Al Franken has won his court battle and therefore won the election, and is now the Junior Senator from Minnesota.
So, the Democrats now have a liberal firebrand to add to their stable, and, in theory, a filibuster-proof majority. I say “in theory” because they’ve got at least two Senators who have health issues and can’t always be counted on to show up for a cloture vote (Byrd and Kennedy), and because there are a number of members of their caucus who are known for an independent streak and breaking party ranks on various issues. Still, their ability to stave off anything perceived as pure obstructionism is quite strong now.
Which is fine by me, by the way. No, I’m not a Democrat, I’m a swing voter who most years leans Republican. I just believe in our Constitution and our system of government, and I believe that people who win elections get elected to do things. One party now has nearly unlimited ability to put its agenda through and live with the results. I’m fine with that. Whether it works out for good or ill, I believe in this country and its system, and its ability to correct if things go wrong, and to acknowledge if things go right.
Congratulations, Senator Franken. I used to be a big fan of your comedy, I eventually came to pretty much hate your politics, but you won fair and square. Good luck.
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Ahh, I see. This is actually a joke, I figured it out once I got to the punchline, “you won fair and square”…
Actually just busting your chops a bit. Yeah, he won, I’ll never believe it was a legitimate win though, but it’s politics.
Every close election is something of a tragedy. In an ideal world, we’d be able to reach a consensus before deploying the coersive power of the state. Since this isn’t an ideal world, we need to make do with a majority, and in close elections, the majority is as far from a consensus as it can be without ceasing to be a majority. No matter who won the recount, nearly half of Minnesota voters are going home unhappy and are to be represented by someone they opposed.
Coleman should have conceded long ago, though. Franken came out of the recount with the most votes, and it’s very unlikely any reasonable reinterpretation of the rules would have changed that. Dragging out the process and denying Minnesota full represenation in the Senate for months after the outcome became clear was petty and irresponsible. The irregularities found in the voting and counting process should be investigated and fixed for next time, and any outright fraud discovered should be prosecuted, but Franken won by the rules in place at the time and we have to go with that.
One party now has nearly unlimited ability to put its agenda through and live with the results.
This is why the constitutional limits of government we’ve been debating in other recent comments threads are so important. The majority needs to be permitted to govern if democracy is to have any meaning (and I share Churchill’s sentiment that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others), and in the case of voters awarding solid control of all elected portions of the federal goverment to the same faction as they did last November, that faction ought to have a great deal of leeway to implement their agenda, but that leeway should not be infinite. The liberties explicitly protected by the constitution and the limited powers the constitution grants the federal government are both vital parts of protecting the ~45% of the electorate that did not support Obama and congressional Democrats.
This is just the latest proof that we have become an unserious nation.
I put the over/under on Franken’s first public meltdown on the Senate floor at six months.
Eric: Agreed. One of the reasons I have faith in our flawed and frustrating system is that even with overwhelming majorities in both houses of the legislature and of the executive branch, it’s still nearly impossible for one party to really have iron control.
Indeed, a certain irony is that the President might actually have had an easier time getting at least some stuff through with SMALLER majorities in the congress. That tends to cause a “rally the troops” effect on the majority party and make every battle seem a desperate cause. With firm and comfortable majorties, members of the ruling caucus will tend to start thinking more about their own individual interests, and the leadership will tend to think more about their own agendas and future rather than the President’s.
Don’t get me wrong, the preferable situation for whoever’s in power is to have wider majorities. But the bigger your majority is, the more fractious your caucus will tend to be in the long run. And, to quote Karl Rove, permanent majorities simply don’t happen in American politics. Even the unsually long hold the Democrats held on the House from the 1950s to the 1990s was often marked by Democratic Presidents having to go to Republicans for help because their own caucus was fighting them, the leadership having grown inclined to push its weight around and tell the President what THEY wanted rather than asking him what HE wanted.
Lyndon Johnson, arguably our most “liberal” President since FDR, got a crapload of stuff done by getting Republicans to cooperate with him, which probably wouldn’t have been all that easy if Republicans had a strong sense that they could retake control of either chamber any time soon. (In those days, it was viewed as exceedingly unlikely and a comfortable status quo as the minority party was even something many Republicans seemed to prefer.)
After the first year or so I expect it to become obvious that Congress is giving President Obama some frustrations, and his own caucus probably won’t be so cozy with him as it is now–unless Democrats take a horsewhipping* in the 2010 elections, in which case they’ll all rally around him like crazy (most likely).
* “Horsewhipping” as in massive losses. They have every reason to expect some losses since that’s normal in off-year elections (with the expected crowing from Republicans about how it’s a sweeping rejection of the Democratic agenda and all that rot). If they lose a few seats, expect them to continue a slow creep away from the President, and if they make unexpected gains expect them to creep away a little faster. If they get a sharp kick in the shins, though, expect them to cling harder to Obama. It doesn’t make immediate intuitive sense but it’s pretty normal. All this without even having to guess what condition Obama will be in; this is all about how the members of Congress will be seeing their own future and their own agendas, not the President’s.
If President Barack Hussein Obama makes the mistake of letting his anti-gun activists in leading federal circles try yet another liberal stab at our constitutionally mandated right to keep and bear arms for purposes of personal and home protection, then we shall see how shatter-proof the 60-vote impregnable US Senate remains. There are a lot of Blue Dog members of the House of Representatives and the Senate as well, all of whom will have something to say about that, and mostly unpleasant to BHO and his attorney general.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
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