Everybody knows by now that the House passed health care yesterday. I spent the evening, beginning at around 8 PM, speaking with a number of Reps from both sides of the aisle. Here are the Democrats in the order I interviewed them:

Jerry Nadler, a leader amongst progressives:

Donna Edwards (a rising star in the progressive caucus):

Kathy Castor, from Tampa Bay, Fl:

John Garamendi, former insurance commissioner, energy expert and strong progressive from California. When I was stringing for FDL, Garamendi made a point to stop and thank me for the work FDL was doing to whip on health care.

Tom Perriello: widely percieved to be one of the most threatened Democrats in the country; his distinction is his strong claim to “conviction politics”. A few months ago he told his supporters and opponents alike that he didn’t run for office to be re-elected. Instead, he’s there to make a difference by doing the right thing. His district is one of the “reddest” House seats held by a Democrat, but don’t tell him that!

BTW, that’s a cheering crowd you hear in the background – they weren’t protesters!

Immediately after I spoke with Congressman Perriello, we walked back to the House office buildings. Earlier, the Congressman told me that he had taken a lot of heat from protesters and it wasn’t much fun. So when I heard a crowd chanting, I assumed it was more protesters and tried to walk the Congressman to the other side of the street. But then I heard what they were saying: “Yes we did! Yes we did!” Hundreds of people were cheering the passage of health care! We ended up crossing the street again and walking through the folks whose support was so crucial throughout the process. For once, Congressman Perriello (and other Democrats, including Alan Grayson!) got to hear a lot of “Thank You”s and “You Rock”s:

Yesterday I wrote about the procedural obstruction in th Senate as it pertains to the confirmation of judges. In a nutshell, I pointed out that forming a new “Gang of 14″ would be useless; that the only thing that would help get Obama’s nominees confirmed in a timely manner would be to deploy the nuclear option.

That’s because one Senator, as we saw with Jim Bunning, can shut down the entire chamber for almost a full week if they oppose a vote. The Senator refuses to join a “unanimous consent” motion and triggers a thirty hour period of debate before the Senate can vote to have a vote. Once that hurdle is cleared, there’s another 30 hours of debate before the final up or down vote can occur. So one judge, not counting committee hearings, etc, can take up 60 hours of Senate floor time. And since Republicans have been in the minority, that has been the norm.

Well, after nearly a year of this, Democrats are growing pretty tired of it. For a while now, we’ve been hearing things about filibuster reform, but for the most part, the calls have come from more liberal Senators like Harkin, Durbin and Schumer.

Well… Filibuster reform is not just for “radicals” anymore. Kent Conrad, a conservative Democrat by any measure, joins the chorus:

LA Times has the story:

An early chance for the Obama administration to reshape the nation’s judiciary — and counter gains made in the federal courts by conservatives — appears close to slipping away, due to a combination of White House inattention and Republican opposition.

During President Obama’s first year, judicial nominations trickled out of the White House at a far slower pace than in President George W. Bush’s first year. Bush announced 11 nominees for federal appeals courts in the fourth month of his tenure. Obama didn’t nominate his 11th appeals court judge until November, his 10th month in office.

Moreover, Obama nominees are being confirmed at a much slower rate than those of his predecessor, largely because of the gridlocked Senate.

Key slots stand without nominees, including two on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the body that reviews decisions by federal agencies and a court that is considered second in importance only to the Supreme Court. Federal judicial vacancies nationwide have mushroomed to well over 100, with two dozen more expected before the end of the year. To date, the Obama administration has nominees for just 52 of those slots, and only 17 have been confirmed.

…

Judge confirmations have become like any other piece of legislation on the Hill. Democrats argue that the GOP leadership is requiring time-consuming cloture votes — motions to cut off debate that need 60 votes to pass and then often require hours of floor time to be spent before a final vote can be taken — on judges that are unopposed.

Earlier this month, Republicans required a cloture vote on Barbara Keenan, a nominee to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. After that vote, Keenan was confirmed by a 99-0 tally.

By contrast, more than half of Bush’s judicial nominees were confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent. Democrats consented to their confirmation without requiring time to be spent on a roll-call vote on the Senate floor.

Republicans counter that if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the White House believed judges to be a priority, they would use their clout to push them through. Reid controls the Senate calendar.

But a spokesman for Reid, Jim Manley, rejected that notion, saying the necessary cloture votes would chew up time on a Senate calendar already under duress from healthcare and jobs bills.

So the idea here is that Republicans are filibustering virtually every nomination. When that occurs, Harry Reid has to invoke cloture, which tolls a 30 hour clock, during which no other Senate business can be done. Once the thirty hours is expired, the Senate has a cloture vote and if there are 60 votes, cloture is invoked and the filibuster is ended. But ending the filibuster tolls another 30 hour clock which also keeps the Senate from doing other business. At the end of that 30 hours the Senate finally moves to an up-or-down vote.

