Short Circuit in Washington

An atmosphere of severe distrust, confusion and rampant polarization has deeply infected the body politic in this nation’s capital. While the notion of a filibuster was known even in ancient Roman times (in their senate), the practice in our Senate is and was simply a product of the right of Congress to create their own operational rules. With a simple majority – reflecting the Democrats’ control of that body – and the stroke of a pen, the Senate requirement that required 60 votes to end a filibuster for Presidential appointments simply died. 51 votes will now do the trick.

Some Republicans (e.g., S. Carolina’s Lindsay Graham, a gentleman who actually knows how to compromise) have used the ability to block appointments as a wedge to force the Obama administration to provide information on the Benghazi assassination of U.S. diplomatic personnel. A dead horse issue to most. Others simply do not want to shift judicial and regulatory appointments away from the conservative slant that was established by the Bush administration. Many older incumbent Democrats have been loath to retire for fear of losing the Democratic placeholder for that position.

But the biggest hidden battle seems to be in the second most powerful appellate court in the land (behind, of course, the Supreme Court), the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. “The real reason Democrats were so eager to confirm Obama's DC Circuit nominees, and Republicans were so desperate to block them, is that the court's current conservative majority has repeatedly blocked the president's agenda. Since most of the federal bureaucracy resides in DC, the DC Circuit is tasked with assessing the constitutionality of federal rules and regulations. Conservatives on the court have neutered much of Dodd-Frank, the post-recession financial reform bill that was meant to keep banks in check. The court alsooverturned Obama's ability to appoint staff while Congress is out of town and struck downstate environmental rules that would have regulated emissions from other states.

“The DC Circuit is also known as a feeder for the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts once sat on the DC Circuit, as did Justices Atonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Bill Clinton nominated future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan to the DC court in 1999, but her nomination stalled in committee and she withdrew her name.” MotherJones.com, November 22^nd.

But they don’t call the end of the 60-vote filibuster rule the nuclear option for nothing. Republicans are seething. While the GOP-dominated House has been the poster boy for gridlock and stupidity, there had been an uneasy truce in the Senate, where more reasonable voices have actually reached consensus on a number of complex issues. “[F]or the foreseeable future, Republicans, wounded and eager to show they have not been stripped of all power, are far more likely to unify against the Democrats who humiliated them in such dramatic fashion.

“‘This is the most important and most dangerous restructuring of Senate rules since Thomas Jefferson wrote them at the beginning of our country,’ declared Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee. ‘It’s another raw exercise of political power to permit the majority to do whatever it wants whenever it wants to do it.’” New York Times, November 21^st. And Republican senators are hardly willing to compare this rule change with the strong-arm tactics of conservatives who have pretty much accomplished the same result in the House (which does not have a comparable rule). That is simply not their problem; the operation of the Senate is. The Senate alone is required to approve senior presidential appointments, so this change is particularly significant in this category.

The battles are not over. “‘Doing nothing was no longer an option,’ said Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, one of a new breed of Democrats who have pressed to reform Senate rules… But the fever is hardly gone. The rule change lowered to a simple 51-vote majority the threshold to clear procedural hurdles on the way to the confirmation of judges and executive nominees. But it did nothing to streamline the gantlet that presidential nominees run. Republicans may not be able to muster the votes to block Democrats on procedure, but they can force every nomination into days of debate between every procedural vote in the Senate book — of which there will be many.

“And [not appointee-related] legislation, at least for now, is still very much subject to the filibuster. On [the] afternoon [of November 21^st], as one Republican after another went to the Senate floor to lament the end of one type of filibuster, they voted against cutting off debate on the annual defense policy bill, a measure that has passed with bipartisan support every year for decades.

“‘[The] historic change to Senate rules escalates what is already a hyperpartisan atmosphere in Washington, which is already preventing Congress from addressing our nation’s most significant challenges,’ said former Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican, and former Representative Dan Glickman, a Democrat, in a joint statement from the Bipartisan Policy Center.” NY Times.

The subtext is that the Democrats seem to be finally giving up trying to find a modus vivendi with their Republican comrades, pretty much rejecting President Obama’s longstanding effort to find compromise positions on key legislation to bridge the unending polarization. “From the moment Mr. Obama took office, the president who proclaimed that there was no red America and blue America, only the United States of America, has strained to maintain some pretense of bipartisanship — through protracted and fruitless efforts to woo Republicans on his economic stimulus plan and health care law, through dinner dates with some handpicked Republican ‘friends,’ through the nomination of Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator, to lead the Defense Department.” NY Times. The Dems could even expand the nuclear option beyond appointments into legislation in general. War isn’t pretty. Mushrooms anyone?

I’m Peter Dekom, and while I see Republicans and Democrats, where have all the Americans gone?