Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 32

New issue of Democracy | Michael Tomasky

It's that time again: a new issue of Democracy, the journal I edit, is out, and naturally I think you should check it out. The link to the homepage is right here.

We have a package about conservative and liberal ideas of government, with excellent pieces by Rick Perlstein and Alan Wolfe on conservatives, while Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer lay out a new idea of the principles that should guide progressive governance. Perlstein is fascinating history, Wolfe a forceful polemic, and Liu-Hanauer a challenging take that critiques not only conservatism but liberalism as well.

There's a great piece by Michael Berube on the legacy of the Sokal Hoax 15 years on. If you don't know what that was but are interested in the life of the mind, all the more reason to check it out. We have a really strong piece by Andrea Louise Campbell of MIT arguing for bringing a value-added tax to the US, a position most liberals would oppose. Brits: do you like the VAT? Are you past the point of even noticing it?

There's a jolly good roundtable of economists on the state of the US economy and jobs market now and what things will look like 10 years from now. And excellent book reviews on Obama's political beliefs, religion and political belief in America, the history of human rights, the end of the age of US hegemony, the legacy of the 1970s, and little essay by moi on the state of Arabs in America that I called "Moral Witness Through Comedy," which I thought was a pretty swell phrase if I say so myself.

So please visit the home page and have a look around. Good stuff. Thanks.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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The Republican capitulation | Michael Tomasky

The question on many lips in Washington these days is why the Republicans have suddenly become such wimps. From The Hill newspaper:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) lashed out at fellow Republicans Tuesday for a "capitulation ... of dramatic proportions" to Democrats and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the lame-duck Congress.

Graham said Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for allowing ratification of the New START Treaty and other legislation in the period before new lawmakers are sworn in in January.

"When it's all going to be said and done, Harry Reid has eaten our lunch," Graham said on Fox News radio. "This has been a capitulation in two weeks of dramatic proportions of policies that wouldn't have passed in the new Congress."

Erik Erikson of redstate.com has a theory:

As I've said for a while, with many people disagreeing, the 2010 election was about moving the Senate GOP right, not moving the Senate to the GOP. This past week makes my case for me.

The Senate GOP is decidedly mushy on many fronts and unwilling for really tough fights except in odd circumstances. The Senate GOP understands that Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Pat Toomey, and Marco Rubio are headed to the Senate as reinforcements for Jim DeMint. They are deeply worried because of it.

Why worry? Because the Senate GOP wants to cut deals with the Senate Democrats and they know that just Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Jim DeMint will be able to force deals much more conservative than the Senate GOP is.

So Senate Republicans decided to roll over on big issues now knowing that next year they will be forced further right than they might be comfortable.

Here's a golden truth some of you won't like, but is true nonetheless: Mike Lee and Rand Paul are worth ten regular Republican Senators any day of the week. They'll fight. And they'll win.

I hardly would agree with his notion of the current Senate GOP caucus as a bunch of wallflowers, but it is indeed worth remembering that he's right about the five guys he names. They'll be DeMint-ites, with (I'm guessing) the possible partial exception of Rubio, who has vice-president stamped all over his face and may do what he needs to be taken seriously by the party establishment. But the others will be serious extremists. Mike Lee of Utah got no attention during the election because his contest wasn't close, but he might be the most extreme of the lot.

But there's more to this story. The real battle will happen next March over spending. Congress is passing a "continuing resolution" to keep funding at present levels until that month, so that's when Republicans will try to force Obama and the Democrats to accept severe spending cuts.

The big fight is going to happen then. So they may be thinking, well, we'll give him DADT and Start, both of which poll well, so we're not seen as too obstructionist, and then we'll throw the hammer down next spring.

Even so, it's kind of shocking, and "capitulation" isn't too far off I guess. Is Harry Reid such a magician? Well, maybe he is. But under Senate rules, one senator can block anything. Jon Kyl could prevent a Start vote all by himself if he wanted to. So could Mitch McConnell. Isn't it now sort of embarrassing to McConnell what just happened - he came out against Start, and in the next two days 11 Republicans got on board for it?

