Congressional Primer
Quick warning for you all. This is a long post about Congress. If that doesn’t sound interesting to you, it is unlikely to get more interesting as you read on.
After Nov 4, we’re looking at around 60 senators and an 80 to 100 seat majority in the House. The makeup of each chamber is extremely important in determining what kind of proposals can even be attempted, and the devil is in not just the number of Dems, but what type of Dems they are.
Thus, it is helpful to view Congress through these two metrics; the total members a party has, and the number of strongly liberal or strongly conservative members in each party. The goal of hardcore partisans on either side is to elect enough moderates in semi-hostile districts to reach bulletproof majorities, and achieve a critical mass of heavy-hitters in friendlier districts/states. So lefty Dems want the Pelosis and Kennedys of the party crafting and hammering out legislation, and the more moderate members pushing it across the finish line, ideally with few revisions.
Toward those ends, 2008 looks to be a good year for Democrats, promising close to 10 freshman senators and 20 to 30 more seats in the House. They will likely add five strong progressives to the rolls in the upper chamber, and Republicans will lose about five fierce conservatives. That’s a big deal, when reelection rates in the senate are upwards of 80 percent and open seats are a rarity. For comparison, 2006 was also seen as a big deal, when a mere 6 seats went blue, and Dems added three strong progressives and Republicans lost three strong conservatives.
The biggest items on the agenda are going to be energy and health care reform, as well as economic stimulus legislation. Big deficits are bad things, but in times of financial crisis, you need deficit spending to prop up the economy. So the Dems have to get enough senators and representatives to realize that creating green energy jobs, making health care more affordable and offering mortgage relief actually boost the whole economy, and aren’t just do-gooder initiatives to be attempted when the weather’s fine.
This is not going to be easy. There will be close to the 60 Dems needed to prevent a filibuster, and that is a good thing. But I can’t stress this enough; not all senators are created equal. Landrieu, the two Nelsons, Baucus and Lieberman are all great examples of terrible senators. There are going to be a lot of lobbyists explaining to them what a terrible time this is for big spending on hugs for trees, and handouts for irresponsible borrowers.
And while I’m not weeping for any of the Republican losses, they’ve pretty much been whittled down to the uber-conservatives. The only likely cross-overs seem to be the two distinguished ladies from Maine and Arlen Specter from PA.
Now, there are some tricks Reid can employ to avoid always needing 60 votes. He could actually force the Republicans to filibuster, which he never does. He could attach health care reform to an appropriations bill that needs a simple majority to pass. Or he could have conservative Dems vote with their party for cloture to keep things moving, but then vote against the final version of a bill, when their vote isn’t needed for its passage.
But the bottom line is that Reid is much less effective than Pelosi at using that cane to reel in wayward sheep (and she has four times the sheep!). I think the most likely big agenda item to get the proper treatment is energy/climate change. I don’t see a health care reform bill passing without being significantly watered down, unless they hitch its star to one of those aforementioned simple majority spending bills. But as Yogi Berra says, that’s what we’ll play the season to find out.
2 comments October 28th, 2008