Tag Archives: majority

IS it possible to humiliate yourself politically and score a political triumph at the same time? That would seem to violate the laws of physics. Yet that is the story of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s week.

In conventional terms, Reid stage-managed a disaster on Tuesday when he had the Senate stay up all night to debate the Iraq war in preparation for a vote on a bill to start withdrawing troops in three months.

What Reid did came to naught. He failed to get a vote on the bill he wanted. He acted peeved and peevish. He retaliated against those who’d opposed him by refusing to allow a vote on a bill to increase pay for military personnel serving in Iraq, which is politically stupid any way you look at it (not to mention morally questionable).

What’s more, Reid handled the whole business like a rank amateur, not like a seasoned politico and parliamentarian, which is what the Senate majority leader is supposed to be.

First he called the all-nighter a “stunt” – not exactly the language you want to use when you’re claiming to be focusing on the most important issue of our time.

Second, there were incongruous notes of good cheer and sophomoric excitement amid the supposedly profound sorrow and anger attending the war debate – boxes of pizza filled with yummy cheesy goodness; senators giddily toting their toothbrushes to work; cots delivered so senators could rest in a “nap room.”

Reid acted simultaneously as though the all-night talkathon was a college rush party and an incredible hardship on those poor, poor senators.

The whole thing was a fraud anyway. The “stunt” was intended to highlight a peculiarity of the Senate – the process known as “cloture.”

Reid knew he had 52 votes for his war cutoff, a clear majority in the 100- member Senate, but also that he couldn’t actually bring the bill to a vote. Why? Because Senate rules call for unlimited debate on bills. Senators must voluntarily agree to end debate and move to a final vote on passage. And, under longstanding Senate rules, it takes 60 votes, not 51, to achieve this “cloture.”

Reid’s purpose was to use the drama of the all-nighter to let the American people know that recalcitrant Republicans wouldn’t vote for cloture, thereby making it impossible for Democrats (and a few GOPers) to vote to begin withdrawing troops in 120 days’ time.

Cloture rules are the friend of the Senate minority and the vexation of the majority. Republicans howled when Democrats refused to vote for cloture on appeals-court judicial nominees in 2003 and 2004 – leading some to call for the overhaul of Senate precedent to end the cloture system.

That foolish move was dubbed “the nuclear option,” and Democrats screamed that it would destroy decades if not centuries of senatorial tradition. But now Democrats are in the majority and Republicans in the minority – and so it’s Democrats who hate the 60-vote rule and Republicans who embrace it.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blew the whistle on Harry Reid when he made fun of his colleague’s fake outrage about the evils of the 60-vote cloture rule. It reminded him, McConnell said, of Claude Rains in “Casablanca” expressing spurious shock that there was gambling going on in Humphrey Bogart’s casino.

To which Reid, in one of the more embarrassing moments of his career, replied self-righteously, “This is not a movie. This is serious.”

So Reid had a terrible week. He looked like a boob and a buffoon. Yet the week was also an undeniable triumph for him- for two reasons. One is cynical, and one is even more cynical.

The first cynical reason is that elected Democrats in Washington believe it helps them politically to talk constantly about the war and to look as though they’re taking steps to end it.

Reid knew full well that his all-night jam was going to end in failure. But by staging the fight, he threw some red meat to his party’s hysterical anti-war wing – thereby ensuring its fealty, its loyalty and the easy flow of its money into Democratic coffers.

Even more cynically, he was able to stage the all-night session precisely because he knew Republicans wouldn’t let the proposal come to a vote. The 120-day proposal isn’t a serious effort to end the war: It’s just a feel-good, symbolic gesture. Democrats don’t have to take any responsibility for it because it will never get beyond the gesture stage.

So Reid tells the American people and the anti-war Democrats that he’s doing everything he can to try and end the war while knowing full well that nothing he’s doing actually matters.

That’s canny. So in losing, he kind of won. Even so, somebody quicker on his feet and faster with a quip could have managed to play the same political game without looking quite so much like a dope.