Finally an opportunity to dust off that button. And by ‘opportunity’ I mean $&*%^.
In an amusing bit or turnaround Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) added an amendment to Harry Reid’s ethics bill that would have the shocking, shocking effect of bringing earmark reporting in the Senate ethics bill in line with Pelosi’s bill in the House. Reid, chair of the Earmark Committee (known in some circles as ‘Appropriations’), tried to block the amendment but a small gang of Dem Senators jumped sides and blocked the block. Paul Kiel tells what happened next:
[I]nstead of then passing DeMint’s amendment, as would normally occur in the Senate, the Democratic leadership held the vote open, a move that Senate Republicans called unprecedented, and reminiscent of tactics used by the GOP-controlled House that voters just booted.
Right now Democrats hardly need a comparison between Harry Reid and the worst Majority Leader in history. Did I say right now? Never. It’s easy to quip that fighting a monster too long brings out the monster in oneself. Sure, fine, the monster’s dead and we’ve somehow picked up a slight case of fangs. I don’t want to judge my government by relative measures. Call me naive for thinking that we can have one full Congressional session that doesn’t make me want to bang my head on the table.
My biggest beef with Bush and his godawful GOP leadership has often been the power of precedent, and Reid’s seemingly minor act just contributes to it. Ten years from now some Majority Leader will say well, DeLay and Hastert held those votes open, forced votes on massive bills before Congress had a chance to read them, snuck in edits after the bill had already passed. Why not? It worked for them.
A healthy ethics process doesn’t just ensure that one naughty Congress critter gets a wrist slapped, loses his or her job or goes to jail. In this case punishment is less important than prevention. We need ethics oversight so that twenty years from now Majority Leader X will recall that Harry Reid caught holy hell for pushing the boundaries and think to him/herself, na ga ha pen. So in case it isn’t obvious I say sure, fire up the Ethics Committee. If Reid’s maneuver was actually as unprecedented as it appears then censure him. A decade of Congressional stagnation is long enough. Dems own a minority share in that decay by virtue of having bubkis for influence during the worst of it, but grace period’s over.
As it turns out I’m late to the trigger on this story. Reid has already recognized the inevitable (and, one hopes, smelled the awful messaging) and thew in the towel. But. Losing doesn’t excuse bending the rules, so if someone decides to wake the Senate Ethics Committee I’m all for it.
***
Incidentally, it will be amusing to watch good-government pundits like Josh Marshall and Glenn Greenwald pick up friends on the right. For some reason many never realized that for people who care about honest government, one-party rule leaves only one party to criticize. Now that Democrats have power to abuse, expect the same folks who whistle past every GOP scandal and bitterly denounced folks like Marshall for mentioning them to discover an unexpected affinity for TPM’s in-house muckrakers.
***Update***
A touch insensitive? While I meant ‘wake up’ the Senate Ethics Committee strictly in the figurative sense, I only realized after publishing the post that the Democratic chair is Tim Johnson (D-SD). As most know by now, Sen. Johnson is currently recovering from a life-threatening brain hemorrhage. Apologies for any unintended crudeness on my part.
SeesThroughIt
I like this part of the quoted segment:
“It’s so unprecendented, we used to do it all the time!”
Seriously, though, Reid’s being a total asshole here.
Dave
Well Reid has been known for loving his earmarks. That aside, I hope the Dems censure him or something.
TenguPhule
*Sigh*, confirmed by AP here.
Reid needs to be taken out back and caned, repeatedly.
On the plus side, a Republican legislator has been spotted with some actual morals. I think.
Steve
Here’s what actually happened.
Sen. DeMint offered the Republican amendment. There was debate, the Democrats moved to table the amendment, that motion was defeated. This is all standard. Since the amendment wasn’t tabled, that means it comes up for a full roll call vote.
Now, as a matter of Senate tradition and courtesy, such a roll call vote is never taken. Instead, once a motion to table is defeated, the losing side typically agrees via unanimous consent to approve the amendment by voice vote. However, in this case one of the Democrats objected to the unanimous consent request, hoping to be able to talk people around to the other side before the roll call vote on Friday.
Like I said, this is a breach of the usual courtesies relating to unanimous consent, and it’s good that Reid decided to apologize and work out a deal. (The truth is that the competing earmark provisions both had good points and bad points.) But this is light-years away from being like anything Tom DeLay did, or anything Reid could get censured for. It’s 100% within the rules.
TenguPhule
Never mind, talk about two pies in the face.
It’s Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC)
Upstaged on the moral high ground by a fresh GOP turd. X
Jake
You’re just as insensitive as that dreadful Boxer woman! I may swoon.
Steve
The two primary sponsors of the Republican amendment were DeMint and Coburn. They’re both quite wingnutty (Coburn is the guy who goes on about all the lesbianism in our public schools) but they both seem like actual spending hawks. I don’t believe this amendment was any kind of political stunt at all, frankly.