Maybe we're seeing McConnell's limitations in some ways. He's a purely political creature and is regarded as pretty thin on substance. Maybe it's just in the nature of things, even in the Republican caucus, that the few people who are actually interested in substance, like Dick Lugar, have to prevail once in a while.

At any rate, this is a great session for Obama, but it might be very short lived.

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Where lame ducks soar | Michael Tomasky

To those whining about all the laws now passing in Congress: maybe the GOP shouldn't have threatened the filibuster so much

There's a hot debate going on right now in the National Football League. The NFL has 32 teams who plays in two conferences (National and American), which are themselves split into four geographic divisions. For the purposes of the playoffs, which are approaching quickly, six teams make the cut in each conference: the four division winners and the two non-divisional winners with the best records (the "wild card" entrants).

The current problem emanates from the National conference's western division (NFC West, as we say), where it is apparent that the division winner – possibly St Louis, or Seattle, or even San Francisco – will have a losing record. That team will still make the playoffs, even though other teams in stronger divisions with winning records will not.

Unfair? It's the rules. Presumably, the NFC West's weakness this year is somewhat aberrational. But you have to have rules.

There are rules, too – a few, anyway – in politics. One is that this current Congress, the 111th (a "Congress" lasts two years) in our history, is seated until January 2011. It's not exactly in the Constitution, but it's an old, old custom. A rule, even.

Now, some people aren't liking that rule so much. Here's a snippet of an editorial from Investor's Business Daily from Monday:

"The whole point of elections is to express the will of the people through their representatives. If voters decide to throw candidate A out in favour of candidate B, doesn't a lame-duck session effectively deny the consent of the governed? As one blogger put it, lame-duck sessions ignore the voters' 'restraining order' on Congress."

I didn't see that original "restraining order" quote, but I'd guess that it came from a conservative blogger,* since conservatives are increasingly up in arms about this lame-duck session because Barack Obama appears to be getting too many wins out of it. It now looks as though the Start treaty might pass, and while things looking iffier for the 9/11 responders' healthcare legislation, passage is still in the realm of the possible. All this activity by these lame ducks is transforming Obama from the damaged little finch he was after the election into a soaring eagle of promise-fulfillment and accomplishment. And they don't like it a bit.

I can see their point, up to a point. It's true that the voters spoke on 3 November. But the rules are the rules. These people are members of Congress until 5 January. If people want to change that rule, fine, then change it. But let's bear in mind that we're seeing this flurry of activity because we've just lived through a two-year period in which the Republican minority in the Senate has threatened a record number of filibusters and forced a massive number of cloture votes. Most of the things blocked by this minority, or at least a whole lot of them, enjoyed majority support among the people.

"Don't ask, don't tell" repeal is the most obvious example. It took the threat of a deadline for the Senate to finally shift out of neutral and take care of the matter, supported by better than 60% of the public. So, if we're going to change rules, then fine, but let's change the rules that stymie Congress, especially the Senate, because they require an absurd 60% of senators to agree to almost anything.

Besides, I can't help but notice that these allegedly unpopular measures sneaking in through the legislative backdoor are getting votes from … Republicans! And they're getting votes from Republicans because they are, in fact, not unpopular. The tax deal wouldn't have passed without Republican support. DADT repeal, as well. The Start treaty will need nine GOP votes, and it looks as if it will get them. So, if conservatives are unhappy about this productive lame-duck session, their beef is with the Republicans who keep voting for Obamian positions.

It's a railroad-age schedule in the jet era, our legislative calendar. No doubt about that. If they want to change it, fine. But until they do, the rules is the rules. Next year, when an openly gay soldier joins the army and volunteers for duty in Afghanistan, no one is going to say to him or her, "Sorry, but you only won this right from lame-duck lawmakers."

And if St Louis wins a playoff game, the football whiners will at least shut up, which is more than we'll ever be able to say about conservatives.

