Dear Harry Reid... You need to call Senator Lieberman's bluff, and force him to filibuster a Health Care Reform bill with Medicare expansion in it.
As covered on various news outlets and blogs, the filibuster has increased dramatically in use since Joe Lieberman cosponsored Senator Tom Harkin's attempt to revise it in 1995. It was a problem then, and Lieberman fought a lonely fight against it, barely getting into double digits of support when it was voted down. At the time, Lieberman made many principled statements about how the Senate was a dysfunctional legislative body and how the filibuster was being misused. And now the filibuster is an even more common tactic, and Lieberman himself is threatening to use it to kill perhaps the most important social legislation in a generation.
Making things worse, his threatened filibuster is against the party that he caucuses with and grants him the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. And the legislation is one of the key priorities of the new President who stood with Lieberman in the divisive primary he lost in Connecticut a few years back (but went on to win as an Independent).
But Lieberman's hypocrisy doesn't end there. Lieberman is threatening to filibuster the latest compromise because it includes a Medicare buy-in down to age 55, something he is on the record in favor of for almost a decade and as recently as just September! This turn of events is quite unbelievable.
So, Leader Reid, it's time to call Lieberman's bluff. Make the Senate stay in session through the holidays. Make it a round-the-clock fight for cloture. Make Lieberman's filibuster into an endless news cycle about his hypocrisy. Get the blogs, commentators, and commercials rolling. Play the video tapes of him speaking in favor of the Medicare buy-in over and over and over. Play some hardball and see how much appetite Lieberman really has for having his entire political legacy (what's left of it) tarnished forever.
The problem with the Senate filibuster rule is not that people are using it. The problem is that the leadership of the majority is allowing the filibuster to be used without ever forcing the minority to play out the tactic. In order to sustain a filibuster, a minority of 41 Senators must not allow the debate of the Health Care Reform bill to end.
The leadership likes to avoid these situations because they are very inconvenient to the Senators' schedules of heading back to the state to campaign and raise money and have their much beloved vacations. With the holidays already upon us, no Senator will want to stay in session. By forcing the Senators to keep discussing it, they'll take away the beloved break. Boo hoo.
But, isn't Health Care Reform important enough? Isn't it worth the inconvenience to 100 Senators and their staffs to keep the Senate in session until Lieberman comes to his senses? Can he really stand an onslaught of round-the-clock Lieberman Hypocrisy Watch that would be a filibuster?
Thousands of Americans give their lives in the line of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands more patriots took time off, volunteered, gave money they did not have to help Obama and the Democrats take back our government in 2008. It's time that the 'patriots' in the U.S. Senate make some sacrifices too. Millions of Americans don't have Health Care Insurance, and thousands die every year for lack of affordable services. If this is not a crisis that demands that the U.S. Senate stays in session until it is resolved, what is? If they did, they will show who the obstructionists to progress are, and maybe, just maybe, get the Democractic base fired back up again for those midterm elections.
EDIT: to those of you who comment that the majority cannot force the old-time, round-the-clock debate where Senators read from the dictionary or whatever in order to keep the floor, you are right. So a round-the-clock debate on the Senate floor is unlikely, however, the majority can keep the Senate in session through the holidays and require votes that keep the Senators from leaving DC. The real, round the clock debate is in the media. So, although I appreciate the passion of folks fact checking, please understand the proposal in it's whole before dissing it.