It’s telling, though, that clowns like the Redstate people want to give the Democrats a black eye over this episode, when the truth is that whether you end up with Reid’s earmark reform or DeMint’s earmark reform it’s still a hundred times better than anything we ever got from the Republican majority. While Coburn and DeMint may be sincere, the reason most Republicans are suddenly in favor of major earmark reform is simply that they no longer control the spigot.
HyperIon
i don’t know about DeMint but Coburn has been on record against earmarks for years. he has not himself had an earmark for several years.
(i grant coburn is wacko wrt abortion/sexual identity.)
Pooh
Isn’t Coburn the “porkbusters” guy? And thanks for the context, Steve. While that’s a little complicated, isn’t that something that reporters, presumably familiar with the process, should be able to report?
CaseyL
Also, Reid has backed down. Whoever gave him a good talking to, he listened to them.
Zifnab
Yeah. I bet they were just about to get around to passing that if the Dems hadn’t swept in November.
Regardless, it’s comforting to know that the Dems are toeing the line even when they don’t want to. Imagine a Republican talking about taking Bill Frist out back over earmarks. It’s amazing how fast things can change with an election. I just hope morals fever is a long term illness.
Steve
No, what I meant is that Coburn and DeMint were sincere in offering it. There are some genuine spending hawks in the Republican caucus, although they seem to number in the single digits. As for what motivated the rest of the Republicans, I think I covered that above.
Dave
Which is fine by me, don’t particularly care who and how Washington gets cleaned up, as long as it does.
Steve
Me neither, you’ll note I didn’t say the Dems should vote against it because the GOP is insincere. However, we should resist the narrative where Reid is the bad guy and the noble Senate Republicans are the anti-corruption fighters, because that’s just dumb.
demimondian
We should resist that narrative by complaining when Reid doesn’t get the message, Steve. He screwed up, his caucus stood up for what they were elected about, and he lost. If you want to change the meme, dwell on the behavior of the rest of the Dem caucus, and ask what it is going to do to prevent another black eye like this.
tBone
We can’t expect reporters to actually sully their non-ink-stained hands by providing context and doing basic research. That’s hard work, bitches.
Steve
Yeah, good call, Demi. Reid should have just dropped his bill the moment something else got proposed, forgotten about publishing earmarks on the Internet 48 hours in advance, forgotten about including tax breaks in the definition of earmarks, forgotten about all the other advantageous things about his bill because simplistic people who only see in black-and-white have decided that the Republican amendment is much better.
Seriously, are you going by anything but the headline here? Do you know anything at all about the difference between Reid’s bill and the Republican amendment?
matt
Ok, I have a dumb, probably naive question. In a day in age where you can post at diary at Kos asking for a hundred grand, and raise in like five minutes, what’s the need for all this extra curricula bullshit? Unless corruption in Washington is beyond our wildest dreams, it just doesn’t make sense to me that any of this shit should be an issue any more.
Raising money (at least for dems) just isn’t an issue anymore. What the ef is going on?
demimondian
Raising a hundred grand is not something which happens “in a few minutes” at dKos. More than that, you have to have a particular stripe there, and not all candidates do. (For instance, why is it that I don’t think that had I thrown my hat into the ring in WA-8, I wouldn’t have gotten much out of Kos… It’s not because of my poor Democratic credentials, at least.)
And even if it were, there is only so many times any given candidate can draw that well. A Senatorial campaign costs millions, even for an incumbent. You don’t raise that money overnight, except at the very end of closely contested elections. 2006 may well have been an anomaly in that regard.
demimondian
Fooey, Steve. Yes, what Reid did was legal, and entirely by the rules. No, it isn’t the same thing as the five-hour long fifteen-minute votes in the House. I’m not trying to make a claim of moral equivalence; it won’t stand up.
But, you know what? Contrary to what you probably think, I do want to be better than our enemies. In this case, I believe that he was bending the rules to try to water down the new standard.
I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary. If you can show me that, then cool, but, really, I care about intent as well as result here — and I deeply suspect his intent.
Steve
Which rule was bent?
demimondian
Sorry, I spoke imprecisely when I should not have done so. By “bending the rules”, I meant the informal rules, the Senatorial tradition, under which the Amendment is never voted upon. Do you honestly think that Reid would have been able to engineer a compromise if he hadn’t originally been behind the objection to unanimous consent?
Steve
Well, without having seen the results of the “compromise,” I can’t even tell you if it might be better than either of the two original proposals. In which case I’m going to find it pretty hard to be upset with Reid.
Bottom line is, dude got a little heavy-handed, he apologized for it the next day and a deal got worked out. I hardly think we have to bring the power of the blogosphere to bear on him, it’s over.
OCSteve
Tim – kudos to you for highlighting this. I have a lot more respect for your opinions on those evil republicans when I see you are willing to take your own to task.
John S.
I think one can tell from this thread that a great deal of Democrats are willing to take their own to task.
Blind party loyalty is usually a trait reserved for Republicans.
ThymeZone
Remember, Don’t Drink and Post.
(A reminder from the Information Highway Safety Council)
jake
OT: According to Gates, if the 20K surge doesn’t work…we should stay the course.
