Jerome Armstrong at MyDD has a post about the Oil Accountability Project. Apparently the Senate Republicans mounted a filibuster to preserve a deeply held belief against the perils of majority rule — protecting oil companies from taxation. The legislation failed because it had the support of only 59 votes out of the 100.
It’s almost too bad the Democrats didn’t let the Republicans use the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster back when the Senate Republicans were mumbling something about “up or down votes”. But, of course they didn’t, and that’s fine. The minority should have some leverage. But, the Democrats really ought to drawing a lot of attention each and every time the Senate Republicans filibuster. They’ve been doing it a lot more than minority parties in the Senate have traditionally done, and the Democrats ought not be shy about pointing that out. It’d be a lot easier to laugh at disingenuous talking points about how the Democrats hadn’t gotten anything done and then make a pitch for electing 60+ Democrats to the majority. Personally, I’m not terribly comfortable with a filibuster-proof majority, but if the minority party is going to use the filibuster willy-nilly, I guess that’s the alternative.
It is interesting that the “Democratic-controlled” Congress scores low in opinion polls, almost as low as the prez., apparently because they’re not getting much done that they were elected to get done. Why is that? Continued obsctructionism by the now-minority Republicans, plus vetos or veto threats by W. That part of the story rarely gets played out in the supposedly liberal-biased media, it seems to me…