To start with, I called 'no filibuster change' back on January 4th.
I can prove it: I called it in the to the Randi Rhodes radio show. (She even mentioned it on yesterday's show.) Not that I wasn't calling my electeds, asking for a repeal of the 1975 filibuster change that made it so that the majority had to prove it had 60 votes, rather than the old, conservative version, that had the minority having to prove it had 41 votes. This is what Norm Ornstein at AEI recommended. (Look him up.)
But there was only one thing Reid could have offered to get McConnell not to give Reid the big F-U and filibuster Obama's tax deal: no real filibuster reform.
When Reid started playing with the Senate calendar, claiming that the first day of the session, Jan 3rd, hadn't actually ended by the time the Jan 4th workday was over in Washington, I was pretty sure of what was coming.
And I was right.
With the other political news that's been coming this month, I think I'm glad, too. After all, we're gonna need the filibuster after the GOP gets the House, the Senate and the White House back by 2016's elections.
Here's why, and how.
1) The House is GOP-owned now, and is stopping almost every initiative the Dems and Obama want to enact. And if you think they capitulated on the debt ceiling, you haven't read this. They capitulated alright, to Grover Norquist.
2) The 2014 election is going to suck for Dems. In the House, Republican-run states are re-redistricting (that's not a typo), while in the Senate, there are even more Dem seats to defend, in even redder states, than there were in 2012.
And that was with all the Obamaniacs coming out to vote this year. But we've seen how well they show up for the mid-terms, haven't we? 2010 is how we ended up in this f-ing mess.
So when 2015 rolls around, after the next mid-terms, the GOP will be running both the House and Senate, both full of GOP drones voting on strict leadership lines, running the GOP's cut-taxes, cut-services, cut-enforcement playbook.
At least we'll still have Obama to veto stuff, and the GOP won't have two-thirds of either house, so it won't be able to override his vetoes.
But that's only for his last two years. Then the shit hits the fan.
3) I've written here before about the GOP plan to change the way presidents get Electoral votes, rather than actually face up to the demographic changes that let Obama give Romney a 5-million-vote ass-kicking in November. There's absolutely nothing unconstitutional about their plan, since it's how Nebraska and Maine have done it for years, at least for the votes related to a state's House seats. The new filip is the allocation of the votes related to a state's Senate seats: these would no longer go to the candidate who won the state's popular vote, but to the candidate who won the most congressional districts in the state, which the Republican legislatures in these states can draw and redraw pretty much at will, to assure that majority.
When I wrote that piece above, a good friend recommended I stop scaring people. Now that this plan is common news, I don't see the point. 2016 is going to be a real shitstorm.
Remember, the Supreme Court said it was fine that Tom DeLay redistricted Texas twice after the 2000 Census, in 2001 and 2003, that second time giving 'W' the only House gains he got during his 'landslide' in 2004. Why not as many times as the GOP wants, in as many states as it they own?
And as long as the redistricting makes sure blacks and hispanics have a few districts that will elect them, the ever-so-pliant Supreme Court will give these new redistricting plans a pass, and screw the Voting Rights Act.
So 2016 stands a real good chance of the Dems winning a thin majority of the popular vote, and the GOP getting a huge majority of the Electoral votes. That's if Dems run a candidate with the same party support they gave Gore and then Kerry. Which is, not much.
But if Hillary runs, giving all her supporters from 2008 a second bite at the apple, and giving most of the Obamaniacs the excuse to vote for a 'third term for Obama' through his first Secretary of State, Dems could win by a margin even larger than the 2012 spread.
And still lose the Electoral College by a huge amount.
At which point we may find out how many of those "law-abiding gun owners" are willing to stand up for the framers of the Constitution, or for the GOP. And it's gonna be ugly.
REAL ugly.
There was a way out of this, back when we'd seen how the GOP ran elections (2000) and how they would redistrict again and again (Texas 2003) to gain any advantage. Screw the future, says the GOP, we'll take whatever advantage we can get, right-damned-NOW. A way out of this, back when Dems had the House, the Senate, and the White House. That golden filibuster-proof 42-day period back in 2009, after Franken was finally declared the winner but before Teddy died.
But we wasted it doing ObamaCare. (That's snark, for those who care.)
Our Constitution gave us a way out, in Article I, sxn 4, saying "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators."
See that? "...but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations." This clause underpins the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Each fulfilling its intention, by helping or hindering American voters, by the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively.
Congress could have regulated how ALL states draw their Congressional districts to prevent this crap, and could have specified how often it could be done (like maybe 'ONCE as soon as practicable after each Census'), and could have specified that all Electoral votes go to the winner of a state's popular vote. All possible. All by simply writing into law the two-centuries-old customs of the United States.
Not a chance now.
There will be a steady string of Republican presidents who lose the popular vote but take the White House anyway, with those Republican-run state legislatures successfully fending off the 'popular vote' initiatives already passed by several states, and the Supreme Court continuing to point out that it's all Constitutional, even if it's nowhere near how the Founders intended our government to run. And with those Republican presidents appointing 40-year-old party faithfuls as replacements for Ginsberg and Stevens, the split on the Supreme Court will become 7 - 2 for decades, ruling against citizens, and in favor of the GOP and their corporate owners.
The only weapon the Democrats will have at the national level will be the Filibuster. And someone not afraid to use it just as often as the GOP does now.
But that won't last, because the GOP leadership has proven it won't be squeamish about changing any rules, including nuking the filibuster, once it's back in the majority in the Senate. So the filibuster will last until the first session of the 115th Congress, Jan 3rd, 2017, when the Republicans have all three houses: Senate, Representatives and the White one up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
I do see how the Democrats will eventually get back into majorities at the federal and state levels.
And back into the White House.
But your children aren't going to enjoy those bread lines.
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