Sen. Kent Conrad
As Joan highlighted for us yesterday, fellow Congressional
Democrats are pissed at Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) and his never-ending pursuit of the mythical bipartisanship pony.
While it's certainly true and worth considering that any budget that actually passes Congress would by definition have to have bipartisan support, there's something else that should be kept in mind here, too. The budget resolution is one of the rare instances where the Senate's dreaded 60-vote threshold doesn't apply. The budget is filibuster-proof, since Senate debate on it is limited by statute to 50 hours.
Now, there are ways for obstinate opponents to foul the works, and even extend debate past the 50 hour mark, but they're not particularly effective. So the upshot here is that the budget is a rare opportunity for Senate Democrats to speak with an undiluted voice in staking out an initial bargaining position, since a simple majority vote will carry the day on a budget resolution in the Senate.
Conrad's idea, though, apparently is to enter into negotiations with the crazier of the two Republican conferences—that being the House's Republican Conference—with a bill designed to try to strike a deal from the get-go. That's not going to be a popular strategy among rank-and-file Democratic observers, to be sure. And it's clearly not much more popular among his elected Democratic colleagues. But even if it weren't the case that more and more Democrats are coming every day to the conclusion that pre-compromising isn't a winning strategy, there's also the complicating factor of not knowing where the various and conflicting power-centers of Republican leadership are going to be on the issues come crunch time. There are clearly competing interests that pull in different directions on different issues. And even without that internal conflict, there are plenty of examples of Republican leaders being forced by external (read: Tea Party) pressures forcing reversals of course. Republicans apparently can't predict these tides, so there's little reason to think Democrats can.
During the Senate rules reform debates, I argued even after Republicans won control of the House that filibuster reform was necessary:
[I]f the Senate is going to function as a body—and since Democrats still hold the majority there, they might consider it a good thing if it also functioned—there's going to have to be reform. It would be a tremendous mistake, I think, for Democrats to surrender their ability to use the house they still control because they lost control of the other one. The Senate can't just sit there unused for two years. Especially if there's going to have any hope of Democrats winning anything in the next election. Only one of the houses of Congress is going to be capable of formulating the Democratic legislative policy agenda and putting it before the public heading into 2012. But that capability is, as we all know, too easily hamstrung under the current rules. Without reform, the filibuster renders it a nullity.
That's the dynamic we're looking at with the budget, where the filibuster isn't an option. Searching for a negotiated settlement may be a reasonable endgame since the budget resolution would eventually have to pass the House, but since there's virtually no chance of nailing it right off the bat, why not take advantage of one of the few opportunities to actually allow Democrats to stake out the Democratic position?
Conrad, who's retiring in 2012, thinks the Democratic position ought to be far to the right of where the rest of the caucus is. It's a political calculation, of course, and there's certainly an argument (with which most of us here would disagree) that the idea has some merit. But Conrad's taken himself out of the lineup for next year's political game. Let the calculation be made by the players looking to stay on the roster. Give Democrats planning to run in 2012 a solidly and recognizably Democratic budget proposition to run on. And if they think they can sell a compromise later on down the road, then give them room to do it.