Democracy Isn’t Worth It If Senators Can’t Be Good Buddies
By Shorter Bobo: Having the Senate run like every pretty much every other democratic legislature in the world would be like genocide. Now, when pro-apartheid southern Senators ran everything and everyone went out for drinks in a nice bipartisan fashion, those were the days!
…see also Chait, Benen, and (without endorsing his evaluation of the bill on the merits) Taibbi. And Yglesias.
…And Klein. Given the extent to which Republicans in and out of the media have pretended that using reconciliation for Bush’s upper-class tax cuts was different because the legislation was “bipartisan,” this point is especially important:
Nor has reconciliation been limited to bills with “significant bipartisan support.” To use Brooks’s example of the tax cuts, the 2003 tax cuts passed the Senate 50-50, with Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. Two Democrats joined with the Republicans in that effort. Georgia’s Zell Miller, who would endorse George W. Bush in 2004 and effectively leave the Democratic Party, and Nebraska’s Ben Nelson. So I’d say that’s one Democrat. One Democrat alongside 49 Republicans. That’s not significant bipartisan support.