(Author’s Note — Meteor Blades took notice of this humble diary and scolded my amount of blockquoting….soooooo I shall attempt to paraphrase Taibbi’s genius article and randomly blockquote elsewhere, to be sneaky...and such.)
Huge hattip to penelope pnortney for posting this article in a comment. I read it and this holds all the answers as to why Sanders needs to get into office and how, just maybe, if he did, those “unicorns and kittens” he promises would become reality.
2005, the year before Sanders became a Senator, Matt Taibbi followed him around as he pushed through 4 massive amendments that actually passed in the House, then thanks to The HORROR SHOW THAT IS CONGRESS all got neutered. Perhaps if Sanders is in the Oval Office, that will change.
For all the fuss over his "socialist" tag, Sanders is really a classic populist outsider. The mere fact that Sanders signed off on the idea of serving as my guide says a lot about his attitude toward government in general: He wants people to see exactly what he's up against.
(SNIP)
. In the first few weeks of my stay in Washington, Sanders introduced and passed, against very long odds, three important amendments. A fourth very nearly made it and would have passed had it gone to a vote. During this time, Sanders took on powerful adversaries, including Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, the Export-Import Bank and the Bush administration. And by using the basic tools of democracy – floor votes on clearly posed questions, with the aid of painstakingly built coalitions of allies from both sides of the aisle – he, a lone Independent, beat them all.
It was an impressive run, with some in his office calling it the best winning streak of his career. Except for one thing.
By my last week in Washington, all of his victories had been rolled back, each carefully nurtured amendment perishing in the grossly corrupt and absurd vortex of political dysfunction that is today's U. S. Congress. What began as a tale of political valor ended as a grotesque object lesson in the ugly realities of American politics – the pitfalls of digging for hope in a shit mountain.
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Ok: pause..go back, reread that. Sanders, the LONE INDEPENDENT, beat Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, the Export-Import Bank and the Bush administration.
So to the “What the hell has Sanders ever done?” people, here you go. Here's your sign.
As Taibbi points out, Amendments take up a great deal of time. Most Congresscritters use them to tweak current bills or pending bills to get a better outcome or new law.
Sanders is the amendment king of the current House of Representative. Since the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, no other lawmaker – not Tom DeLay, not Nancy Pelosi – has passed more roll-call amendments (amendments that actually went to a vote on the floor) than Bernie Sanders. He accomplishes this on the one hand by being relentlessly active, and on the other by using his status as an Independent to form left-right coalitions.
Okay, pause again: BY FORMING LEFT-RIGHT COALITIONS. Yeah, that's right, Sanders manages to work with both sides to get things done. Please, please don’t tell me that Republicans will suddenly stop hating all things Clinton if she is elected and choose to work with her, because you KNOW that’s a pile of unicorn shit a mile high.
One of the Four Amendments Taibbi discusses is one that Sanders proposed to rollback Section 215 of the Patriot Act:
Section 215 allows law enforcement to conduct broad searches of ordinary citizens – even those not suspected of ties to terrorism – without any judicial oversight at all.
As a reminder, Clinton, unlike Sanders VOTED YES BOTH TIMES on the Patriot Act. (This is a different source article, aka Politifact)
Clinton and Sanders voted differently on the USA Patriot Act, a 2001 bill designed to combat terrorism, in part by granting broad surveillance powers to the National Security Agency. In her first year as a senator, Clinton voted in favor of the bill, while Sanders, by that time a 10-year veteran of the House, voted against it.
The pair did not change positions on votes to renew the legislation in 2005 and 2006.
Sanders voted against a second extension in 2011 as well, three years after Clinton left the Senate for the State Department.
Now back to Taibbi’s article: Just reading about all the antics these people pull on each other is sickening, things like Sensenbrenner turning off the lights in committee rooms while Dems were still waiting to talk. Yuck! Sanders took time to point out to Taibbi that the reason the committee rooms are often cramped and ill-lit is to dissuade the press and outsiders from seeing what goes on there.
The second amendment Sanders has with him is a sneaky bit of legislation that would, according to Taibbi, would outlaw the fucked up searches that the Patriot Act allowed, by defunding the DOJ’s ability to do them. It's sneaky but that’s what he has to do to try to get things done. By carving out bloated contracts or funding Congresscritters can change parts of bills.
For one thing, it's easier to offer such amendments to appropriations bills than it is to amend bills like the Patriot Act. Therefore, Sanders often brings issues to a vote by attempting to limit the funds for certain government programs – targeting a federal loan here, a bloated contract there. "It's just another way of getting at an issue," says Sanders.
And it worked, Sanders Amendment Passed on June 15th. Then Rep Flake and conniving within the House torpedoed it. By the end of this whole thing, which goes into how Rep Flake supported Sanders, then backstabbed him by making his own, much more useless and weak amendment which was then passed because Flake’s amendment gutted all the power from Sanders but they could still say they passed SOMETHING to address the concern regarding Library and Bookstore searches. WHAT THE HELL?
