Author: David Dayen

photo: Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Greg Sargent gets the scoop on the health care proposal being written by the White House in advance of the health care summit. Big surprise, it’s what the House and Senate would have voted on if Martha Coakley won her election in Massachusetts. In other words, only the deal on the excise tax already forged with the unions, and no public option.

Bottom line: It’s all but certain to have the Cadillac tax in it, even though House Dems oppose it, and no public option, aides say.

According to multiple reports this morning, Obama will bring some version of a bill containing elements of the Senate and House proposals to the summit next week.

The White House has arrived at a general outline of what this proposal will look like, a senior Dem leadership aide tells me. It will largely reflect the compromise reached between the House and Senate in January: It will likely contain the national exchange sought by House Dems, and tougher penalties on businesses that don’t insure workers.

Also, the White House has told the House Dem leadership that it isn’t prepared to raise the threshold of the Cadillac tax, as many House Dems want, the leadership aide says. The White House prefers instead to keep the version already agreed upon with unions, the aide adds.

I’m not seeing how exchange design is germane in a reconciliation bill, and how it would survive a parliamentary inquiry. Actually, there are a lot of questions about that (more later). But on the other points, this is pretty much as expected.

Eric Cantor is trying to flip the script rhetorically by citing reconciliation as a partisan action rather than what gets done when the two chambers differ on issues in a bill that impacts the budget. I don’t think parliamentary process of this type will resonate very much with the public, but expect the conservative noise machine to get pretty frenzied about that.

Obviously the mini-storm over the public option will have to increase exponentially to find a place in any bill.

Rep. Eric Massa (D-MA) (photo: Wikimedia)

In stark contrast to recent reports of a deal that would pass comprehensive health care reform, Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) told supporters this week that a comprehensive bill would not pass, and the best alternative option would be to get Republicans on the record with a series of smaller bills, building incrementally to a full set of reforms. Massa said that the House would begin that next week, when they finally take up the delayed (by snow) vote to repeal the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption.

Massa didn’t vote for the House bill, being focused entirely on a single payer solution. This has been his position since well before being elected to office in 2008, and he has never wavered from it. I wasn’t aware of the history leading him to that decision. Massa was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and given four months to live. That was eleven years ago. “I’m alive because of the best experimental medicine in the world,” Massa said. “Why millions of our own citizens don’t have the same opportunity is a tragedy. My religion teaches me that it’s fundamentally immoral to profit off of people’s medical care.”

The New York Democrat simply said that the Senate bill can never pass the House of Representatives, even with fixes through reconciliation. He certainly committed himself not to vote for it, and he was one of the several No votes that the House leadership may have hoped to flip into the Yes column. His major contention seemed to be that the House would have to pass the Senate bill before changes were made, which isn’t necessarily true. But regardless, he wouldn’t commit to that passage. “It doesn’t have a public option,” Massa said. Asked why he then voted against the House bill, which did have one, he explained that it would have only been available to 2% of the population. “Wouldn’t you rather accept half a loaf,” someone asked. “Yes, if the half a loaf isn’t laced with cyanide,” he replied.

However, Massa added that “from great defeat comes great victory,” and he called for splitting health care into discrete parts, forcing the opposition to vote on popular elements and putting them on the record. The first of those votes will come next week on the anti-trust exemption. Massa wants future votes on popular provisions like banning the denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Told by a supporter that it would be potentially more harmful to ban that provision without a mandate or community rating because insurers would simply price anyone with a pre-existing condition out of the market, Massa said he knew, but that politically this was the only way forward.

Previously, Massa has endorsed a three-track approach, with the small-bill approach being one track. Next, he would work to organize in states will single payer could gain support, and fight for passage there. “Success in even one state would be monumental,” he said. Finally, he would support a bill allowing the federal government to fund something like single payer in the states, with incorporation of Medicaid and SCHIP funding into one comprehensive program. “Parallel to this, a bill expanding age eligibility for Medicare is crucial,” he added.

Massa took pains to suggest to the audience, made up of mostly progressives, that he considers himself more of a fiscal conservative, as evidenced by his many votes against cramdown, against the House financial reform bill, for killing the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, etc. But he cited single payer as the most fiscally responsible option possible in health care reform.

