Post-Election Elections

Am I the only political junkie who is yawning over the leadership elections held in the respective Senate and House party caucuses this week?

Well, no, I guess I'm not.

Here's where I'm lapsing into my realist persona again. We in the grassroots who pay attention to this stuff are aghast that House Pachyderms would have the temerity to keep John Boehner and Roy Blunt at the apex of their caucus. I managed to get in before the GOPers' hastily scheduled vote that I was all the way for Mike Pence as Minority Leader, and I was subsequently reminded of John Shaddegg as well, who'd have been outstanding as Minority Whip. Heck, flip-flop the posts and they'd have been just as good. But really, how often do such precipitous leadership coups actually take place? Particularly after a party has just gotten clobbered? Answer: not very. So why was this time going to be any different?

Besides which, as Dean Barnett cannily points out the link above, how widely known ARE Boehner and Blunt outside the political junkie community? Heck, I wouldn't bet much on Denny Hastert's notoriety, and he was Speaker of the House for eight years. Tom DeLay probably crossed over to mainstream fame, but for all the wrong reasons. Should all the crap from those two dribble down to Boehner and Blunt? Or did the latter two simply inherit a bad situation and prove unable to salvage it? And does that disqualify them from a shot at trying to get back what their caucus has lost?

Here's the measuring stick for B&B: how closely they listen to and follow Mike Pence's advice.

I'll admit that the new leadership on the Senate side is a bit harder to stomach. Mitch McConnell as Minority Leader was the same assemblyline dynamic as on the House side, since he'd been Majority Whip under Bill Frist. But Trent Lott - Trent f'ing Lott - as Minority Whip? A man who already led his caucus from a ten-seat majority to the minority once before? A man who got bitch-slapped on a regular basis during the second Clinton term? And when he wasn't getting humiliated by that White House, was constantly doing it to himself with one gaffe and surrender after another?

Actually, in a way that's almost a relief, since I was fully expecting Lott to be given McConnell's new job. That's how thorougly feckless the Senate GOP is and has always been.

Sure makes McConnell look good by comparison, though. So did McConnell’s comments to Cap’n Ed, up to a point:

McConnell spoke mostly extemporaneously. He made a couple of points in a short statement at the beginning of the call, mostly reminding people of the challenges and benefits of being in the Senate minority. "Forty-nine is not irrelevant," he pointed out, noting that it only takes forty-one to block undesirable legislation. As we have experienced in the majority, the filibuster threat allows the minority to have a lot of influence in shaping legislation. McConnell organized the last old-fashioned filibuster in 1994, "going to the mattresses" in an overnight session to block an egregious bill that would have made the government finance all political campaigns. This occurred six weeks before the 1994 elections that delivered Congress to the Republicans for the first time in forty years, so McConnell made his point that obstructionism sometimes pays….

He was adamant on the war that he would allow no de-funding, and he could create a lot of legislative mischief if it came down to a trench-fight on that issue. He seemed eager to use the divided government to pressure for better fiscal discipline, but gave us few concrete points to consider.

The above speaks, to me, of why Hugh Hewitt describes McConnell as "a superb Minority Leader". That job has as its primary function to so thoroughly gum up the workings of the Senate that the majority cannot govern. That’s what the Democrats did the past four years, and there’s every reason in the world to give them full and complete payback for it in the next two (and most likely beyond).

There’s also considerable reason to doubt that McConnell will carry out that function more than just occasionally - and that he'd be every bit as lackluster a Majority Leader as his lame-assed predecessors:

Well, sure. I mean, these precedents that are started in the Senate are almost never stopped. We were able to get the [judicial confirmation] filibuster genie back in the bottle. As you know, a year ago last summer, we were able to get Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor and Priscilla Owen, who had become kind of poster children for the left, we got them all confirmed, not to mention two solid Supreme Court nominees. So I think we've pushed them back on the filibuster.

That is the new Republican leader of the United States Senate defending John McCain’s "memo of understanding" debacle that prevented the rules change banning confirmation filibusters as having "pushed [the Democrats] back on the filibuster." True, there won’t be a Democrat in the White House making judicial appointments for another two years, and Republicans are no longer in any position to change that rule now, but this comment from Senator McConnell is not symptomatic of a partisan getting ready to go into battle against the political enemy. And that is what we’ve desperately needed the past few years, and even more so now. If we had gotten that warrior attitude, we would not have lost the majority in the first place.

