Centrist Democrats keep telling us DFHs we need to learn how to speak the language of the religious. Now it's been a while since I last went to Mass, and even longer since I last attended Sunday School, but a few things always stuck out to me. One of them was this passage from Proverbs 16:18:
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
I wonder if Senator Claire McCaskill is familiar with that verse. In a shockingly ignorant twitter, she said she was "proud" of the $100 billion in stimulus cuts:
Proud we cut over 100 billion out of recov bill.Many Ds don't like it, but needed to be done.The silly stuff Rs keep talking about is OUT.
"Silly stuff"? As Atrios points out that "silly stuff" includes:
big reductions (relative to the House Bill) in food stamps, school construction, head start, and COBRA subsidies for people who have lost their jobs.
Also included as "silly stuff" that Senator McCaskill is "proud" to have cut are the all-important state stabilization funds. Those funds are the bedrock foundation of the stimulus, by far the most important part of the overall bill. States face budget deficits of $100-$200 billion; California alone faces $40 billion in deficit. We need federal money to make up the difference, especially for helping teachers keep their jobs.
As I explained Friday night nearly 10,000 teachers in California, including my sister, face layoffs by March 15. The $40 billion in aid to state education budgets would help keep them employed.
And it would help keep others employed - waitresses, janitors, mechanics. It would prevent more foreclosures.
As d-day explained here's the full list of cuts that Senator McCaskill is "proud" to embrace:
$40 billion State Fiscal Stabilization
$16 billion School Construction
$1.25 billion project based rental
$2.25 Neighborhood Stabilization (Eliminate)
$1.2 billion in Retrofitting Project 8 Housing
$7.5 billion of State Incentive Grants
$3.5 billion Higher Ed Construction (Eliminated)
$ 100 million FSA modernization
$50 million CSERES Research
$65 million Watershed Rehab
$30 million SD Salaries
$100 million Distance Learning
$98 million School Nutrition
$50 million aquaculture
$2 billion broadband
$1 billion Head Start/Early Start
$5.8 billion Health Prevention Activity.
$2 billion HIT Grants
$1 billion Energy Loan Guarantees
$4.5 billion GSA
$3.5 billion Federal Bldgs Greening
Some of these may have higher priority than others, but for Claire McCaskill to call it all "silly" shows how totally divorced she is from the on-the-ground reality Americans are facing. It is as if she has no clue how badly off states are - that even Republican governors were pleading with the Senate to keep the state stabilization funds there.
"Pride goeth before destruction." McCaskill's pride will mean the destruction of public schools in many states, the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs, and the destruction of careers, of hopes and dreams.
"A haughty spirit goes before a fall." Because of McCaskill's, and Ben Nelson's, and the Snowe-Specter-Collins axis of evil's haughty spirits, the American economy is going to slide further into Depression. In states like California, the mass layoffs of teachers and other state employees that McCaskill has helped set into motion will negate the positive effects of the stimulus.
In fact, it's even worse when you realize that those mass layoffs are going to happen in the next few weeks - whereas much of the other valuable parts of the stimulus will not take effect until later this year or next year.
Some may claim we can restore the state funds later, but "later" is really too late from a practical perspective. Once teachers are laid off, schools make decisions about hiring and class sizes that will be in place until June 2010. It would be fall 2010 until the teachers laid off because of McCaskill's pride can get their jobs back.
How many will wait that long? How many more teachers will say "fuck it" and find another line of work that isn't so easily sacrificed by Senators who don't understand reality?
Pride goeth before a fall. Because of the "pride" of people like Senator McCaskill, the economic recovery has been dealt a significant blow. The Senate has often shown itself to be divorced from reality these last 8 years, but this is a more consequential failure than any of those, with the possible exception of their support for the Iraq War.
The United States Senate just doesn't get it. And it's a shame that Claire McCaskill, elected with strong netroots support in 2006, has so quickly become a part of the problem. Until the Senate gets snapped back into reality, or made more democratic (the 60 vote rule has to go), it will be the United States of America that falls so that a few Senators can brag about their pride.
Note: The above was written on Saturday, but my "Friday night" diary counted as my one alloted diary for Saturday. That worked out well because McCaskill just kept on twittering, digging the hole deeper.
Just saw Krugman's comments on reduction in recov act. Question for him. Would no stimulus act be better than one thats 800 B instead of 900
When that generated some critical twitters in response she went further:
Compromise had to happen or we would NOT have 60 votes. Period.
The first interesting thing is that as Atrios pointed out she's shifting the goalposts here:
Which Is It?
Were cuts to important and effective parts of the stimulus bill supported by her because Claire McCaskill agreed with the Republicans that such programs were "silly," or did she support cuts simply as a pragmatic step in order to get the bill passed?
My own replies to Senator McCaskill, which I'm not sure if she read or not, were:
@clairecmc There were other things to cut aside from state stab funds. Mass teacher layoffs negate the rest of the stimulus
and
@clairecmc your party is in power. Learn to make other side react to you. Stop letting them dictate to you.
The whole exchange is deeply revealing of the true attitudes of even some of our newer Democratic Senators. Claire McCaskill seems to have no real clue how to wield power in the majority. None. The notion that they could force Republicans to react to them, to back down, never crosses her mind - at all.
Let's say that the Republicans did carry out their filibuster threat. What would have happened then? Given the public's support for the stimulus, for Obama, and for Democrats, I have a very difficult time seeing how they could sustain a filibuster. Specter is up for reelection in 2010, and Snowe in 2012. If McCaskill would have continued the strong speaking style and opinion leadership she demonstrated by her remarks on executive pay to an attack on Republicans who filibustered, it would have helped mobilize public opinion against their obstruction.
I keep hearing "omg we didn't have 60 votes" as a defense of this doomed-to-fail stimulus deal. But every time someone mentions "60 votes" they fail to realize they are asking a question and not making a statement. The question then becomes "how do you get 60 votes?"
I'm a political scientist and a historian by training. One of the most persistent things you come to learn about political power is that it is defined by the ability to break your opposition. If you cannot force the other guy (or girl) to do what they don't want to do, you don't have political power.
Democratic Senators have persistently failed to show that they grasp the most elementary truths of how to wield power. They routinely fail to push the Republicans back up against a wall, and repeatedly refuse to try and rip the public support, such as it exists, out from underneath the GOP caucus. Nor do they show any real interest in changing Senate procedure to effectively wield power - reducing the cloture rule to 55 or 51 would guarantee their reelections AND revive the economy.
But instead, as Claire McCaskill tweets, the Bush-era rules still apply. If Republicans object, they must be made happy, instead of broken on the rack the way Americans want.
Even if McCaskill were right that nothing could have produced 60 votes short of compromise, she showed a stunning callousness and ignorance of the damage her compromise will wreak. Krugman estimates 600,000 jobs will be lost because of the Senate compromise. So how does McCaskill go out and celebrate?
I confess.Big cheat on diet at dinner. Choclate mousse with raspberry sauce? I don't think so.
Cold comfort to all those teachers who are going to get pink slips because of you. They won't be able to afford to cheat on their diets, or on their budgets - and hell, because you cut food stamps, we'll see how well they can even eat.