americans all over the country? How about one last gesture voting no on cloture, and no on passage, if and when this miserable failure of a health care reform bill comes back with an individual mandate requiring people to buy junk insurance from private insurance companies under threat of enforcement from the IRS, and without a provision waiving ERISA restrictions for those States who want to enact Medicare for All? Your objective in doing this wouldn’t be to block all health care reform, of course. Instead, it would be to force the Leadership to turn to the “nuclear option,” if they want to get health care reform with mandates passed now.

Absent a substantial change in direction by Congressional Leadership and the President, I think it’s time to do whatever progressives can to kill the health care reform legislation currently moving through Congress, and then to immediately reset to Medicare for All, single payer.
As HR 3962 bill sits now, it’s worse than no bill at all, and the Senate and Conference versions are likely to make a final bill still worse. If so, that bill will destroy progressive and Democrat credibility by associating us once again with reforms that don’t solve problems, and corporate interests, in opposition to the American people.

Harry, this is real simple. You’re making the American people pay much too high a price for 60 votes. You’ve got other fish more important than getting 60 votes to fry. The first is that you’ve got to get a strong health insurance reform bill with a PO that will cut costs. The second is that you need to establish your authority as majority leader of the Democratic Party and create party discipline in the Senate.

Let’s look at the second thing first. Throw Joe Lieberman out of the caucus. Tomorrow! If you do, you’ll have no more trouble from Blanche, Mary, Ben, Evan, or any other blue dog again. You won’t have 60 votes for cloture, of course. But let’s be honest. You never needed 60 votes anyway, and you don’t need it now. You can use either reconciliation or the nuclear option to pass reform with 50 + 1 votes. Which brings us to the first, most important, thing you have to do, and that’s pass a good bill for the American people.

A few weeks back I did a diary called “Mis-directed Fury.” It focused on the reaction to the State opt-out idea on health care reform at FDL, and basically made the point that there are a lot more important things to get furious about than the State opt-out proposal. Today we have another explosion of angst and bile, this time at the report of Joe Lieberman’s intention to filibuster with the Republican opponents of health care reform legislation if the Senate bill contains Harry Reid’s highly constrained Public Option with a State opt-out. Meanwhile, everyone I’ve seen writing, or heard talking, about this ignores Reid’s continuing commitment to the 60-vote game, and his refusal, thus far, to start talking about using “reconciliation” or “the nuclear option” to get a really strong PO bill through the Senate with a majority vote.