For almost thirty years the conservative movement was on the rise in America, led by a Republican Party whose mantra is that Government Is The Problem: Within the GOP it’s an article of faith that every issue can be solved with either tax cuts, deregulation, or preferably both. And, for many years, this rallying cry gave the GOP a workable coalition. The liberal movement in American politics peaked with civil rights and Roe v. Wade; the conservatives rode the backlash into power, and stayed there with little interruption from 1980 to 2008. Even when Bill Clinton was in office, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans were calling the tune.

But, as we’ve seen many times in the past decade, there are many problems that can’t be solved with tax cuts and deregulation – indeed, we now have several problems that were caused by tax cuts and deregulation, including our “stop me before I bet the house on derivatives again” financial sector.

We essentially have a thirty-year backlog of issues where the most effective solution is for the government to step up – and a Republican Party whose core belief is that government cannot solve problems. For thirty years they’ve preached that taxes are always a poor use of money, regulations simply get in the way of business, government assistance is always debilitating, and government programs to “promote the general welfare” are the worst of all sins. When your core belief is that Government Is The Problem, a government that actively tries to solve problems – with a social program that raises taxes, regulates industry, and helps the poor – is your apocalypse.

So when Obama proposed government action to fix a broken health care system, today’s Republicans had nothing to offer but opposition: Their core belief has led them to a dead end. All they have left is a rabidly partisan base that thinks health care reform is a first step toward taking their guns and confiscating their property. (And if you think the tea partiers went off the deep end during the health care debate, wait until we get started on immigration!)

There’s still a possibility that the GOP will make short-term gains in November 2010, although with the passage of health care reform they may face a boy-who-cried-wolf scenario: Instead of plying their base with tall tales about how they prevented death panels, they’ll be accountable to voters who can see the actual law. But any way you look at it, the GOP is now dancing to a tune Obama called two years ago: They’re running on the slogan “no you can’t” – and yesterday the Democrats proved that yes, they could.

I’m not categorically opposed to the filibuster. I didn’t object when Democrats used it to block some of Dubya’s more blatantly incompetent appointments (coughJohn Boltoncough), or to prevent the modern GOP’s borrow-and-spend policies from permanently mortgaging our future. In fact, in general, I like the idea of a safety valve that prevents a temporary majority from making radical changes.

But, hey, Republicans — you can’t filibuster everything. I’m okay with the filibuster if it’s kept behind glass and used in emergencies, and I’ll even allow that opinions of “emergency” may differ… but if you’re going to pull the fire alarm every single day Barack Obama is in office, then it’s time for some thicker glass.

Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate is the rule that enables the filibuster (emphasis mine):

2. Notwithstanding the provisions of rule II or rule IV or any other rule of the Senate, at any time a motion signed by sixteen Senators, to bring to a close the debate upon any measure, motion, other matter pending before the Senate, or the unfinished business, is presented to the Senate, the Presiding Officer, or clerk at the direction of the Presiding Officer, shall at once state the motion to the Senate, and one hour after the Senate meets on the following calendar day but one, he shall lay the motion before the Senate and direct that the clerk call the roll, and upon the ascertainment that a quorum is present, the Presiding Officer shall, without debate, submit to the Senate by a yea-and-nay vote the question:

“Is it the sense of the Senate that the debate shall be brought to a close?”

And if that question shall be decided in the affirmative by three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn — except on a measure or motion to amend the Senate rules, in which case the necessary affirmative vote shall be two-thirds of the Senators present and voting — then said measure, motion, or other matter pending before the Senate, or the unfinished business, shall be the unfinished business to the exclusion of all other business until disposed of.

…and the reform I’d suggest is:

And if that question shall be decided in the negative by two-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn…

This change would shift the burden of carrying out a filibuster: Instead of forcing the majority party to round up 60 “aye” votes to stop a filibuster, the obstructionists would need 40 “nay” votes to start one — and, if called on it, 40 senators would have to actually camp out on the Senate floor and take turns reading the phone book. (…which is how everyone thinks the filibuster works anyway. In practice the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style filibuster appears to have died out sometime after the Civil Rights Act; in modern times you just announce your intent to filibuster, and there’s no further effort required.)

