Creature of dysfunction
Joe Lieberman's power is a sympton of senatorial gridlock
Creature of dysfunction
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
I'm not quite sure how we wound up with President Lieberman. Last I recall, he completed his sole bid for the presidency on Feb. 3, 2004, when he got his butt kicked by losing seven out of seven Democratic contests.
Yet thanks to the undemocratic rules and routinized dysfunction of the U.S. Senate, this guy gets the opportunity to issue peremptory decrees about health care reform, with the aim of bending the overwhelming Democratic majority to his whimsical will. All because he has set himself up as the crucial 60th vote in a chamber that now seems to require 60 votes for passage of anything remotely substantive.
My aim today is not to detail Lieberman's latest craven act, in which he declared his stalwart opposition to the Democratic health reform compromise that would've allowed people over age 55 to buy into Medicare - just three short months after he had publicly voiced support for allowing people over age 55 to buy into Medicare, a stance he had also supported when he was Al Gore's running mate. Nor is my aim to replay the ongoing debate over what really motivates Lieberman's obstructionism. (Is he still bitter about his '06 Senate Democratic primary defeat? Is he trying to torpedo health reform in order to please the private health insurance industry that has pumped $1 million into his career? At this point, who cares?)
What interests me most is how Lieberman has become a prime symptom of the Senate's institutional ills. He has been exercising virtual veto power over health care reform only because the Democrats sorely need him as the 60th vote, and the only reason they sorely need him is because - thanks to the omnipresent threat of a filibuster, and thanks to the extreme partisan polarization - the Senate can barely pass ordinary legislation anymore unless there are 60 votes to do it. That's the bare number required to break a filibuster and thus prevent a minority from thwarting the majority.
This routinization of the filibuster is actually a fairly recent development, little remarked upon in the press. For nearly 200 years, the Senate passed all kinds of important legislation via simple majority votes. Lawmakers on the left and right routinely compromised and formed bipartisan coalitions to get things done. Most importantly, filibusters were exceedingly rare. Senate scholars have discovered that there were only 23 filibusters during the entire nineteenth century; in the 2007-2008 Senate alone, there were 142.
In the words of Julian Zelizer, a Princeton history professor who has studied the Senate, "the filibuster has become a normalized tool of political combat. There have been more filibusters employed in any given single year since the 1980s than took place throughout all of the nineteenth century." He rightly attributes this "filibuster-mania" to the growing ideological divide between the parties, and the lessening appetite for compromise. All told, he says, the Senate today "is a source of obstructionism, anti-majoritarianism, and dysfunctional deliberation."
And Lieberman is its creature. In a normal era, he would not be flexing so much muscle. In a normal era, an overwhelming majority of Democrats (say, 57 or 58, all of them duly elected to get things done) would simply pass major legislation with, say, 57 or 58 votes, and Lieberman's independence would be an irrelevent footnote.
Instead, here was Lieberman recently, hurling thunderbolts on Fox News: "I will not allow this (health reform) bill to come to a final vote." And here he was on CBS News: "I will use the power I have as a single senator to stop a final vote."
But what's fascinating about Lieberman is how often his sanctimony is trumped by his hypocrisy. Back in 1995, he actually co-sponsored Senate legislation that would have curbed the filibuster. Back then, he complained that the power of a single senator was a bad thing. He complained about how the filibuster "has increased the power of every individual senator, and senators aren't too good at yielding individual power."
Today, thanks to the ever-present threat of a GOP filibuster on health reform, he revels in the power he wields "as a single senator." Yet here's what he said in November 1994, when his curb-the-filibuster bill was first being readied: "I think the filibuster has become not only in reality an obstacle to accomplishment here, but it is also a symbol of a lot that ails Washington today....The whole process of individual senators being able to hold up legislation, which in a sense is an extension of the filibuster - it's just unfair."
Clearly, those articulations don't square with Lieberman's principles of the moment. All that matters now, apparently, is that the majority Democrats bow and scrape, and craft health reform to his liking. The Medicare buy-in has been duly jettisoned. And yesterday, Lieberman finally sorta said that he is finally ready to like. From his lips fell these words: "I am getting to that position to where I can say what I wanted to say all along, that I'm ready to vote for health care reform."
Oh thank you thank you, creature of Senate dysfunction! Shall we wash your car now? Or shall we simply cue up "Hail to the Chief?"
