Trump vetoed the military appropriations bill and the Senate was going to override it. At the same time, the House voted a separate bill to grant people $2K for Covid relief. Mitch was not going to let the Senate vote on the $2K. Bernie was going to hold up the military bill override until Mitch let the Senate vote on the $2K. That action by Bernie was supposed to be happening yesterday (Dec 31).
So I’d like to know what happened. Googling just shows that the Senate is going to vote on the override today or tomorrow. What happened to Bernie’s plan? How did it fizzle out?
There was never a “plan”. There was a grandstanding publicity stunt. Bernie never had any leverage. The most he could do was throw up some procedural bumps and slightly delay proceedings. A cloture vote to end debate and shut down a filibuster only requires 60 votes. A vote to override a veto requires 67. McConnell had more than the 67 lined up for the veto override. The “filibuster” was a meaningless, empty threat.
McConnell did face real political pressure, from the White House, possible defectors in his own caucus, and public opinion to do something with the House bill to increase individual payments to $2,000. So, he did exactly what many predicted, indeed what anyone who’s been in Congress for 30 years should have been able to predict. He attached “poison pills” (measures Democrats would be sure to oppose).
At that point, a vote on the stimulus increase would have just forced Democrats, including Bernie, to go on record voting against the $2000 (and the other measures, like an investigation into voter fraud in the 2020 elections).
Wow, that’s cutting it close. Assuming an all-night session, they will get to vote at 7PM tomorrow, just five hours before this session of congress ends.
Just to underline how meaningless Bernie’s threat of a filibuster was as a procedural obstacle, the Senate voted 80-12 to “invoke cloture” and limit additional debate to no more than 30 hours. They only needed 60. Apparently Bernie gave up at that point, because the Senate didn’t use any of those 30 hours but rather went straight into the vote to override, which is about to pass overwhelmingly.
Also, giving up once it was clear the filibuster threat was solidly beaten and the override was a foregone conclusion, by getting the Defense bill out of the way quickly and mercifully (no need to redebate something that had ALREADY been debated to death on its merits), leaves everyone on all sides free to end the term doing their best grand posturing over the additional relief bill without being accused of costing anyone anything else unrelated.
I’m just wondering what exactly Sanders was thinking. The filibuster threat was just so obviously pointless.
Was it just a cynical grab for headlines?
Is he really so clueless after 30 years in Congress, that he actually thought he was doing something useful? Like, did he look around after the House passed its bill, wonder why nobody was trying to move it forward in the Senate, and genuinely did his best to bring it to a vote? Like a toddler who makes a mess in the kitchen, then looks up with a smile and says, “Look, I’m helping!”?
Did he just get so caught up in his self-image as a Man of Principle that he “took a stand” without even caring if it would actually accomplish anything?
@flurb, I know you posted in another thread that McConnell’s counter-move would be a poison pill provision, which is exactly what happened. I couldn’t find that post to respond to it, so I’ll do it here. Good call.
There is value in being seen to try something even if it will fail than to do nothing, and be seen as not trying at all. You can call it a cynical grab for headlines, but it’s part of being a politician and representing your people—sometimes they want to know you tried.
It also wasn’t a guaranteed failure if all of the Dems would have stood with him, feeling pressured to do so by their constituents.
I mean, there’s even the idea that the Dems should go ahead and call the Republicans bluff. The poison pills in this case are things the Republicans wouldn’t want, either. Section 230 gone means all their conspiracy and alternate facts people get banned instantly, and more conservatives are kicked off of platforms, not fewer.
Ha, thanks. I wish I could claim some sort of sophisticated political insight, but the truth is that Mitch is not a complicated Majority Leader. He certainly isn’t playing three dimensional chess and weaving intricate legislative strategies to run rings around his opponents. His strength as Majority Leader is simply his willingness to bulldoze through his agenda without giving one rip about the opinions of his Democratic colleagues, the public at large, or the judgment of history.
If you try to do something just for the sake of being seen to be doing something, even though you know it won’t actually accomplish anything, yes, I’d call that cynical.
Well, “all of the Dems” might “have stood with him” if he had actually bothered to talk to them, tried to rally their support, and tried to coordinate with House and Senate Democratic leadership, instead of making a lone wolf grandstanding gesture.
The fact is, they didn’t, and the whole thing accomplished exactly nothing substantive. If it was intended to be a genuinely effective legislative maneuver, it failed utterly. Which gets back to him either being weirdly ignorant of how Congress actually works, or just not caring about whether he actually accomplished anything substantive.
Well…maybe? But that’s not what happened, because virtually no one else in the Democratic caucus thought it made sense. Maybe they were wrong, and Sanders was right, and McConnell was bluffing, and they should have called the bluff. But then we get back to Sanders not actually doing anything effective to call the bluff.
This is why I roll my eyes at the Bernie zealotry. After three decades where he still doesn’t know how to accomplish anything beyond empty posturing, what would any serious person expect of him?
What I don’t understand about Bernie is that when he was mayor of Burlington, he was so pragmatic and so effective carrying out some of his socialist ideas (about housing, for example) that even the business community supported his re-election. Now he comes across as an uncompromising idealogue.
In Burlington, he was the mayor. It has a council-mayor government, and I don’t know how powerful the council and the mayor are relative to each other, but at the least he was first among equals, with at least some independent power. Burlington is also a small city, only about 40,000 residents, with Progressives outnumbering Republicans, so he was on very friendly political turf. He was “compromising” with slightly more Progessive council members, less progressive but still progressive Democratic council members, and mostly liberal Northeast Republican council members.
Also, when you personally know the members of the local chamber of commerce, and some of them are themselves progressives (even if they’re not Progressives), it’s a lot easier to be “pragmatic” and make deals.
In the House, he was just one of 435 Congressmen. In the Senate, he’s just one of 100 Senators. In order to get anything done, he actually has to make real compromises. He has to deal with people who are diametrically opposed to him, who represent completely different constituencies. And he has to do that as a peer, at best. At worst, he was the junior Representative, and is now the junior Senator, from a small state. And he’s not even a member of either party (although he “caucuses” with the Democrats and ran for President as one, he isn’t actually a member of the party and can’t ever hold a Senate leadership position).