So what’s happening is that Republicans are using this process to stall everything. An incredible number of votes – on nominees and substantive legislation – have been stalled in this way. That forces Harry Reid to prioritize. He can use 60 hours of floor time to pass a single judge, or he can use it to pass health care and jobs bills. And given that there are scores of judges awaiting confirmation, it probably won’t be possible to get more than a couple of dozen confirmed before Obama’s term expires. Unless…

Remember the “nuclear option” Majority Leader Frist threatened back in 2005? It would have done away with the minority party’s right to filibuster judicial nominees. In response to the threat, 7 Senators of each party joined to form the “Gang of 14″ and put out a statement saying they wouldn’t support filibusters of judges absent extraordinary circumstances. The agreement lasted for one session; it expired after the 2006 elections.

Could a new “gang of 14″ work today? Actually, no, a new agreement wouldn’t be helpful here; only pressing the nuclear option button could break the logjam. The reason for that is that all the gang did was promise to vote for cloture on judges (absent “extraordinary circumstances”). And as far as I know, none of Obama’s judges have been successfully filibustered; they’ve just faced cloture votes which, as previously explained, require 30 hours of dedicated floor time both before and after the cloture vote. A promise not to filibuster means only that the cloture vote would be overcome; the 60 votes would be there to get the judge an up-or-down vote. But there’d be nothing to stop, say, Jim Bunning (or any other single Senator), from filibustering and triggering the cloture vote process.

That’s why the nuclear option – taking away the filibuster for judges – is crucial to moving nominees.

I’m going to start asking about this in the coming days.

see here for more context

I went to the Hill because I often witnessed things that were simply inexplicable to me.  How could Republicans vote against armor for our troops in Iraq?  How could they vote to cut their pay while they were in the middle of a war?  How could they vote against Senator Franken’s anti-rape amendment?

This is another of those issues.

THE PREVENTING HARMFUL RESTRAINT AND SECLUSION IN SCHOOLS ACT…. H.R. 4247, the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act, seemed like the kind of legislation that would enjoy broad support.

It focuses on school safety, and seeks to protect children from “physical or mental abuse,” and would ensure that “physical restraint and seclusion” of children would be limited to instances in which “a student’s behavior poses an imminent danger of physical injury” to the student or others. The bill was co-sponsored by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), co-chair of the House Republican Conference, which should have bolstered the bill’s bipartisan appeal.

But, no.

You’d expect something like this to breeze through the House, but you’d be wrong. In the age of the Tea Party, even the most uncontroversial of legislative proposals are attacked by many Republicans in order to shore up their anti-statist bona fides. The majority of the Republican caucus voted against H.R. 4247 on the premise that issues of school safety is best left alone for the states to decide.

Here’s Roe on his vote against the bill:

Honestly, I thought it’d be in his best interest to settle the outstanding questions, and I told him as much.  He disagreed with me.

I simply do not understand this.  If there is nothing to hide…  if there is “no there there”, why wouldn’t he embrace the chance to answer his critics charges?  As it is, he’s under a cloud of suspicion.

He’s not gay.

I would have had a lot more to report, but HuffPo and TPM (here and here) beat me to the punch.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the first half of the summit – I was covering a conference on Iran for most of the morning and into the early afternoon.  So I missed Reid, Schumer and Menendez.

Moreover, I was lucky to be in the room at all.  I had not been invited and the room was overbooked and bumping up against its capacity.  If I hadn’t run into Senator Stabenow in the hallway and asked for help, I’da been out in the cold.

The first panel I caught was supposed to be about health care, but it diverged wildly.  Before you know it, we were talking about the broad spectrum of progressive trials and tribulations.  Senator Stabenow said it best, “It’s been a hard year for us.”  Both Stabenow and Sanders implored us to uncurl the circular firing squad and train our fire on conservatives.  And then Senator Stabenow turned the floor over to Ed Schultz so he could say his peace.

Ed despaired at the lack of a Democratic message machine.  He recalled the discipline with which Republicans fanned out across the networks to push for their agenda when they had the reins, and wondered why we aren’t seeing something similar from Reid and Schumer and Dodd.  Senator Stabenow had much to say in response and seemed to take Ed’s point, but she also raised a defense:  that some Democratic Senators are afraid to go on progressive programs because they’ll be forced to play defense.  She went on to suggest that she’d like to see more of us doing more to provide cover and defend the Democratic caucus against the constant barrage of nonsense-charges leveled by the right-wing noise machine.

At that, John Arivosis stood up to call bull-shit.  He pointed out that this has become a fairly common charge and that it’s coming from all quarters of the administration and Congress.  To him, the idea was eye-ball popping ludicrous; who’s done a more effective job of carrying the progressive message than bloggers and new media?  Democrats certainly aren’t being served well by Chris Matthews, Brit Hume, Wolf Blitzer, and Howie Klein!  If anyone has had the back of Democrats, it was the people in that room.

The Senators began to respond when I stood up and suggested that it probably makes sense for them to do what is in their own power to help themselves, and if there is trouble with the progressive media, it stems from the fact that the progressive wing of the Senate hasn’t done much by way of acting in their own interest.