* Editor's note: good guess, Mike: the phrase was certainly used by Michelle Malkin

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The census numbers | Michael Tomasky

So the new census numbers are out today, and politically, it's all good short-term news for the Republicans, because of the gains in the (grrrrr) South. Ezra Klein has a list, which actually comes from Dave Weigel, showing the number of House seats gained and lost by certain states:

The gainers:

Arizona +1
Florida +2
Georgia +1
Nevada +1
South Carolina +1
Texas +4
Utah +1
Washington +1

The losers:

Illinois -1
Iowa -1
Louisiana -1
Massachusetts -1
Michigan -1
Missouri -1
New Jersey -1
New York -2
Ohio -2
Pennsylvania -1

You can see that most of the gainers are GOP controlled, and most of the losers are Democratic-leaning states. And even the most heavily Republican state on the losers list, Louisiana, is losing its seat because of the post-Katrina exodus; in other words, it lost city dwellers, so the one heavily Democratic area of the state is the area that shrank.

I should say that we don't yet seem to know exactly where these gains were inside these states. For example, if the Texas pickup is largely the result of Latinos, that may mean more Democratic seats in Texas. However, this will now give Texas 38 electoral votes next time around instead of 34, and those votes are certainly going to the Republican in 2012 .

The way I count it, and I'm honestly not sure if I'm doing this right, based on these changes Obama is down 12 electoral votes from 2008 if every state votes the same. Right? States Obama lost gain six seats, while states he won lose six seats. Well, 12 is a lot. That's a problem. Of course he's starting from a rather large cushion. He got 365 electoral votes last time, and you're no less the president if you get 300 or 282 or even 270.

Could it be that northerners are moving down south and changing the character of the place? Good God, let's hope so. That certainly seems to have happened in North Carolina to some extent. And Virginia and Florida. I'm not sure how many other candidates for such change exist down there though.

And God, while I'm at it, thank you for not letting everyone else know how glorious life is in Montgomery County, Maryland, lest they'd all move here.

United StatesUS politicsMichael Tomasky
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A note to conservative commenters | Michael Tomasky

Friends, trust me on this. You are doing yourselves no credit trying to explain Haley Barbour's comments away. I say this as your friend who is grateful for your participation in our conversation. You look ridiculous.

The Citizens Councils were racist outfits. Haley Barbour is defending them. They may not have burned crosses and bombed churches, but they did exist to support and help enforce segregation and prevent, as they would have put it, "mongrelization."

Why defend this? Why defend someone who is defending this? I truly do not understand. If today's political battles are more important to you than being on the proper side of history on this matter, this rather large question of America's great original sin, then your priorities are askew. Just bite the bullet here.

Christopher Columbus has nothing to do with this. Nor do Mexicans. And no one is hanging this whole history on Barbour, or saying all Republican voters are racists. And some other apparent first-timers who seem to know nothing of this history and take Barbour's words at face value would have been better off keeping their mouths shut.

Liberals have certainly made their historical errors. Believe me, my reputation on the left is for being the guy who spends maybe if anything a little too much time on those. I'm no apologist and sleep well at night thanks. And some of these liberal errors have had to do with race: the horrors of urban renewal, say.

But no liberal error in American history is remotely on the scale of the conservative errors on race, which began with enslaving human beings, extended into lamenting the great "Lost Cause" (can you imagine? Lost Cause??) and sweeps right up to today through statements like Barbour's, who remember is not just some mid-handicapper, back-slapping and racist-joke-telling asshole at the local country club but the governor of a state. They are outright lies about history that are delivered today with deeply malicious intent, especially in the age of a black president.

Lastly, I and Josh Marshall and Yglesias and many others are carrying on about this, I can promise you, not to damage Barbour's presidential prospects. I don't care about those. If anything, I hope he's the GOP nominee, as I believe I have written before. He's probably the second-ugliest available face of Republicanism today, so naturally I wouldn't mind letting America have the chance to experience what Republicans are saying they care about if they nominate him to face Obama.

We're carrying on because we're pissed off. There are many good things about the United States, but this is the single worst thing about it - its racial history, pertaining particularly to the South. Trying to downplay that today or compare it to something else is at best unserious. So please be serious. And anyway, if you are a Republican, do you really want to be represented in the world by that kind of idiocy?