Unfortunately, changing the Senate rules is even harder than breaking a filibuster. From the same sentence of Rule XXII:

And if that question shall be decided in the affirmative by three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn — except on a measure or motion to amend the Senate rules, in which case the necessary affirmative vote shall be two-thirds of the Senators present and voting — then…

So in practical terms it would take 67 votes to amend Senate rules and make it harder to filibuster. (And, before you ask, there’s no “organizing resolution” or other measure where a new Congress votes to adopt these rules: The only way to change them is to amend them.) And that, frankly, makes reforming the filibuster a pipe dream: It’d take a 70-seat majority to even consider it, because you can bet on the 59th, 60th and 61st members of the caucus fighting like crazed weasels to keep the balance of power right where it is.

Of course it’s also worth noting that Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate, which is enough to end debate and break filibusters — and as a reader observed at Talking Points Memo, Harry Reid is not Lyndon Johnson. But then again, there are other ways 2009 is not like 1961: Back then, two dozen GOP senators joined a Democratic majority to break the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act.

And then there’s the “nuclear option” — a parliamentary maneuver that would allow 51 senators to simply declare that the filibuster is unconstitutional, and the Senate must decide matters by majority vote unless the Constitution says otherwise. The argument here is that the Constitution specifies when a vote requires a supermajority (e.g., for ratifying a treaty), so in all other causes majority rule must apply and the Senate can’t legally impose a 60-vote requirement for passing legislation — which, in the hands of today’s GOP, is what the filibuster has become.

The danger here is that the GOP will someday come back into power, and without the filibuster there’ll be nothing to stop the next George W. Bush from putting wingnuts into judge’s robes and looting what’s left of the Treasury. But, really, the only way Democrats can prevent that scenario is by delivering results — and the GOP’s filibuster abuse is making that more difficult. For the next decade at least, watering down good legislation to get that 60th vote on board is going to hurt the Democrats more than it helps.

So my preference would be that we have the filibuster, but make filibustering require some actual effort from the minority party: If the minority party can impose a 60-vote requirement on every bill just by saying so, we’re not doing it right. But if the only available choices are between today’s version of the filibuster and none at all, then I’d rather we took the “nuclear option,” and let both parties put their ideas into full effect when they’re in power. It’d make matters worse when the GOP is enacting bad ideas and cratering the economy — but the solution to that problem is to defeat them at the ballot box.

Via Andrew Sullivan comes this report, where the question of whether a dying woman’s insurance covered liver transplants came up at the worst possible time.

From CNN:

A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail referring to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a “banana-eating jungle monkey” has apologized, saying he’s not a racist.

Ta-Nehishi Coates over at The Atlantic has had a lot of interesting things to say about the recent incident where a Boston police officer thought it was appropriate to arrest Prof. Henry Louis Gates for “disorderly conduct” because Gates had the temerity to question the officer’s actions. (The irony, of course, was that the officer’s most questionable action was the bogus arrest for disorderly conduct.) But among his most interesting observations is that no one admits to being racist except the hard-core supremacist types.

And so we get the unintentional comedy of a man apologizing for his racist remarks while desperately denying that he’s a racist — because our society only recognizes two types of racists: The Klansman, who admits it, and the closet racist, who publicly denies it. We don’t have a category for the self-proclaimed “good person” who occasionally lapses into unthinking prejudice, or who just isn’t self-aware.

Matt Steinglass:

Sullivan writes “McCain knew full well that Palin was unqualified to be commander-in-chief.” But here’s the thing: John McCain is unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief.

Back in January 2008 I attended a “practice caucus,” hosted for fun by the fine folks at Drinking Liberally. It was held a few days after Obama won in Iowa, and a few days before Hillary won in New Hampshire, so all the Democratic candidates were still in the running — and, unlike the real caucuses later that year, the atmosphere was cozy enough that the thirty or forty attendees could genuinely talk to each other about the merits of each candidate.