There was a chart behind Senator Stabenow.  The top line said that 14,000 people would die every year for want of health insurance.  I said that should mean something to progressives in the Senate.  That we’re frustrated because even as progressives form the majority of the Democratic caucus, they do nothing to impose party discipline…  That Harry Reid says there will be no consequences imposed on Democrats provide crucial support for Republican filibusters, and instead of demanding party discipline on procedural votes by asserting their numbers, the progressives in the caucus accept Reid’s leadership.   As a result, Blanche Lincoln, for example, can join with Republicans to filibuster health care reform, cap and trade, EFCA and any number of other progressive policies.  As far as I can tell, progressives in the caucus could force her out of her Agriculture Committee Chair if they wanted to, but so far they’ve decided to cave to her demands instead.  It’s enough to make a guy wonder why they bother with the chart citing 14,000 lost lives every year.

Senator Stabenow told me she didn’t think I was being fair.  I didn’t get why, but Senator Brown quickly jumped in with some welcome news.  He told us that Committee Chairs will be up for election in the next Congress and that nobody is guaranteed to keep their seat.  Ryan Grim brings some expert analysis:

“We’re going to elect committee chairs next year,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “The current chairs that are sitting there now understand that we’ll be electing chairs next year,” he added, saying the idea had been cleared with Senate leadership.

Under current rules, members of the caucus can weigh in by objecting to an overall Senate organizing resolution, but don’t have an up-or-down vote on each chair.

Historically, the seniority system has been one of the chief obstacles to legislative progress. It is more difficult to continuously get elected to the Senate — or to get elected at a young age — in a big state, rather than a small state. That imbalance means that the most senior members of the Senate are almost all from rural, conservative states, giving them outsized influence in a chamber where they already have outsized influence because of minority protections and the two-per-state makeup of the chamber.

The next panel covered energy and the green economy.  There was a lot of talk about putting a price on carbon and messaging, and frankly, the presenters (Bingaham, Boxer, Cardin and Shaheen) didn’t sound all that optimistic about the fortunes of the legislation.  The entire hour-plus went by without a single mention of nuclear power.  I thought that was striking – nukes used to be a flash-point of debate and very controversial.  But President Obama recently announced billions for new nuke plants and the news went over with a collective yawn.  I wondered if progressives were supportive of the new policy and if we got any concessions (on, for example, new source review or cooperation with energy legislation) from power companies in exchange for jump-starting the nuke process.

Boxer mentioned that she has long-standing reservations with regards to nuclear because of the waste issue (the stuff is deadly for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years.  By way of comparison, the Egyptian pyramids are about 3,000 years old; the earliest human civilizations sprung up less than 10,000 years ago), but that she sees nuclear as an inevitable component of energy policy.  She added that power companies are on board because they want an alternative to burning coal – especially if they are facing a levy on emissions.  I followed up by asking if it is an efficient use of money – how many solar panels could we construct for all the billions we’re committing to nukes?  Cardin weighed in saying that we aren’t spending too much (most of what’s being offered are loan guarantees) and that if we don’t do nukes, we’ll be burning more coal and sending more money to troublesome parts of the world in exchange for oil.

Here’s a bit from TPM’s report:

The progressive Senators tasked with guiding a climate change bill through the back-logged Senate say they’re ready to grease the legislative wheels with nuclear power. Speaking at the Progressive Media Summit this afternoon, Senators said it was time to embrace the atom as the key to comprehensive climate change legislation this year.

“I happen to be one of the Senators who’s concerned about waste,” Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said. “But most progressives in the Senate believe nuclear power is part of the solution at this time.”

…

Obama’s environmental proposals include the construction of new nuclear power plants for the first time in decades, which Obama and nuclear proponents say are the best short-term way to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuel-burning power generation.

Conservatives have long been in favor of new nuclear plants. Now it seems that the Senate’s left wing — once the home to the strongest critics of nuclear power — is on board with Obama’s plan.

“If we don’t expand nuclear power, there are going to be more coal plants and more oil plants,” Cardin said. “Nuclear power has been accepted as part of the solution [to climate change] among progressives.”

And that was my day at the progressive media summit.

The dynamic duo! Enough to strike fear into hearts of liberals everywhere (or at least a sense of superior bemusement). For the life of me, I don’t know how wingnut space-time didn’t collapse on itself into a far-right-wing singularity.

Honestly, King used to talk with me fairly frequently and said some pretty nutty things. When I posted the videos, he stopped talking to me. On the other hand, Congresswoman Bachmann used to ignore me and walk with head bowed in silence as I peppered her with questions. For some reason or another, more recently she’s been very friendly and open.

I, obviously, was wondering why these two hadn’t signed on to Paul Ryan’s roadmap for America.

The Senator was one of four that initially signed on to a letter asking Harry Reid to include a public option in the “side-car” reconciliation health care bill expected to come out of the Senate.