“If we talk about the consequences of the American failure and defeat in Iraq, then saying, ‘If you don’t do this, we’ll leave, and we’ll leave now,’ does not strike me as being in the national interests of the United States,”
This has been your Saturday Morning edition of “Same Shit, Different Day.”
OCSteve
You may not have noticed, but this administration has been getting a lot of flack from the right.
Most of the criticism of D by D I see is that they are not far enough left. So I found this refreshing, that’s all. After a couple of years of JC skewering republicans, it’s nice to see Tim smacking around a democrat.
Entertainment value – take it where you can get it.
Zifnab
In the same way that Barney Frank kicked Patrick McHenry around the House floor, I think Reid was probably just trying to get the Republicans to sit down, shut up, and let the Democrats do the driving. Unfortunately, he picked a really bad issue to slam the gavel on.
That said, I didn’t see anything in this amendment that squashes Reid’s Bill. Certainly, it creates a bit of a redundancy, but welcome to Legislation. There’s half a billion ways to convict someone of drug trafficing. I won’t mind two different bills regulating earmarks.
Of course, the real “ethics violation” here is any news media outlet trying to paint Republicans as somehow more moral than Democrats on the issue because they don’t have the balls or the experience to actually spell out what happened on the Capital floor. Liberal media my ass. Meet the new Republican Noise-Machine. Same as the old Republican Noise-Machine. Maybe we can get some hearings on the “ethical violations” of Reid’s Christmas Card list next.
demimondian
demimondian
[sigh] I hate HTML. Programming without a syntax checker is the bane of my existence.
ThymeZone
When did this week turn into a slow news day? A fucked up Middle East is not enough entertainment?
Now we are going to micromanage the day to day affairs of that Good Old Boys’ Millionaire’s Club, the US Senate?
Wake me up when something noteworthy happens.
Hey, isn’t that Ted Stevens picking his ear over there in the background? What the ……?
Today, Senator Stevens and his daughter … er, wife … visit the National Zoo!
Exciting! World affairs! War! Oil Money!
The Other Steve
Know any good HTML validating algorithms?
I’m starting to write some forum software, and while I want to allow a bit of HTML I want to make sure tags are on the white list and are closed… and disallows attributes. I thought about allowing img tags, but then I saw a site that showed all the different ways to hack them.
I have yet to find a very good algorithm for this. Most of what I find are inelegant hacks written in PHP.
CaseyL
PHP = Pretty Horrible Programming?
ThymeZone
I was wrong, we can get more irrelevant here.
Geek IMs over a political blog.
There isn’t enough caffeine in the universe to keep us awake for that ……..
demimondian
Actually, I once derived a stochastic algorithm for both detecting unclosed tags and suggesting a most likely correction. It’s really quite elegant, but there isn’t enough space in the margin to keep Herb from going to sleep while I describe it.
ThymeZone
Oh, fuck me.
Elegant geek shit.
Speaking of sleep, I’ll guesstimate that I can write better string handling code in my sleep than you can write while awake.
I can also do a great brake job on a 1966 VW. Isn’t that fascinating, Demi?
Hey, have you seen my spaghetti sauce recipe? Killer.
I mean, elegant.
Pb
The Other Steve,
Heh; I wrote a simple HTML parser in PHP once… anyhow, here’s a list of such things.
ThymeZone
This is what happens when you skip Friday Night Beer Blogging.
jake
Translation: I’m hella kewel.
Translation: Dude UR weak.
Someone let me know when they start the Sharks v. Jets dance routine. I’ll make popcorn.
demimondian
It wouldn’t surprise me at all. But then, you knew it wouldn’t.
Hyperion
i HAVE noticed that some elected repubs have suddenly gotten in touch with their inner Frenchmen (as Jesus’ General would say).
but what changed their minds? while i’m glad they have finally seen the light, i suspect its something along the lines of “my god, my invincible country is going to lose and i will be unable to continue to be a smug and self-righteous promoter of american superiority”.
i don’t hear any of them saying “this was wrong to do.” instead it’s: “this was done so badly and now that others are taking the lead in saying so i’ll just go along and maybe no one will notice that i was part of the problem.”
Bruce Moomaw
The Senate just voted 98-0 to approve the removal of secret earmarks as supported by the House. I would, however, be a lot happier if 39 of the 48 Democrats present for the original vote in which Harry Reid tried to cancel the rule hadn’t supported him, before that vote failed and Sen. Durbin offered a resolution allowing Reid to cover his ass and retract his original opposition. (The Senate Republicans voted against Reid 42-7.) I do hope we’re not just going to see another Changing of the Corrupt Guard in Congress. (I was happy to see, by the way, that Obama was one of the nine Democrats to buck Reid. James Webb was another.)
And, while we’re at it, isn’t it time we reopened Foleygate? (Not that we ever will, since the House Ethics Committee report made it clear that both parties were up to their necks in sewage on that one, with the GOP trying to cover it up permanently and the Dems covering it up for at least a year until the strategic moment when they could reveal it just before the election.)