A rare bit of non-absurdity from the executive branch today, as Rell signed the Senate Vacancy bill into law. With all 24 Dems united in the Senate, and enough House members (along with one Republican) to make a 2/3 majority, it was going to happen sooner or later. But it’s nice for Rell not to make the lege jump through hoops for no reason on it: consider sending a note of thanks to Rell for signing the bill into law today.
So we got a budget from the State Senate today: highlights include a progressive income tax up to 7.5% for annual incomes over $750,000, a temporary hike in the estate tax, no reduction in the $500 property tax credit, and about a billion dollars in cuts. The Senate Dems have a reasonable presentation assembled here, with pie charts to compare this budget plan to previous “crisis budgets” here. The odds of the pie charts appearing in the news tomorrow morning are pretty slim.
I have more to say about the budget, but the focus in coverage so far has been the number of Democrats that defected on the vote, taking as a foregone conclusion that Rell will issue a veto of the plan.
But a 19-16 vote doesn’t bother me in the least: I mean, I don’t enjoy that Duff and Meyer seem to be re-branding themselves this year as “conservative Democrats,” but the closeness of the vote is a sign that there weren’t any more deals made than necessary to pass the bill through.
A 24-11 budget is not going to be pretty — some of the quotes seem to suggest that the holdouts believe $400,000+ earners need more of a break in our troubled times than those seniors and unemployed residents that are still paying their property tax bills — and the other 80% of the caucus might not be willing to give enough to buy those few renegades back into the fold. In fact, I would hope that legislators from Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport would reject any attempt to stick it to their constituents by making it clear that a proposal that moves too far away from today’s deal would lose their support. (See the excellent effort to whip Congressional progressives into insisting on their own relevance a public option in health reform as a larger-scale version of this same idea.)
If Rell issues a veto — and I’m not totally convinced she will — don’t expect major changes to attract a 24-vote majority. The ticking clock is going to be what persuades either five Senators or one Governor to come aboard, not a more-regressive tax code or sweeteners for wayward Democrats.
Matt Browner-Hamlin is shrill:
The New York Times profile of Senator Max Baucus and his role leading the Finance Committee towards a healthcare reform bill contains an infuriating nugget of strategic hindsight.
He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.
God God, man! It’s like Baucus had never heard of physics before he fell down.
Seriously, the lack of strategic understanding by Democratic elected officials is mind-boggling. That Baucus is only now realizing the strategic value of keeping a single-payer system on the table from Day One, even only as a means to provide political space for something like a political option, is simply stunning. Of course Baucus, and likely the whole country, will pay for his strategic error as the public health insurance option doesn’t survive the Finance Committee’s draft process. After all, while Baucus may be making noises about not being able to keep the Obama-backed public health insurance option on the table because of this error in strategy, he is also conceding it as a means of winning the support of at least one Republican on his committee. Not because he needs the vote to pass legislation out of the Finance Committee, but because he thinks bipartisanship is more important than providing working Americans with universal health care.
Baucus’s statement about the strategic error he made (though in fairness this is a mistake that every Democrat in the Senate save Bernie Sanders has made, as well as most members of the House caucus and Presidnet Obama) is a rare admission by a senior Democrat that there is political value in the party maintaining strong liberal positions. The simple fact is that if the Democrats want to achieve their moderate goals for quasi-liberal, pro-business policy, they can’t have quasi-liberal policies as the left flank. This leaves them coming to the table with only one direction to move: away from their goals and towards the Republican position. This amounts to making concessions before you even start negotiating, by the simple fact that you have no margin for concession short of not getting what you want.
The not-all-that-liberal Baucus is looking at a bill that started from a position of compromise and is rapidly becoming something that even he isn’t very enthusiastic about passing. And if your progressive base is dispirited and your wise moderates are dispirited, well, it makes it a lot less likely that a bill of any merit will pass, and that there are strong incentives (read, money) for your Joe Liebermans and Ben Nelsons to be seen as the one who caused health reform to fail.