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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Lo and behold, December 20 lives in infamy | Michael Tomasky

The Weekly Standard chose an interesting day to post the Haley Barbour story. Dennis G. of Balloon Juice makes the nice catch of reminding us all that:

Perhaps the Nit Diddler is in the news today to help celebrate the 150 Anniversary of South Carolina's act of treason that put the Nation firmly on the path to Civil War.

Yes! I'd forgotten about this story I read a couple of weeks ago:

NAACP members and supporters plan to hold a peaceful march in downtown Charleston the day of the ball, on Dec. 20, followed by a meeting and question-and-answer session focusing on slavery. Participants will watch segments of "Birth of a Nation," a 1915 silent film that portrayed Ku Klux Klan members as heroes.

Nearby at Charleston's Gaillard Municipal Auditorium, ball attendees, who will pay $100 a ticket, will don formal, period dress, eat and dance the Virginia Reel as a band plays "Dixie." The evening's highlight will be a play reenacting the signing of South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago, which severed the state's ties with the Union and paved the way for the Civil War.

South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession was indeed adopted on this day in 1860. The ordinance itself is brief. What's longer is something called Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, which spells out the reasons for the drastic move.

Did I say reasons? There's a fair amount of procedural gobbledygook, but then authors get to the heart of the matter, showing that there was one reason only really:

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress.

And so forth. I think you get the idea. And people are dressing up - TONIGHT, in YOOL 2011 - to commemorate a protest lodged against other states that wouldn't return slaves to South Carolina. And you ask me (some of you ask me, anyway) what I have against the South?

United StatesSouth CarolinaMichael Tomasky
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I'm sure it wasn't bad for Haley Barbour at all | Michael Tomasky

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, via TPM:

"You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK," said Barbour. "Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."...

...In interviews Barbour doesn't have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. "I just don't remember it as being that bad," he said. "I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white."

Did you go? I asked.

"Sure, I was there with some of my friends."

I asked him why he went out.

"We wanted to hear him speak."

I asked what King had said that day.

"I don't really remember. The truth is, we couldn't hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King."

Well. That was to a Weekly Standard reporter. This needless to say isn't quite how others described the era. From Kos:

"Look," said Nick Roberts of the Yazoo City Citizens Council, explaining why 51 of 53 Negroes who had signed an integration petition withdrew their names, "if a man works for you, and you believe in something, and that man is working against it and undermining it, why you don't want him working for you—of course you don't."

In Yazoo City, in August 1955, the Council members fired signers of the integration petition, or prevailed upon other white employers to get them fired. But the WCC continues to deny that it uses economic force: all the Council did in Yazoo City was to provide information (a full-page ad in the local weekly listing the "offenders"); spontaneous public feeling did the rest.

That, from a contemporaneous report by David Halberstam. And Yglesias adds more, having dug up language from a Citizens' Council pamphlet from back in the day:

Maybe your community has had no racial problems! This may be true; however, you may not have a fire, yet you maintain a fire department. You can depend on one thing: The NAACP (National Association for the Agitation of Colored People), aided by alien influences, bloc vote seeking politicians and left-wing do-gooders, will see that you have a problem in the near future.

The Citizens' Council is the South's answer to the mongrelizers. We will not be integrated. We are proud of our white blood and our white heritage of sixty centuries.

There's nothing new about this kind of lying. It goes back to the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and is little short of being a regional psychosis.

