Democrats Blame Senate GOP for Failure to Govern; Voters Still Blame Democrats

Democrats have failed to govern, despite occupying large majorities
in Congress and the Presidency. Their failure is not just in situations
where external factors limit their control, such as the economy and
foreign affairs. They are failures by their own standards. They have
repeatedly failed to fulfill promises when they are capable of
delivering. For example, Democrats ran on a pledge to pass a drug
re-importation bill, but they haven't. Democrats have not advanced any
immigration-reform legislation.

Democrats now place the blame for their failure on Republican Senate
obstructionism. No doubt, Senate Republicans have done everything they
can to make life difficult for Democrats. They have used the filibuster
as much as possible to stop Democrats from fulfilling their promises. As
the opposition party, the GOP really has no reason to help Democrats
achieve success.

Inside the Washington bubble, Democrats are throwing their hands up,
saying, "What can we do, there are 41 Republican Senators and they have
the filibuster." Somehow, that's considered a perfectly acceptable
excuse. Allowing this bizarre use of an arcane rule about the amount of
debate needed to shut down the federal government is weirdly accepted as
a fact of life in Washington. It is so completely accepted that most of
the media report it as hard fact without ever mentioning that it's pure
nonsense.

Nothing is stopping 51 Senate Democrats from taking to the floor and
in 20 minutes using Senate procedure to eliminate the filibuster.
Republicans even threatened to do just that back in 2005. This excuse of
the filibuster and Republican obstructionism is merely a
self-constructed fantasy that the Senate has impressively convinced the
rest of Washington to believe. A political tooth fairy, if you will. But
this means Democrats are 100 percent to blame for not passing the laws
they promised to and for failing to govern. They actually are fully
capable of passing any law if they really want to.

The great irony is that "ignorant" average voters who are uninformed
about the filibuster fantasy have correctly put the blame
for failure squarely on the majority party: the Democrats. The
supposedly savvy Beltway insiders and reporters who think they
understand how the Senate works are completely wrong and try to spread
the blame. They mistakenly believe the way Senate Democrats choose
to run the Senate is how it actually must run. The majority party can
handle it very differently.

Now that Democrats have failed, they have only two choices going into
the November election. They can try to get all of America to buy into
their filibuster fantasy, as they've succeeded in doing with the
Washington media. This would require persuading regular people that
because some Senators in the early part of the 19th century were a bit
sloppy on how they drafted a few Senate rules changes, the huge
Democratic majority is utterly powerless if all 41 Republicans don't
play nice.

Good luck with that. The other option is to end the stupidity, kill
the filibuster and start governing the country as they promised. Use
their simple majority in the Senate to pass a bunch of smart policies,
and hope voters like what they've done and reward them by voting to keep
them in office.

No doubt, you've guessed it: Democrats choose
option A, the convoluted story about helpless Democrats, mean
Republicans and a weird interruption of a supposedly irreversible
19th-century Senate rule-drafting mistake.

That's going to make for a great campaign slogan. Not only is it a
terrible message but it's a complete lie.

Note: Even if you don't support using the "Constitutional option" to
eliminate the filibuster, midterm Democrats are still to blame for their
failure because they refused to pass a budget this year. No budget
means no budget-reconciliation bill, the traditional way to pass a bill
with only a simple majority in the Senate. And yes, Democrats
could have used reconciliation to advance much of their agenda,
including job-growth legislation.

Update - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claims
Republicans are "betting
on failure" when it comes to the economy because it will help them
win in November. Amazingly despite believing Republicans want the
economy to fail he still doesn't think it is necessary to quickly take
away their filibuster based veto power over any legislation that might
help turn the economy around. The Republicans are betting on failure and
Reid is still insisting on allowing them to keep the power to make sure
that happens.