The Senate Spectator: The Democrats Look at Sixty
Antle, W. James III
The SenaTe SpecTaTor The Democrats Look at Sixty For Republicans, it’s filibuster or bust. by W. James Antle III N o matter who wins the presidential election, keep...
...Filibusters forced the Democrats to pass a one-year “patch” to prevent the Alternative Minimum Tax from gobbling up more middle-class families without any offsetting tax increases...
...And close Senate races have a way of breaking in favor of one party...
...We really don’t want 60,” concluded an anonymous Democratic aide...
...Susan Collins of Maine still leads her Democratic challenger by double digits in most polls...
...In the first two years of Bill Clinton’s administration, just 44 Republican senators under the leadership of Bob Dole managed to kill the new president’s stimulus bill, the energy tax, and Hillarycare while coming within one vote of defeating the Clinton tax increase in the full Senate...
...But even if Obama loses, Senate Republicans will be needed to prevent John McCain from signing too many bills that resemble McCain-Feingold, McCainKennedy, and McCain-Lieberman...
...Johnston of Louisiana, David Boren of Oklahoma, and Howell Heflin of Alabama have all since retired and Alabamian Richard Shelby became a Republican after the 1994 elections...
...The GOP must defend 25 seats to the Democrats’ 13, with six Republican senators and not a single Democrat retiring...
...46 The aMerIcan SpecTaTor SepTeMber 2008...
...McConnell W. James antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator...
...The Democrats also had to strip a tax increase from their energy bill and could only pass a higher federal minimum wage by accepting Republican demands for complementary small-business tax cuts...
...Even on a bill extending congressional voting rights to the District of Columbia, hardly a pressing issue in most Republican states, McConnell lost seven GOP votes and only picked up one Democrat...
...w. JaMes anTle III Even with a closely divided 51–49 Senate, Sen...
...Sam Nunn of Georgia, John Breaux and Bennett Republicans who are trailing would be much more helpful in sustaining filibusters than the more moderate ones who are leading...
...The worst case scenario...
...Two years later, the Democrats won all but Tennessee...
...Unless Congress specifically acts to extend the Bush tax cuts, they will expire at the end of 2010...
...A leftward lurch by the Senate would make life difficult for red-state Democratic senators up for reelection in 2010, including Harry Reid himself, and might endanger Sen...
...Yet the Democrats don’t need 60 votes to get a tax increase of this magnitude, SCHIP, or card check...
...If the Democrats only win the Senate races where they are now ahead—the open seats in Virginia, New Mexico, and Colorado as well as the challenges to incumbent Sens...
...According to vote rankings compiled by National Journal in 2007, Ben Nelson of Nebraska is the only Democrat left in the Senate who is to the right of some currently serving Republicans...
...In the 1990s, this rule kept the Democrats from trying to ram the Clinton health-care plan through the reconciliation process, which under Senate rules is not subject to filibusters...
...Consequently, non-defense discretionary spending fell from 3.9 percent of GDP in 2005, at the height of the Grand Old Spending Party, to 3.6 percent in 2007...
...But Dole could also count on more conservative Democrats than McConnell now has at his disposal...
...It is a danger of a pure Democratic majority...
...He defeated a Democratic effort to effectively impose price controls on prescription drugs through Medicare Part D by just two votes...
...For conservatives, the best-case scenario is that Senator McConnell is in a position to keep blocking the Democrats’ liberal excesses...
...We want 57 or 58...
...Mississippi, North Caro lina, and even McConnell’s Kentucky are too close for comfort, though McCain may be able to help in all three...
...When it came to the tax provision in the energy bill and the Democrats’ bloated stimulus package, McConnell had no Republican votes to spare...
...The Senate minority would become toothless...
...Only a critical mass of Republican senators can keep Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress in check...
...Senate Republicans already lacked the votes to filibuster an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a five-year, $35 billion down payment on national health care that contained a tobacco tax increase to boot, though their House counterparts were able to sustain President Bush’s veto...
...T T hat might be a moot point...
...It would be a favorable environment for President Obama’s spending wish list—calculated by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation to exceed $300 billion a year—to say the least...
...They purged the stimulus bill of most new spending and loaded it with tax cuts...
...On key votes, Dole was frequently able to keep the most liberal Republicans in line: John Chafee of Rhode Island, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, David Durenberger of Minnesota, and Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood, both of Oregon...
...As John F. Cogan and R. Glenn Hubbard recently observed in the Wall Street Journal, “Letting the Bush tax cuts expire would drive the personal income tax burden up by 25 percent—its highest point, relative to GDP, in history...
...But the Republicans who are trailing would be much more helpful in sustaining filibusters than the more moderate ones who are leading...
...Even 57 or 58 Democratic senators might be enough for an effectively filibuster-proof majority, because the Republicans wouldn’t have any margin for error or moderate defections...