Go read David Blight's book Race and Reunion. Here's the Publishers' Weekly capsule review:

Almost all the dominant views of the Civil War and its aftermath, including Reconstruction and "reunion," prevalent in this country until the coming of the civil rights movement, were the direct result of an extensive Southern propaganda war, argues Blight (Amherst College professor of history and black studies), remnants of which are still flourishing in various racist subcultures. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted a century ago, shortly after the war, the North was tacitly willing to accept the South's representation of the conflict in exchange for an opening of new economic frontiers. Blight sets out to prove this thesis, surveying a mass of information (the end notes run to almost 100 pages) clearly and synthetically, detailing the mechanics of mythmaking: how the rebels were recast as not actually rebelling, how the South had been unjustly invaded, and how, most fabulously of all, the South had fought to end slavery which had been imposed upon it by the North. His argument that this "memory war" was conducted on a conscious level is supported by the Reconstruction-era evidence of protest, by blacks and whites alike, that he unearths. Yet these voices failed to dissuade the vast majority of Americans both North and South who internalized some version of the story. This book effectively traces both the growth and development of what became, by the turn of the 20th century and the debut of The Birth of a Nation, the dominant racist representation of the Civil War. A major work of American history, this volume's documentation of the active and exceedingly articulate voices of protest against this inaccurate and unjust imagining of history is just one of its accomplishments. (Feb. 19) Forecast: This book will be the standard for how public perceptions of the Civil War were formed and propagated in a manner directly analogous to today's doublespeak and spin control. It will be a regular on course syllabi, and will be glowingly reviewed, but the wealth and diversity of sources may keep some general readers away.

The moneyed interests of the North, Blight argues, were more interested in white reconciliation, for economic purposes. Within 50 years of the war's end, the South that had lost the war had effectively won the post-bellum spin war over the national narrative, with some (too much, alas) Yankee acquiescence.

Barbour may be an ignorant liar, but he isn't stupid. He's allegedly running for president. He knows who votes in Republican primaries in his presumed region of strength.

"I just don't remember it as being that bad"...and I'm sure it wasn't for him. God help us.

US politicsMississippiMichael Tomasky
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Is Michael Vick a good person now? | Michael Tomasky

Indulge us, our British friends, as we discuss American football. But this is really a much bigger subject as you will see, so please read on.

Many of my US readers will know that the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the New York Giants yesterday in an incredible fashion. Down 31-10 with 8:17 remaining in the game, they came back and won, scoring 28 points, winning the game on a punt return for a touchdown by DeSean Jackson as time expired, 38-31.

Context A: It was the first punt return to win a game with time expiring in the history of the league, says the NFL. Context B: No one scores 28 points in eight minutes of a football game. Maybe in a ridiculously mismatched college game, but even then it's exceedingly rare. But at the professional level, where there's a rough parity and where a 17-point win is a blowout, it just never happens. So it's one of the most stunning results in league history.

Eagles quarterback (the most important position and field general) Michael Vick engineered this win. Even in England you may know him from his troubled past, or shall we say sick past, leading a dog-fighting ring. He admitted to being involved directly in the killing of six to eight underperforming dogs, by...hanging or drowning.

He served a year prison, came back to football, under a dark cloud. He started the year as the Iggles' (as we say) second-string quarterback. But he won the starting job early in the season and has played (as we also say) lights out. He's probably going to be the league MVP.

So now here's the question, which is partially a philosophical one. Is Vick reformed? I've read some interviews, not a whole lot, and seen the big 60 Minutes interview. He seems sincere to me. He seems to grasp that he was a really bad guy.

But I would go even further: I don't think you can be a great athlete at that level and be living an effed up life. That level of excellence requires too much dedication and intensity. I'm not saying one has to be a boy scout or a devout whatever or even a really good person. But I do think that to be that good, you have to have an incredible focus, and to have such a focus, you simply cannot be living a screwed up life. Yes, there's Tiger Woods. So maybe my theory is all wet. But I suspect his case was unique. And golf, while mentally challenging, just isn't as intense and demanding as football.

Ergo, I think Vick is truly reformed. I say this by the way as one who has long cheered against him, because Virginia Tech (his university) was a leading rival of my dear gold and blue. I just don't think a person can perform that well week after week and at the same time be a sociopath.

Yes or no? I would, by the way, limit this claim to sports, and as the Tiger example shows, not even all sports. Like, I think one can be a great writer and be a sociopath; or architect or philosopher or civil engineer. But not an athlete. And maybe not a neuro-surgeon.