So we all pretended to caucus, declared for our candidates, and then made the rounds from one group to the next, trying to peel off an Edwards supporter here, or a Kucinich fan there, so that the numbers rounded up to give Obama one more delegate. I remember making the pitch for Obama and arguing that any of the Democratic Party’s top candidates would go on to win the 2008 election: Hillary could beat Guiliani, Dodd could beat Thompson, and so on for every combination on the list.1

But one of my arguments for Barack Obama was that he would most likely draw John McCain as his opponent — and that Obama was especially well positioned to bring out John McCain’s worst qualities. 2 And he did: McCain’s legendary temper, his age, his erratic and impulsive decisions, and his visceral, personal hatred of Obama were all on display throughout the 2008 campaign.

Admittedly McCain might have self-destructed no matter who he was running against, and his choice of Sarah Palin was only one of several Hail-Mary efforts to shake up a race he was clearly losing — but it was Palin who clearly revealed how reckless and unprepared John McCain really was. As disastrous as George W. Bush was for America, McCain would have been far worse: By now we’d be in a second Great Depression and a shooting war with Iran, just for starters.

1. In hindsight, John Edwards was the one Democratic candidate who could have blown the 2008 election and handed the White House to John McCain… which, among other reasons, is why Edwards will never, ever be forgiven or rehabilitated. [↩]
2. In fact I argued the GOP’s entire playbook would fail against Obama: Since 1988 the GOP has relied on what Josh Marshall calls the bitch-slap theory of electoral politics to belittle and marginalize their opponents — and Obama had repeatedly demonstrated that he could turn such attacks against the attackers, by either appealing to the public’s desire to change the tone of our politics, or by calling out the opponent and deftly mocking them. [↩]

President Obama, in Russia, announcing an agreement that will reduce by one-fourth the size of the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals:

You know, this is part of American culture. Michael Jackson, like Elvis, like Sinatra, when somebody who’s captivated the imagination of the country for that long passes away, people pay attention and I assume at some point people will start focusing again on things like nuclear weapons.

In 1991 there was a short-lived coup in Russia — and I almost missed it, because I didn’t have cable television at the time. CNN was running round-the-clock coverage, but I only found out later, by glancing at newspaper headlines, that Boris Yeltsin had climbed onto a tank and stared down the coup plotters.

In 1997 Princess Diana was killed in a car crash, and I learned about it from CNN.com — I happened to be in front of the computer at the time of the crash, and the news came in as I refreshed. It was the first major world event that I learned about from the web.

Today Iran is going through its greatest political upheaval since the Shah died, and the best sources for Persian news are from YouTube, Twitter, and Andrew Sullivan, who has turned his blog into an absolutely indispensable clearinghouse for all things Iran. Sullivan’s aggregating content from literally thousands of sources; it’s raw, unfiltered and “unverified” per the traditional canons of journalism — but the sheer quantity of reporting verifies itself, and captures a more realistic “you are there” feeling of events than Edward R. Murrow ever dreamed.

Iranian protesters equipped with cameras and cell phones are, in every sense possible, making the news.

A while ago I wrote about the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and how the ongoing collapse of the newspaper industry leaves a gap in the field of investigative journalism: The beat reporter who knows City Hall inside and out isn’t getting paid in the new post-newspaper era. (For that matter the foreign correspondent got lost in the budget cuts quite a while ago, which is part of why the best reporting from Iran is on YouTube.) I don’t know whether investigative reporting can always be crowd-sourced, but the way this week’s top story is being circulated could be a glimpse into the future of journalism.

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who as an ex-Navy SEAL is one of the few politicians in America with first-hand knowledge of waterboarding:

You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

I don’t do “what she said” posts often (actually never, come to think of it), but Hilzoy’s post on why we should prosecute war criminals, even if they were high-ranking members of the executive branch — especially if they were high-ranking members of the executive branch — pretty much covers it. This isn’t a partisan issue, unless you believe the rule of law shouldn’t apply to members of your own party.