[crossposted and re-edited from
Political Dogfight]
While I had been campaigning for Ol Joe's removal from his committee's and even got a petition with over 6,000 individually written emails into Harry Reids office, I then began to remember some arcane info stored in this old head and realized that there was more complications involved than I thought.
Now Bob Geiger has it all laid out very clearly. Here's a few excerpts whether we like them or not:
Make no mistake about it: Joe Lieberman has crossed the line in so many ways that,<snip>, it's time for all Senate Democrats to drop the hammer on Joe and publicly renounce him <snip> Lieberman is doing everything he can to undermine the national Democratic party<snip>.
<snip>
And, while many of the calls for harsh action from Reid may be righteous, bloggers castigating him for not stripping Lieberman of his committee assignments <snip><snip>and urging their readers to call Reid's office to harangue him about this, are simply wrong and not reporting accurately on what is or is not within Reid's authority.
Based on the way the Senate works procedurally, this is simply not something that Reid even has the authority to do.
<snip>
The membership in Senate committees is decided at the start of every Congress with a haggled-out thing called an "organizing resolution." The entire Senate votes on it
<snip>
To give Joe his well-deserved comeuppance by taking him off committees and effectively making him the most junior member of the Senate, Reid would have to formally propose an amendment to the current organizing resolution, manage to get it to a vote and then get every Democrat and a handful of Republicans to vote for a new committee organization sans Lieberman.
<snip>
To get the full value of the entire article you really need to read the whole thing. YOu can see I had to edit the hell out of it to get the money quote in bold into the main article area. Please read the entire article. But the upshot is that no matter what we did Leader Reid had his hands tied.
This reality, and the fact more didn't know it (including me), also points out that we, as the Blogsphere, need to learn more about Senate procedure.
Anyone suprised at the existence of a 'secret hold' in the Senate hasn't been around long. And it has been used effectively to hold really bad legislation too.
We, as a group, need to learn more about the actual acts of Goverance if we want our full power to be felt. I'm glad Bob Geiger finally got the exact facts on the table where they can be seen.
Now when Lamont wins we won't care about them!