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Your snow | Michael Tomasky

When I read on the quiz comments thread last Friday that you were expecting 25cm of snow Saturday, it didn't quite sink on me that that's roughly 10 inches. We talk inches in America. Centimeters sound so small, it just didn't occur to me that any amount of centimeters could really add up to a debilitating snow.

For the record, an inch is 2.54 centimeters. Here is a conversion web site. Although in his column today, our redoubtable Michael White uses inches and feet too:

That, of course, is one reason why we're hearing so much about the bad weather, leading the TV bulletins and the newspapers. One inch of snow on the BBC TV Centre here in west London is equivalent to two feet on Aberdeen. We had a rare three and a half inches around here on Saturday morning and it's still on the ground.

So what gives here? And by the way what about this recipe business? Can't you people use teaspoons and tablespoons and ounces like the rest of us?!?

Anyway I'm writing this mostly to create a comment thread in which you can all share your snow stories of the weekend (Americans too - we had our rough spots), and to say to everyone on both (or even all) continents that I hope you're getting around all right.

WeatherMichael Tomasky
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Back to Start | Michael Tomasky

Now we return to the Start treaty, which just might have the votes. Harry Reid forced a procedural vote Sunday to cut off debate and it got the 60 needed votes, passing 60-32. The vote roll is here.

Now, as you know, usually when a matter clears the procedural 60-vote step, it's home free, because all that's needed after that is the simple majority vote of 51 for final passage. But this is a treaty, and according to the Constitution, treaties require the consent of two-thirds of senators. That's 67 - but only if everyone shows up. It's actually two-thirds "of the senators present." So if hypothetical somehow there were some massive storm and only 30 senators could make it to work, 20 would be needed to pass.

That's a silly example, used just to illustrate the point. But in fact, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is dealing with the very non-silly issue of prostate cancer and is preparing for surgery. That takes the magic number down to 66.

Yesterday five Republicans voted the (presumed) pro-ratification position: Dick Lugar (obviously), Judd Gregg, Robert Bennett, and both Tennesseans, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker (is there some humungoid goodie for Oak Ridge in this treaty or something?).

Also, eight senators didn't vote, five Republicans and three Democrats. Wyden was one of the three of course; the other two, Arlen Specter and Jean Shaheen, will presumably vote for the treaty. Of the Republicans, George Voinovich of Ohio has said he's for it, and Mark Kirk of Illinois might be. Two will be nos, and one is a maybe, surprisingly, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who actually voted in committee to ratify.

Sorry if this is too deep in the weeds, but we're about done. Bottom line: If everyone but Wyden shows up and votes as I'm guessing here, that's 65 or 66 votes in support, depending on Isakson. That's the difference between failure and passage. Where, you might be wondering, are the Maine ladies? They both voted the McConnell position Sunday.

Speaking of Mitch McConnell, he announced yesterday he was against it. What this matters, I know not. It surprises no one. But maybe it sends a signals to other Republicans. A little interesting context from this morning's NYT:

The down-to-the-wire suspense is unusual in the annals of arms control votes in the Senate. Most such treaties that reached the floor won by overwhelming margins if not unanimously. The rare arms control treaties to fail were generally never brought to a vote, with one exception being the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which Mr. Kyl helped defeat in 1999.

Never has a major nuclear arms control treaty been approved during a lame-duck session or without the support of the Senate minority leader. What makes the fierce showdown over this treaty so surprising is that compared with most of its predecessors, it is a relatively modest agreement that mainly resumes on-site inspections that lapsed last year and pares down each side's deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 and deployed launchers to 700.

In other words, these things were once done on a bipartisan basis until conservatives starting thinking of liberals as mortal enemies and idiot talk-show hosts started making Republican policy, which they effectively do on a majority of matters.

Those people will be on a rampage this week and turn this from the merits into a polemic about how no Republican can possibly hand the Kenyan socialist another victory, especially after the don't ask repeal, and all that noise will likely leave Start one or two votes short, would be my guess. I dearly hope Bennett and Voinovich, who have nothing to lose and surely hate what's happened to their party, stand up and say something forceful about this.

US CongressUS militaryMichael Tomasky
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