BILLY: Some Conse 'Pubs attack Polman with an eye toward discrediting him and his opinion on a daily basis. Plus, they need to discredit disagreeing posters with insults and evasions.— Talvenada- Gee, the filibuster was great when used against conservative judges, but now it is a dinosaur that gives one senator too much power? Truth is several senators had misgivings about the medicare buy-in, including Nelson from Florida and Lincoln of Arkansas. Lieberman was just the one to verbalize his misgivings. So get over it.— tom - wilmington, de
- Read Glenn Greenwald today. He says that the final bill is what Obama has always wanted. His Senate mentor, Joe Lieberman, was actually assisting the White House.— Chris Landee
- Truly nauseating: http://www.salon.com/news/healthcare_reform/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2009/12/16/white_house— DisappointedDem
Comment removed.- The history of the filibuster as it currently stands started during Woodrow Wilson's term in 1917 with Rule 22. This stated that it took two/thirds majority vote to end debate on any particular bill. This was amended to 3/5's in 1975. Contrary to opinion, this was not (as far as I can determine) inserted to protect slave states. The Constitution really says nothing about the filibuster, as each chamber can set their own rules. Originally both houses could have unlimited debate, but the House changed this as their membership grew with the population. Filibuster causes the Senate to act in a bi-partisan manner. Do you liberals really think that if the Senate tried working with Republicans instead of writing these bills behind closed doors either in a small group or by themselves that this would be happening?— tom - wilmington, de
- Don't blame it on Lieberman. We're going to get the "reform" that Obama wanted all along. I can't stand when people act like Obama is powerless when dealing with Congress. Obama applied no pressure, zip, nada on so-called moderates who never wanted a public option. I was willing to give Obama a chance, but he blew it. This is a colossal betrayal of his campaign rhetoric, and he deserves to be held accountable. We spent eight years screaming about how Bush was never held accountable for anything. Let's not be hypocrites.— p-diddy
- I second that Glenn Greenwald column. Greenwald is 100% right.— p-diddy
- Disappointed Dem: Speaking of the media, their game is as rigged as Congress'. Yesterday I was watching Wolf Blitzer moderate a discussion on healthcare reform with a conservative from Redstate.com and a DNC official. For about 2 seconds under the DNC official, one of his former jobs was listed as "PR Rep for Healthcare Industry". No mention of this crucial fact from Blitzer. I thought, "No wonder." Just look at all the drug ads during the commercial breaks.— p-diddy
- when dems used the filibuster to block a lot of bush's judges ,you never heard any complaints about its use from the dems.now ,all of a suddon, its bad. a consistent point of view would be appreciated.— ian
- p-diddy, you are correct and fully agree. My suggestions was to use the Dem-friendly media to show the public just who sunk this bill. Having read Greenwald's piece today, it points right back to the Obama WH. I stopped watching Network and Cable "news" as I has discovered years ago how the advertising influenced the program content ("news" story about health risks of heartburn, sandwiched between ads for related Pharma product, e.g.)— DisappointedDem
- loved the article:) This govt. & congress, whether dem or repub, can't do anything without corruption, inefficiency and back office deals (see the 1st post on this thread for proof). That is the way it works all the time. Hasn't anyone noticed? So to give them more control, more tax dollars and more responsibility for the way we live our lives, not just in healthcare, is not the smartest thing to do, imho. From the same article; ***Let's repeat that: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place." Indeed it does. There are rational, practical reasons why that might be so. If you're interested in preserving and expanding political power, then, all other things being equal, it's better to have the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry on your side than opposed to you. Or perhaps they calculated from the start that this was the best bill they could get. The wisdom of that rationale can be debated, but depicting Obama as the impotent progressive victim here of recalcitrant, corrupt centrists is really too much to bear.***— NEPhilly
- Same article. ***Nobody's "getting covered" here. After all, people are already "free" to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won't make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn't or didn't want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people's money against their will, saying it's for their own good --- and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don't miss the money as much when they never see it.***— NEPhilly
- This is kind of a rehash of a Dionne column yesterday or so in the WPO where he bemoaned the Senate as being "undemocratic" because of the cloture rule. Both he and DP need a serious refresher course in constitutional history or a read or re-read of the Federalist. The Senate was designed precisely so a mere bare majority could not run roughshod over a minority. And thank god for Lieberman. I'd like to see him single-handedly sink this monstrosity of health care reform.— pj katauskas
- One more from the slop infested pigsty called our federal govt.:( *** In essence, this reinforces all of the worst dynamics of Washington. The insurance industry gets the biggest bonanza imaginable in the form of tens of millions of coerced new customers without any competition or other price controls...Most of this was negotiated and effectuated in complete secrecy, in the sleazy sewers populated by lobbyists, industry insiders, and their wholly-owned pawns in the Congress. And highly unpopular, industry-serving legislation is passed off as "centrist," the noblest Beltway value.***— NEPhilly
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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