The Washington Independent's Andrew Restuccia:
A Senate aide says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) could file a motion to proceed on his energy and oil spill legislation as early as today, which would leave room for the first procedural vote on the bill to take place on Wednesday.
As I noted earlier today, if there aren’t enough votes to clear the first procedural vote, the bill will likely be punted until after the August recess, given the tight floor schedule this week.
Looking forward a bit, can Reid’s bill pass after the recess? The answer may come down to a couple factors.
First and foremost is whether negotiations behind the scenes can get on-the-fence Democrats like Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.) and some Republicans on board. These negotiations will likely focus on language in the bill that removes a company’s $75 million cap on economic liability in the event of a spill. Landrieu and Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), as well almost all Republicans, have raised concerns about the language.
So because every damn piece of non-budgetary policy needs 60 votes to pass, one of three things will happen before we even get to the point of trying to secure one (or more) Republican votes for the legislation. Either (1) Dems will cave to the parochial concerns of two big oil state senators in their own caucus and maintain the cap on damages that functions effectively as a bailout for big oil and we'll need one Republican vote; (2) those two senators will buck the interests of their corporate supporters giving Democrats 59 votes to repeal the cap and we'll also need one Republican vote; or (3) Dems won't cave and neither will the two Senators and we'll need three Republican votes.
It's tempting to say that in a perfect world, the second scenario would prevail, but that's not true, and not just because Republicans could still hold the legislation hostage. In a perfect world, none of this would be an issue -- it would take 50 votes to pass legislation in the Senate, and that would be that. But we don't live in a perfect world, and thanks to the filibuster, just about any legislation the Senate produces is virtually guaranteed to look and smell awful.
There's really only one way to get rid of the to the problems the filibuster creates and that's to get rid of it at the start of the next session when the Senate decides what it's rules are, a prerogative assigned to it by the Constitution. There's no way to predict with certainty what decision the Senate will make next January, but we do know they will make a decision. And as we can see with this legislation, if senators choose to maintain the filibuster intact, they'll have nobody to blame but themselves the next time a Mary Landrieu or Mitch McConnell decides to hold them hostage.