But don’t worry, Matt - it sounds like Chairman Baucus has learned his lesson, and I’m sure he’ll fight vigorously for a strong carbon tax cap and trade regime agriculture giveaway package just as soon as health reform is done.
Another new hire from after the most recent campaign finance filing: Colleen Flanagan, previously the press secretary for North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan.
Her first quote to the press came out today in a statement on Simmons’ endorsement by Fred Thompson:
“While attempting to burnish his so-called ‘moderate’ credentials for the U.S. Senate race, this endorsement by a conservative, radically anti-choice, George W. Bush Republican shows where Rob Simmons’ ideology truly lies,” Colleen Flanagan, spokeswoman for Connecticut Democrats, said in a statement. “Those values may fly in Tennessee, but they’ll get you nowhere fast in Connecticut.”
An interesting discussion on minor parties influencing major parties from potential Senate candidate Peter Schiff, speaking at the Libertarian Party of Connecticut convention:
What is going on in the Republican Party is there’s a group of people who say that the Republicans need to move to the left, and be more like Democrats. Well I don’t even know how they could move any further, I can’t distinguish them myself already! (Laughter, applause) And I know that that strategy can’t win. Because theoretically if there’s two Democrats in the race, then you may as well pick the real one.
And the other group says we need to move more to the conservatives, to the right, but again, what does that mean? What is the right of the Republican Party anymore? They can’t win an election. What we need is a move towards the Libertarian wing, to the Ron Paul wing, because that’s the only way we can win.
The only way we can get Libertarian principles into government is to bring ‘em in through that party. I don’t think we have enough time to try to get the Libertarian party in office, we just need to get Libertarian-minded people in office. And I think the way to do that now is through the Republican party, because I think the Republican Party is very vulnerable right now. Instead of fighting them, just take them over, and infiltrate the party, and then influence the direction that it moves. [...]
As Libertarians, it’s never going to happen, you’re not going to win anything, but in the Republican Party you have a shot. And the best way to run is to criticise it, and if you’re running in the party and you’re criticizing the party, you’re likely to get a lot of support from the independents. You might even get some Democrats that were stuck in the Democratic Party because they were so divided on the social issues. [...]
Q: The Republican Party is poisoned, it’s nothing more than the opposite side of the coin in the Hegelian dialectic from the Democratic Party, they are the two parties who own power. The money powers behind the Republicans aren’t going to line up behind Libertarian candidates, I don’t think, because they like the control that they have. How do we break that stranglehold?
Schiff: The only way to defeat them is to do it from within. We’ve already shown, after 40 years, that we’re not making any headway, trying to break into it. The media is not going to take a Libertarian candidate seriously anyway, they never have, and they won’t. If you’re running as a Republican, then they’re going to take you seriously. [...]
Because look, I mean when Ron Paul ran as a Libertarian, and he ran for President as a Libertarian, I know, I voted for him, right?
Nobody knew him, he didn’t get any media, he didn’t get anything. He ran as a Republican, and everybody knows who he is now! And he actually got votes! He didn’t win, but you know what, he was in the race ’til the end. Look at all the other ones that dropped out. Look at Mayor Giuliani, a lot of these guys dropped out really quickly, but he had support to the end.
The video for this quote comes from around 1:25 (that’s 85 minutes in, not 85 seconds) through to about 1:40, and it actually reminds me of how us Dean folks used to talk about the Democrats back in 2003 and 2004. And Schiff sounds like he’s pretty pumped about Ron Paul’s example of staying in the race through the end.
The questioner in the video didn’t really take well to the suggestion that he abandon the minor party strategy that Libertarians have stuck to for so long, and I might suggest to him that he consider using the fusion laws to gain some leverage over the process and change the electoral calculus for those who will be voting in the 2010 primary. (And, since I suspect there will be some search engine visitors to this post, I should mention that this strategy is already being used on the progressive side to good effect by Working Families — and that I’m someone who’s eager to see a Republican party with some level of principles, even if I elect to spend my time improving the Democrats instead).