Massa faces difficult re-election prospects in a competitive western New York district.

photo: Magnus Kolstad via Flickr

After weeks without clarity, it appears the top leadership in the Democratic Party is committed to using the budget reconciliation process to make changes to the health care bill so it can pass both chambers of Congress. And the White House supports the action as well.

President Obama, House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid are preparing to begin the reconciliation process after next week’s bipartisan White House health care summit. “They are coming out of the summit guns-a-blazing and they’re committed to reconciliation,” said one Democratic insider. All three are dedicated to comprehensive reform, but Reid and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel are cautioning that “it’s going to be a heavier lift than a lot of people expect it to be,” said a senior Democratic official. “It’s going to cause political problems.” Not the least of which is how Democrats pivot to reconciliation, a procedure Republicans view as a partisan ramrod, shortly after Obama hosts the GOP to talk about bipartisan solutions. Right now, Democratic leaders are considering a $200 billion reconciliation bill that includes more affordability subsidies, the union-tweaked Cadillac tax and filling in the gap in seniors’ drug coverage, which would be paid for primarily by additional Medicare cuts and an increase in Medicare payroll taxes above those in the Senate bill, an insider said.

I’d only go by this “insider” take because it matches what we’ve been hearing all along – affordability credits, reducing the excise tax, filling the donut hole, paid for with an increase in payroll taxes on the wealthy. And if Rahm Emanuel is cautioning about something, you can pretty much guarantee it’s the right move.

The report cautions that the votes aren’t quite there for the bill, but when Evan Bayh is consenting to using reconciliation, you can be pretty sure that at least a simple majority in the Senate will agree as well. The reconciliation whip count shows 34 so far in favor of the process, four maybes and just one no (Blanche Lincoln), so this is not all that heavy a lift, particularly if Republican intransigence and obstructionism can be demonstrated.

The President will propose a comprehensive bill in advance of next week’s health summit, and the changes from the House and Senate base bills will be entirely budget-based, clearly suggesting reconciliation as the answer. Will that include the newly-resurgent public option? Ezra Klein reported yesterday that there’s “sharp resistance” to any public option comeback in the White House. But then Kathleen Sebelius told Rachel Maddow the White House would push for it if the Senate included it in their reconciliation bill:

Eighteen Senators have signed a letter asking Harry Reid to push for the public option using reconciliation, which would allow Democrats to pass it with just 51 votes. (Republicans may be able to slow or halt the processing with procedural objections.)

Appearing on MSNBC tonight, Sebelius said the administration would back that decision.

“Certainly. If it’s part of the decision of the Senate leadership to move forward, absolutely,” she told Rachel Maddow.

I don’t think those two stances are all that contradictory. We know the White House wants a bill in the end, and they’ll resist anything controversial that might leave them with no bill. But they’ve consistently allowed Congress to take the lead, and they know Reid won’t touch the public option unless he has majority support, so they’ll back it on the back end.

All we’ve learned is the path forward: a reconciliation sidecar, with the Senate bill as the baseline. We do not know if such a strategy will pass, particularly in the House, because nobody wants to talk about the other roadblock. From the NYT piece:

Democrats said it was still unclear how the president would deal with other disagreements, including the issue of insurance coverage for abortions.

Abortion remains “a wild card,” said a Democrat on Capitol Hill.

Ignoring that element does not make Bart Stupak disappear.

Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-IN) (photo: Wikimedia)

Brad Ellsworth has ended the coyness and announced his interest in a candidacy for the US Senate seat held by the retiring Evan Bayh. Ultimately, however, the decision is not up to him; it’s up to the Indiana Democratic Party, which can choose a replacement on the ballot because no candidate qualified for the primary. However, they just learned that they cannot formally choose that nominee until May:

Indiana Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker, who had said he wanted a candidate quickly, said Thursday that “the sooner rather than later has now become later.”

Parker had hoped to call a meeting of the Democratic Party’s state central committee’s 32 voting members as early as next week. But after party attorneys researched state law, they discovered they could not fill the ballot vacancy until after the primary […]

The delay complicates the Democrats’ scenario considerably.

Members of Congress such as Ellsworth and Hill will be on the primary ballot for re-election to their congressional seats, but at the same time perhaps signaling to voters that they’d rather be in the Senate.

They could withdraw from the primary ballot by Monday’s noon deadline — but with no assurance that the committee ultimately would pick them for the Senate job.

