Black Box Report

Well, at least someone's keeping busy.

What things are important enough to fight for? What basic principles are you willing to go to the mat for, even if you know you're doomed to lose on a technicality?

"No taxation without representation?" Only a rallying cry for the US Revolutionary War and a founding tenet of this country. But giving over a half million citizens of Washington DC that right "came up short in the Senate":

Abraham Lincoln must have rolled over in his grave this morning as Republicans used the threat of a filibuster to kill the legislation passed by the House that would have provided for permanent congressional representation for the 600,000 residents of Washington, DC, who do, it should be noted, pay taxes, and serve in the military and on juries. It's also a majority African-American jurisdiction and that, of course, is why what was once the party of Lincoln...refused to let the bill go forward for a straight up or down vote.

"Support the troops" has been thrown around so many times, it might as well be made of Nerf. So how about protecting troops by keeping them rested enough between tours to maintain peak efficiency? The Webb Amendment "fell short by four votes," But protecting them from the dangers of a newspaper ad?

More U.S. senators voted to condemn a newspaper ad attacking Gen. Petraeus than voted...to lengthen the time off troops get from the frontlines in Iraq, thereby reducing individual soldiers exposure to actual attacks.

Habeas corpus, a basic human right that's been around since the Magna Carta? "Fell short in the Senate":

Let’s be clear and unvarnished...44 of our Senators hate the Constitution and basic civil rights. They do not believe in the fundamental right of due process...

Absolutely unacceptable. With all the horrors that we hear about Hamdan, about suicides, about innocent people rounded up for bounties and left to rot in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it is absolutely immoral that 44 senators feel that entrusting basic civil rights of any person to the Bush administration is the way to go.

Now It's not that any of these bills didn't have clear majority support. They did. But a majority is no longer enough:

The reason the Webb amendment failed even though it got 56 votes was that Senators agreed by unanimous consent that the amendment should have to get 60 votes to pass, even without a filibuster.

But why would anyone agree to allow Republicans, who are already on pace to shatter all previous filibuster records, to stop an amendment this important and this sensible without even lifting a finger? And the question here is not just why anyone would allow it, but why everyone did. A single Senator could have put a stop to this simply by saying, "I object" when the unanimous consent request was made. Just one Senator.

Yet none did...

And so the Webb amendment died quietly yesterday, allowing Republicans to enjoy all the obstructionist benefits of a filibuster, without having to stand up and tell Americans and their fighting men and women in the military exactly what they were doing.

Now, the filibuster is a legitimate tool for a minority party. And no one should begrudge the GOP for using the means at their disposal to effect legislation. But besides getting entirely too carried away with the practice - and then blaming Democrats for being a "do-nothing Congress" - there is the rank hypocrisy involved:

For years, Republicans, with a 55-seat majority, cried like young children if Dems even considered a procedural hurdle. They said voters would punish obstructionists. They said it was borderline unconstitutional. They said to stand in the way of majority rule was to undermine a basic principle of our democratic system.

And wouldn’t you know it, the shameless hypocrites didn’t mean a word of it.

Republicans are obstructing legislation at 3 times the normal rate. But do you hear Democratic leadership going on the Sunday talk shows, sending out press release after press release, yelling from the mountain 'til they're hoarse that the GOP is obstructing what is very popular legislation? The silence is deafening. But what's worse is apparently all these things aren't important enough for Democrats to fight for (but MoveOn.org's NY Times ad And now all Republicans have to do is threaten to filibuster a bill, and Senate Democrats roll over like dog show champs. Digby has a solution:

It's really too bad that we now have a new rule that nothing ever passes the Senate without 60 votes. I'm not sure when this became business as usual, but the media seem to have absorbed it as if it were set forth in the constitution...

The fact that this new 60-vote gambit is purely to protect the president to ever have to veto anything that's popular never comes up. Neither, however, does the the press bother to report this as unusual or that the Republican congress is, in effect, vetoing popular legislation by filibustering everything in sight. In fact, the press is reporting this as if the democrats have failed to move their popular legislation even though they have a majority --- never mentioning that a majority is no longer enough, something that I doubt the public knows.

The Democrats are going to have to force real filibusters. I know that it will disrupt the business of the senate, but there's really no other choice. Look at that chart. The Republicans have successfully halted virtually anything worth doing with these EZ-Filibusters. Forget cloture. Make 'em talk.

Make Republicans explain - in front of cameras and with trascripts going out to every news outlet in the country - why residents of Washington DC don't deserve a voting member of the House of Representatives; why denying proper rest periods to already over-extended troops is a good thing; and why we're so eager to abolish habeas corpus, one of the central freedoms the terrorists supposedly hate us for.

They can take their time.