Punked / Lessons
So, the Obama stimulus package, stripped down to win some Republican votes in Congress, won exactly zero Republican votes on the floor tonight.
That’s not a surprise: in fact, the only thing that’s surprising is that anyone would find it all that remarkable to begin with. It’s being written up everywhere, but I like Atrios’ take:
They’re a competing political party and they need to, you know, highlight the fact that their vision for America is actually different. I appreciate that members of both parties don’t always toe the line completely, but on a bill as big as this it makes perfect sense for it to play out as it did.
Of course the flip side is that Dems should’ve pushed the best plan that could pass the Senate instead of pushing some pointless fantasy about bipartisanship.
That “pointless fantasy” is of course alive in practically every nook and cranny of the Democratic Party: one State Rep that I was corresponding with recently cited “these non-partisan new times” as a reason to change some content on a Democratic website. My response was to say that I “hope Cafero and McKinney share your enlightened view when the end of the session comes around.”
But of course, they don’t, and at a certain point “hoping” for change to come is a lot less productive than using your political power (i.e. veto proof majorities) to simply make it happen. The reality is that, as it stands, the pretense of non-partisanship eats 90% of the time off of the clock, and by the time Democratic leadership is forced to get down to brass tacks, it’s relatively easy for the minority to just filibuster the rest of the majority’s legislative program away. It happens every time, and it’s utterly maddening.
Unless Connecticut’s State Legislators have some good reason to think the state budget process will go differently from the stimulus vote we just witnessed, they need to get their heads together and find the best plan that can get 24 votes in the Senate, and just make it happen. Yes, that gives whoever is likely to be that 24th vote more influence over the process than any of us might like, but that situation is going to be a lot better than negotiating away all of the priorities that 137 Democratic legislators just finished campaigning on, winding up with a mess, and taking 100% of the blame for it.