Reid’s Bold Move

When you’re Senate Majority Leader, everyone’s fighting for your ear. Today, the netroots have Harry Reid’s ear, instead of the punditocracy.

This blog has long been calling for Senate leaders to fight for bold, popular legislation and stand up to those blocking its passage -- instead of flinching at filibusters, chasing unprincipled compromises and accommodating the conservative minority.

We launched the petition last month urging Reid to do just that.

And many other bloggers -- including Digby, Taylor Marsh, Open Left, Booman Tribune, ThinkProgress, Miles Mogulescu, FireDogLake, Leisure Guy, The Next Hurrah, The Carpetbagger Report, Tangled Webs, Billy Creek, Politits, Talking Points Memo, South Georgia Liberal, Pygalgia, The Newshoggers, The Sideshow, Seeing The Forest and Blue Jersey -- have rallied around the effort.

In the other corner is the punditocracy -– represented by folks like New York Times’ David Brooks, Washington Post’s David Ignatius and Time’s Joe Klein. In particular, Brooks recently accused Reid of thwarting a biparistan consensus to change course (but remain) in Iraq, for political purposes.

For six months, the Senate leadership largely took the counsel of the punditocracy. Bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake. Compromise for compromise’s sake. The argument was that’s the only way to responsibly govern and win the respect of the electorate.

But it was a bust. Despite all the efforts to water down legislation and curry the favor of the conservative minority, conservatives obstructed most everything anyway.

Few voters realize this, because these filibusters have been mere minutes long, if even that much. If Democrats couldn’t get 60 votes to break a filibuster, they would simply pull legislation off the floor, or not bother to put it on the floor. When Democrats avoid conflict, the media ignore the story, and with it, the conservative obstructions.

Conservatives were able to block popular legislation, without the public knowing about it. There was no political risk taken, no political price paid.

After seeing congressional approval drop below Bushian levels, Reid and his peers have apparently concluded the punditocracy doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

(Perhaps the last straw was David Brooks’ baseless column attacking Reid for not letting Democrats Carl Levin and Jack Reed compromise with GOP Senators Dick Lugar and John Warner. In fact, it is Reid who is fully supporting the Levin-Reed proposal, and Lugar and Warner who refuse to abandon the White House’s goal of indefinite occupation and create a bipartisan coalition to end it.)

Sen. Kent Conrad told Air America’s Young Turks last week (via Open Left) that “there's a growing consensus” among Democrats to force sustained filibusters “to let the American people see just how obstructionist this Republican minority is being.”

And today, as Bob Geiger reported, Reid is daring conservatives to filibuster the redeployment of troops from Iraq -- in broad daylight and broad moonlight -- with the media and the public watching.

As Talking Points Memo notes, conservatives certainly have a legal right to filibuster. And if they feel the public would support their obstructionism, they won't mind all the additional attention.

However, we haven't seen conservatives go out of their way to brag about being obstructionists. (Though occasionally they can't help themselves.)

That's because loud and proud obstructionism of popular initiatives carries big risks. Either public pressure will push enough Republicans to the majority camp to break those filibusters. Or, voters will seek to remove those who obstruct what they want at the ballot box next year.

Either way, exposing the obstructionists will eventually lead to better legislative results than what we've seen the past six months. In other words, fighting for good legislation is responsible governing.

Perhaps the punditocracy will try to pillory Reid for embracing those insidious bloggers and those awful opponents of indefinite occupation (who comprise the majority of voters).

But Reid’s bold move is no evidence of political pandering. Senate leaders were not pandering to the punditocracy when they took its advice for the last six months. They just thought the pundits gave good advice.

And Senate leaders are not pandering now. They just realize the pundits were wrong.

Unlike the White House and the conservative minority, these Senate leaders are able to recognize when a strategy isn’t working.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future