Now here’s a disgusting little revolving door tidbit.
In the ongoing orgy of greed that is the U.S. Congress, the Financial Services Committee is the hottest spot. Joel Barkin, a former press aide to Sanders, calls Financial Services the "job committee," because staffers who work for members on that committee move into high-paying jobs on Wall Street or in the credit-card industry with ridiculous ease.
"It seems like once a week, I'd get an e-mail from some staffer involved with that committee," he says, shaking his head. "They'd be announcing their new jobs with MBNA or MasterCard or whatever. I mean, to send that over an e-mail all over Congress – at least try to hide it, you know?"
Or, you know, maybe like a Former SOS making tons of speeches to Wall Street and Health Insurance Companies. Maybe...
The third amendment that Taibbi gets to witness is one where Sanders takes on a major bank
The afternoon Senate vote is the next act in a genuinely thrilling drama that Sanders himself started in the House a few weeks before. On June 28th, Sanders scored a stunning victory when the House voted 313--114 to approve his amendment to block a $5 billion loan by the Ex-Im Bank to Westinghouse to build four nuclear power plants in China.
The Ex-Im loan was a policy so dumb and violently opposed to American interests that lawmakers who voted for it had serious trouble coming up with a plausible excuse for approving it. In essence, the U.S. was giving $5 billion to a state-subsidized British utility (West-inghouse is a subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels) to build up the infrastructure of our biggest trade competitor, along the way sharing advanced nuclear technology with Chinese conglomerate that had, in the past, shared nuclear know-how with Iran and Pakistan.
Pause again. SANDERS GOT A $5 BILLION LOAN TO A BANK BLOCKED. He didn’t just tell them to “Cut it out”, he cut off their damn funding. Oh it turns out that Rep Coburn, yeah Coburn, actually likes Sanders.
John Hart, a spokesman for Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (who would later sponsor the Senate version of the Sanders amendment), laughs when asked what his opponents were using as an excuse for the bill. "One reason I got," Hart says, "was that if we build nuclear power plants in China, then China would be less dependent on foreign oil, and they would consume less foreign oil, and so as a result our oil prices would go down."
Oddly enough, Coburn, a hard-line pro-war, pro-life conservative who once advocated the death penalty for abortion doctors, is a natural ally for the "socialist" Sanders on an issue like this one. Sanders among what he and his staff call "honest conservatives," people like California's Dana Rohrabacher and Texas libertarian Ron Paul, with whom Sanders frequently works on trade issues. "A lot of times, guys like my boss will have a lot in common with someone like Sanders," says Jeff Deist, an aide to Rep. Paul. "We're frustrated by the same obstacles in the system."
Taibbi then talks about how Washington basically tells any and all attempts to clean up it’s lobbying culture to screw off and does nothing about it. It’s an disturbing section written in a very entertaining fashion.
Then Taibbi talks about how Sanders got a contract with Lockheed Martin canceled.
Sanders secured another apparent major victory against a formidable corporate opponent. By a vote of 238--177, the House passed a Sanders amendment to cancel a $1.9 billion contract that the Federal Aviation Administration had awarded to Lockheed Martin to privatize a series of regional Flight Service Stations.
The reason Sanders was against this was two-fold: first, it impacted jobs in Vermont and second, there was no guarantee that the jobs that were lost through privatization would be replaced somehow. He talks about how many big companies basically tell Congress “Give us this tax break or we will move to China faster than we already are.”
Beyond that, Sanders sees in issues like the Westinghouse deal and the Lockheed Martin deal a consistent pattern of surrender to business interests by Congress. Too often, he says, Congress fails to tie government assistance to the company's record in preserving American jobs.
And here's where it all starts to go bad. Sanders was unable to find a Senator to back the bill in the Senate because the President threatened a veto and then Harry Reid cast the final vote against it. Well done Harry (faceplam)
And the bittersweet note:
In the end, after just a few weeks, every one of Sanders' victories was transformed into a defeat. He had won three major amendments and would likely have won a fourth, if the Rules Committee had permitted a vote on his Patriot Act measure. In each case, Sanders proved that his positions held wide support – even among a population as timid and corrupt as the U.S. Congress. Yet even after passing his amendments by wide margins, he never really came close to converting popular will into law.
Sanders seems to take it strangely in stride. After a month of watching him and other members. I get the strong impression that even the idealists in Congress have learned to accept the body on its own terms. Congress isn't the steady assembly line of consensus policy ideas it's sold as, but a kind of permanent emergency in which a majority of members work day and night to burgle the national treasure and burn the Constitution.
This article is huge, in depth and scary but what it shows to anyone who is willing to read it that NOT ONLY can Sanders get victories against entrenched interests, he has a history of working with both sides and has ALWAYS FOUGHT AGAINST the greedy, corrupt powerbrokers in government.
And I ask Hillary Supporters again, if they think, in all honesty, that she would be able to build any kind of left-right coalition to get things accomplished. Sanders has proven he can, what about her?