In any case, this is being billed as Schiff’s first political speech, and it’s always interesting to see where a politician starts so you can see how he or she grows over time. And Schiff, to his credit, seems to be the one Republican starting out with something to say apart from how lousy Chris Dodd is – he hardly mentions Dodd at all in the speech.
Also, from the end of the Q&A period:
Personally, the change coming from the third parties, it’s just so difficult given the way we’re operating. So I think we’re going to have to change one of those two parties. And I think it’s more likely we’ll change the Republican Party because they’re the ones that aren’t in power, the Democrats are. And it’s going to be difficult to change the party in power, it’s easier to change the party that’s out of power.
I tend to think this isn’t the case: looking back, Al Gore was more progressive than Clinton, and was followed by two candidates that were more conservative than he was. It’s hard to negotiate from a position of weakness or desperation.
The Catholic Church hierarchy has come to a mutual accord with labor over organizing in hospitals:
The accord, announced Monday, seeks to apply Catholic teachings that recognize the right of workers to “freely and fairly” decide whether to join a union. [...]
The agreement touches on a thorny situation for Catholic hospitals, some of which have aggressively resisted union organizing amid complaints that their conduct contradicts Catholic doctrine on social justice. [...]
“The central actors in these dramas have to be the workers themselves, that’s what we feel is the strength of the document,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired archbishop of Washington, D.C., who helped lead the discussions.
Under the agreement, hospital managers agree not to use “traditional anti-union tactics,” including hiring firms, known as union-busters, that work with companies to defeat organizing drives. Unions also agree not to publicly attack Catholic health care organizations during labor campaigns.
The article mentions that 15 percent of the 600,000 Catholic hospital workers nationwide are members of unions right now, but so far as I’ve been able to find, none of the Connecticut Catholic hospitals are unionized.
Update: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has the document available as a PDF here.
The Fairfield County Weekly follows up on this MLN post on the votes by our Congressional delegation for war funding, getting quotes from Murphy:
On Afghanistan, Murphy says he voted for the bill because “It supports President Obama’s troop withdrawal plan and his counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan.
“Though my support for President Obama’s plan in Afghanistan comes with a short leash — if Afghanistan and Pakistan become more destabilized, we will need to reconsider the costs of our involvement,” Murphy says in a statement.
Murphy returned from a recent trip to Afghanistan where he was told about dramatic upticks in suicide bombings, something previously unheard of in the war-torn nation. Murphy also returned convinced the American military must stay involved.
“I believe we need to refocus our efforts in Afghanistan to stifle the drug trade, work with tribal leaders to suppress the insurgency and help bolster the country’s flagging economy,” Murphy writes on his congressional Web site.
Joe Courtney (by way of spokesman Brian Farber):
Courtney spokesman Brian Farber says the bill was about more than money: it compensates troops caught in the Bush administration’s stop-loss policy, essentially a back-door draft that kept troops stuck in years-long deployments, and requires Obama to report to Congress on military progress in Afghanistan.
“The [Obama] administration’s approach to Afghanistan is different, including working closely with local communities, tribal leaders, and providing the Afghanistan government the tools they need to defend their borders from Taliban and al-Qaeda,” Farber says.
… and the Greater New Haven Peace Council, following up on a meeting with Rosa DeLauro:
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the New Haven Democrat and powerful right hand to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, met with the Greater New Haven Peace Council for more than an hour this spring on the topic of Afghanistan. Peace council member Henry Lowendorf says DeLauro heard the group out but was not persuaded.
“She is sincere,” Lowerndorf says. “She really believes. She wants to support Obama. I just see Obama digging us deeper.” [...]
“This is not change,” Lowendorf says. “This is more of the same.”
I wonder: do Murphy, Courtney, and Obama have any sense that the never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan played any role in the Democratic takeover of the House, Senate, and White House over the last couple of years? Come on, guys — time to shut these wars down.