~ ~ ~

The Democrats have never lacked for that warrior attitude. What they have lacked is sanity, discretion, maturity, civility, ethics, decorum, morality, common sense…well, never mind, I could go on for days about that.

As expected, Dirty Harry and Ali Dickbar Al-Durbini exchanged the "Minority" modifiers on their titles for "Majority" ones. And Crazy Nancy Pelosi got her Speaker’s gavel. Only question now is who’s going to lift it for her – a task that can’t be as difficult as all the times she’s lifted other parts of her person.

Her reputation, meanwhile, has been going in the opposite direction, as first exemplified by her backing of Jack "Haw-Haw" Murtha for House Majority Leader. A gesture of support that Murtha repaid by calling her proposed congressional ethics bill "total crap". Which it is, in the sense that the Democrats are utterly devoid of ethics and this bill is as purely superficial and sheerly cynical as it is devoid of substance or teeth. Ten to one the Dems exempt themselves from it altogether. That’s not, of course, what the famous Abscammer meant by it, showing that his penchant for spectacular indiscretion has not diminished with advanced, debilitating age.

Ditto the dumb broad who touted him for Majority Leader. Her House caucus gave her the big "FU" and elevated Minority Whip Steny Hoyer to the job instead, in the self-same "assemblyline fashion", and it wasn’t even close.

I have to admit to at least mild surprise that House Donks didn’t take this prime opportunity to gratuitously and malevolently rub GOP noses in last week’s defeat by inflicting Murtha on us. I guess it speaks to how powerful process and hierarchy really are, which reinforces why Boehner and Blunt were retained on the Republican side. It also illustrates how un-powerful Crazy Nancy really is even amongst her own caucus.

Having failed to screw over Hoyer (against whom she apparently has carried a grudge ever since their leadership race four years ago), her next crusade – to replace Jane Harman atop the Intelligence Committee with the corrupt, disgraced, impeached ex-federal judge Alcee Hastings – is drawing even harsher reviews from quarters that only now evidently feel liberated to start lobbing some friendly fire:

That embarrassing experience should induce Pelosi (D-San Francisco) — who appeared chastened before reporters Thursday — to reconsider another ill-advised promotion: Her apparent intention to bestow the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee not on the panel's ranking Democrat, Representative Jane Harman (D-Venice), but on Representative Alcee L. Hastings (D-FL).

Hastings, like Murtha, seems an unlikely choice for a leadership role in what Pelosi has been advertising as "the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history." [snicker] Hastings was impeached as a federal judge and removed from office in the late 1980s (although he was acquitted of bribery in a criminal trial in 1983).

A litany of explanations have been adduced to explain why Pelosi would bypass Harman, an expert on intelligence matters who has won the respect of both parties while criticizing some of the Bush Administration's excesses in the war on terror. None of them is persuasive. Harman has earned this chairmanship.

And, since committee chairmanships are not determined by full caucus vote, Harman will not get it. This screwing won’t have quite the visibility that a Majority Leader "SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!" would have had, though given the Intelligence Committee’s crucial role in the GWOT, the actual damage to the country will be considerably worse. But then the Dems will be shutting down the war effort anyway, so I guess as far Crazy Nancy is concerned, it doesn’t matter. Besides, when al Qaeda hits Manhattan with an Iranian-supplied nuke, the Hastings committee will hold highly entertaining investigatory hearings garroting the hapless Bushies dragged before it (even if they’re no longer in office when the attack comes).

What has Crazy Nancy proved this week? That’s she’s a liar. That she’s a crook. That she’s an extremist. That she isn’t fit to lead a quilting circle, much less the House of Representatives. But that’s what the American people chose last week.

It may have sounded weak for Republicans to sound the alarm during the midterm campaign about the manyfold dangers of a Pelosi speakership, but it was also preciently true. Because the American people did not heed those warnings, the American people will now reap the bloody whirlwind they have sewn.

Will it change any minds two years from now?