...G G overnment will grow enough with a Democratic majority of any size...
...On legislation like the Freedom of Choice Act, which would essentially codify Roe v. Wade, Republicans might be able to count on pro-life Democrats like Nelson, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, but they will also lose some blue-state moderates...
...Without the filibuster, they would lose the power to block or revise bills entirely...
...Democrats are favored in the races for four of these open seats, and at least another four blue-state Republican incumbents are vulnerable, with several more pickups possible if it’s a Democratic rout...
...President McCain, on the other hand, would find it exceedingly difficult to pass his proposed tax cuts, hold the line on spending, appoint judges in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito rather than Anthony Kennedy, or do anything about entitlements that would involve free-market reforms instead of raising taxes...
...We know what it means to fail to live up to our promises,” one Democratic strategist is quoted as saying...
...It wouldn’t take many Republican losses this November to put filibusters on such legislation out of McConnell’s reach...
...They also managed to hold the Democrats to the Bush administration’s domestic discretionary spending targets...
...Either way, conservatives will look to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to bar the door...
...Only a filibuster stopped the Democrats from passing cardcheck legislation, which would allow unions to organize companies without secret-ballot elections...
...In the minority, President Bush and Senate Republicans have at least partially rediscovered their commitment to restraining the growth of federal spending...
...And close Senate races have a way of breaking in favor of one party...
...In 2004, the Republicans won all of them except for Colorado...
...by W. James Antle III N o matter who wins the presidential election, keep in mind this basic rule of thumb: the bigger the Democrats’ Senate majority, the more liberal the next two years of legislation will be...
...44 The aMerIcan SpecTaTor SepTeMber 2008 What happens if the Democrats get to 60 seats...
...Clearly, it would be a lot easier for Democrats to implement their agenda,” Riedl says...
...John Sununu of New Hampshire and Ted Stevens of Alaska—they’ll be back to their pre-1994 numbers...
...There won’t even be a Senator McConnell...
...Gordon Smith of Oregon has a small lead over his Democratic opponent, and his Minnesota colleague Norm Coleman a larger one against liberal comedian Al Franken, but neither is out of the woods yet...
...But the benefits of divided government disappear if the Democrats win a filibuster-proof majority...
...Mary Landrieu of Louisiana was to the right only of Lincoln Chafee, the liberal Rhode Island Republican who was defeated in 2006...
...Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn...
...Perhaps to lower expectations, several Democrats told the Politico in July that they didn’t really Without the filibuster, Republicans would lose the power to block or revise bills entirely...
...H H ow close are senate republicans to the precipice...
...chairmanship of the Committee on Governmental sePTeMbeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 45 The SenaTe SpecTaTor Dole Affairs...
...Much of that agenda includes new spending initiatives and increased taxes...
...want a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate...
...If they reach the Gregg Reid magic filibuster-proof number, they can aim even higher by passing a more ambitious national health insurance plan, lifting the payroll tax cap, and contemplating the biggest liberal domestic-policy initiatives since the Great Society...
...The SenaTe SpecTaTor The Democrats Look at Sixty For Republicans, it’s filibuster or bust...
...Hold on to your wallets, warns Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation...
...John Ensign, the Nevada Republican who heads his party’s Senate campaign committee, doesn’t talk much about retaking the majority...
...The Democrats would also have the votes to waive the Senate’s PAYGO (pay-as-you-go) budget rules, requiring new spending to be offset with spending cuts or additional revenues, though Adam Hughes of OMB Watch points out that this applies to tax cuts as well as spending increases...
...They could similarly waive the Byrd rule, which can be used to strike anything that enlarges the deficit or is outside the scope of the budget from a reconciliation bill...
...Over the last two years, actual and threatened Republican filibusters have been good for taxpayers...
...The Senate minority would become toothless...
...Judd Gregg of New Hampshire recently complained at an American Spectator dinner that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was already making it difficult for Republicans to reshape legislation through the amendment process by “filling the tree” with his own amendments...
...The child tax credit will be cut in half, the lowest statutory marginal tax rate will jump 50 percent, and the top tax rate on dividends will triple...
...The Democrats, by contrast, are hoping to make Senate Republicans irrelevant by reaching that magic number of 60, the three-fifths majority needed to invoke cloture and end debate on most legislation...
...That’s a bigger rogue’s gallery of RINOs than Mitch McConnell must contend with today...
...Instead, it is filibuster or bust...
...Even McCain’s foreign policy might be hamstrung, since Republican filibusters played a big role in getting the Democrats to abandon their insistence that any Iraq war funding contain a timetable for withdrawal (the Democrats have actually outspent the Bush administration even on the war supplementals...
...Unfortunately for conservatives, this year’s Senate races do not favor the Republicans...
...Amnesty for illegal immigrants, cap-and-trade schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and expanded federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research would all still be on the table, of course...
Vol. 41 • September 2008 • No. 7