Working Families sends emails:
Rachael spoke to North Branford resident Bruce Deegan who was surprised that Senator Ed Meyer didn’t support the paid sick days bill.
Deegan said he spoke to Meyer at a meeting in Killingworth in May and believed Meyer would vote in favor of paid sick leave. “Based on things he said at the meeting and then the fact that it did end up having a later starting date, like he said he favored, I expected that we would have his support and I was extremely disappointed,” Deegan said.
You can read the full article here.
As we’ve been reminding our supporters, it’s this kind of behavior from our elected officials that makes it easy to be come cynical and jaded about our political process. And not without reason. But big changes like this one won’t happen overnight. At least, as a silver lining, Senator Meyer indicates he will support the sick days legislation in the future. Let’s hold him to that.
Paid Sick Days died on the Senate floor with eight Democrats opposed, three of whom had voted for it in the past. The question, of course, is why? I enjoyed this explanation (for the U.S. Senate, not our local version) from Matthew Yglesias:
I don’t think you need to appeal to the idea that people prefer to pander to the caucus’ worst instincts so much as simply the fact that legislators prefer to do nothing at all. The supermajority—and, more broadly, the extreme difficulty of moving legislation—makes it easier for elected officials to make contradictory commitments to various people. Consider that as long as Democrats clearly didn’t have the votes to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, they could promise labor law reform to unions while also reassuring business that no such law was going pass. After the election suddenly there were sixty members who’d promised to vote for EFCA, which created an awkward situation for those members who, in fact, preferred to do what business wanted and killed it. They had to flip-flop in a not-very-pretty way and anger a lot of people. If it took 67 votes to move a bill, they would have been in much better shape, loyal friends to Wal-Mart and the AFL-CIO alike. (Emphasis added.)
It’s not hard to figure out — when Meyer et al could promise an expansion of the safety net to workers, safe in the knowledge that Jim Amann would stop the bill from passing, they made that promise and voted aye. But given a choice, they’d rather help the CBIA.
A future promise following a past betrayal isn’t a “silver lining” — the silver lining is having an improved understanding of his priorities, and the ability to adjust one’s support accordingly.
Notable in this month’s campaign finance filing: Kate Magsamen has joined the staff of the Connecticut Democrats. It appears that her job is to help boost the party’s fundraising efforts, which is good news given the traditional disparity between D and R fundraising in the state.
Also of note, the Dodd campaign is sharing rent costs for State Central’s Hartford office, which means that the Dodd campaign is now being run out of a physical location in the state.
As mentioned in the previous post, Love Makes a family surveyed Connecticut’s Congressional delegation on marriage equality and DOMA. However, a couple of our Reps weren’t exactly forthcoming:
Rep. DeLauro would not comment specifically on support of marriage equality but responded that she was “comfortable with Connecticut’s law.”
Only Congressman Larson refused to provide a response on marriage equality and DOMA after repeated requests.
Larson followed up with the Courant, and in a post titled “U.S. Rep. John Larson releases his statement on same-sex marriage,” they faithfully transmitted it:
“I am proud that Connecticut has taken a leading role in giving same-sex couples the same rights and recognition as other couples in our state. Connecticut is telling the world that, in our state, if you love each other and are committed to each other you have the right to have your relationship legally recognized. The fight to attain this recognition was not easy and I salute all of the people who worked hard for years to bring it about. I am also a co-sponsor of legislation that would repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and I have signed onto a letter calling on President Obama to instruct the Armed Forces not to initiate any further investigations to determine the sexual orientation of a service member. I support the repeal of Section 3 of DOMA and the extension of benefits to same-sex partners. I applaud President Obama for the first steps he has taken to bring that about.”
Reading through it line by line, it doesn’t appear that he actually gave anything like a position on marriage equality in that statement. As fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, Larson could “salute” the hard work of marriage equality proponents by endorsing marriage equality on the Federal level instead of just pretending.