Mike Bennet, Senate reformer?

Michael Bennet is pretty much your classic establishment guy - son of a prominent Washington insider he atteneded St. Albans, Wesleyan and Yale law. He worked in the Department of Justice and Clinton's White House out of law school. His father's family goes back to the Mayflower. His brother is the editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

Today though Ezra Klein published an interview that he did with Bennet on the Senate reforms that Bennet is pushing. It's a really interesting read and I'm glad to see someone taking these issues on. I have a lot of respect for Michael Bennet, the couple of times our paths have crossed he's shown himself to be not just smart but with a truly creative mind as a problem solver.

Don't be decieved by the raw numbers on Congressional majorities

This chart from Nate Silver is interesting but it's not nearly as illustrative of his broader point as he believes,

F.D.R. and L.B.J. might have been great cleanup hitters -- and you'll get no argument from me that Obama's aptitude at shepherding his agenda through Congress has been mixed, at best. But they basically spent the first several years of their Presidencies playing in the Congressional equivalent of Coors Field. Considering how dramatic the impact of the loss of just one Senate seat has been on both the perception and the reality of Obama's agenda, that needs to be kept in mind when drawing the comparison.

In the session when FDR had his greatest majority, 1937, the Senators from the following states were all from the Democratic party,

• Alabama
• Arkansas
• Florida
• Georgia
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Maryland
• Mississippi
• Missouri
• North Carolina
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Virgina
• Texas

In other words 28 of the 76 Democrats were actually Dixiecrats from the old Confederacy - or border states sympathetic to the Confederate cause. . A caucus with 37% old south membership paints a far different picture than what Silver's initial analysis demonstrates.

While Senator Robinson of Arkansas was Majority Leader and an ardent FDR supporter (up until his death in the summer of 1937) it was actually southern Democrats who led the charge to defeat Roosevelet's court packing scheme. That plan was a centerpiece of the Roosevelt agenda after the 1936 election and its failure was a huge blow to the President.

Liberals today rightly complain when Republicans make comparisons between the bi-partisan deal on Medicare that LBJ formed as opposed to Obama's health care package. We know full well that past bi-partisanship was directly attributable to the fact that the parties were each a mixture of conservative and more progressive forces for much of the 20th century. You can't compare today's Democratic or Republican caucus to their counterparts of the mid 1930s or 1960s because the parties didn't fit into clear ideological boxes.

If it's wrong for Republicans to obfuscate on this point in order to tear down the current process it's wrong for liberals to do the same to defend the current process.

Your world in charts

Via Ezra

Fighting for dear old dad

To be fair to Liz Cheney, her dad is a self-confessed international war criminal so we shouldn't be shocked that she'd go to extreme measures herself in order to distract from his crimes.

At least he's not your School Board President

As if Detroit didn't have enough problems.

As the great Ralph Wiggum once stated, "Me fail English? That's unpossible."

Recess appointment to placate labor?

Labor and Employment law blog "Manpower" indicates that a recess appointment for NLRB nominee Craig Becker may be in the cards after all,

At yesterday’s annual AFL-CIO meeting, Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis told union officials that there will soon be “positive news” on Becker’s stalled nomination. She later told reporters that unions will be “very pleased” with the resolution of that issue.

Becker's nomination was filibustered by the GOP, he won "only" 52 votes. In the immediate after-math of the vote Obama had clearly indicated that he would not be using a recess appointment for Becker.

By itself the failure of Becker's appointment would have drawn the ire of labor. Combined with the failure thus far of health care reform, the excise tax that will be part of any reform package that does pass and the failure of EFCA labor had every right to feel as though they had been abandoned.

Assigning clear and unambigious blame

I'm not going to pretend that all of the Democrats issues will suddenly evaporate merely by pointing out the flagrant obstructionism of the GOP but it sure can't hurt. Today we see the administration doing just that with Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning.

To me this achieves two things. One, it leads the media horses to the proverbial water. If The White House clearly and unambigiously sends a message about obstructionism the media is likely to report it. Will it always be framed how we want? Of course not. But Democrats need to start breaking through to the public on these issues and that begins with leveraging the bully pulpit of The White House. The administration has been reluctant to do this but it's long past time to move towards more campaign style tactics; Republicans have been there since the day after the 2008 election.

The second benefit is this begins to appease a very restless and demoralized liberal base. After 8 years of George W. Bush the base is more than a little restless. We're into the second year of the Obama administration and liberals are not seeing the results that they (rightly or wrongly) thought were coming. If you don't give them somewhere to direct their ire it's going to be focused entirely on Obama and Reid and it will have repurcusions this fall.

It's not an immediate fix but the sooner Obama gets started with this change of tactics and temperment the better.