Surely, there will be some behind-the-scenes coordination, to alleviate the potential scenario described above. But basically, nobody could set up a candidate fundraising committee until May. Nobody could start soliciting funds until May. Nothing could really happen until May, at which point the Democratic nominee will start several months behind the Republican challenger.

But don’t worry, Evan Bayh said this was a great idea because Democrats wouldn’t have to allow a vote of the people.

Incidentally, another name has surfaced as a possibility other than Ellsworth or Baron Hill – Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott, who has indicated his interest and is actively seeking the nomination. He claims support from at least two party leaders of the 32 who would make the decision. McDermott was a Republican before switching parties in 2003.

Democratic Senatorial candidate Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA7) (photo: Progress Ohio)

Joe Sestak, the challenger in the Democratic Senate primary against Arlen Specter, alleges that he was offered a federal job if he stayed out of that race.

Rep. Joe Sestak (D., Pa.) said yesterday that the White House offered him a federal job in an effort to dissuade him from challenging Sen. Arlen Specter in the state’s Democratic primary.

The disclosure came during an afternoon taping of Larry Kane: Voice of Reason, a Sunday news-analysis show on the Comcast Network. Sestak would not elaborate on the circumstances and seemed chagrined after blurting out “yes” to veteran news anchor Kane’s direct question.

“Was it secretary of the Navy?” Kane asked.

“No comment,” Sestak said.

“Was it [the job] high-ranking?” Kane asked. Sestak said yes, but added that he would “never leave” the Senate race for a deal.

It’s not possible that Sestak was offered Secretary of the Navy. Ray Mabus was nominated for that position by the White House in late March of 2009. Arlen Specter didn’t even switch parties until April 28 of that year. Sestak said that the offer came in July, after Mabus was confirmed for the post.

I don’t think anyone should be surprised that the White House has tried to manage the primary process to protect individual incumbents – we have that on the record multiple times. You’d think they’d have done a better job, with all the attention they paid to it, however. They selected cabinet members from New York and Colorado without knowing that the Governors in those states would pick subpar candidates. They could not entice the Vice President’s own son to run for a seat in Delaware. They plucked Kathleen Sebelius and Janet Napolitano out of their respective Governor’s mansions when they could have been real contenders for seats in Kansas and Arizona. They had nobody ready for Evan Bayh’s retirement, although he claims to have let them know for months that he could leave. There’s the Martha Coakley nightmare. And obviously, Sestak didn’t give in to their demands, nor will Harold Ford (though the comedic value of having him run is high). For a White House presumably obsessed with meddling in Senate elections, the failures far outshine the successes.

Still, it’s startling for Sestak to say this out loud, even if it was assumed.

Rep. Brad Ellsworth with Sen. Bayh and Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel (photo courtesy of Evan Bayh)

The local Courier Press-News in Evansville reports that Rep. Brad Ellsworth will be tapped to run for the US Senate by the Indiana Democratic Party, with a state Representative then taking his place on the House ballot in IN-08.

U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth will run for Senate, and state Rep. Trent Van Haaften will seek his seat in Congress, multiple Democratic sources said Thursday morning.

As Democrats have searched for someone to replace retiring Sen. Evan Bayh on the ballot this November, Ellsworth, the former Vanderburgh County sheriff, has been a focal point, along with U.S. Rep. Baron Hill of Seymour.

The Indiana Democratic Party’s 32-member central committee will determine Bayh’s replacement. Anthony Long, the party’s 8th Congressional District chairman, said he expected a Ellsworth’s decision this morning. No official announcement has been made.

Ellsworth, a former sheriff, is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition with a conservative voting record, who has been endorsed in past Congressional campaigns by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Rifle Association.

Meanwhile, if Rasmussen can be believed (and at this stage of the election cycle, I actually don’t think they can), any Democrat would poll well behind the Republican candidates in Indiana.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely Indiana voters shows former GOP Congressman John Hostettler leading Baron Hill 49% to 31% and Brad Ellsworth 46% to 27%.

Former Senator Dan Coats, whose entry in the race has the blessing of the GOP establishment but has angered some Indiana Republicans, runs ahead of Hill 48% to 32% and ahead of Ellsworth 46% to 32%.

Another announced Republican hopeful, freshman state Senator Marlin Stutzman, leads Hill 41% to 33% and Ellsworth by a 40% to 30% margin.

Best to see some more independent polling before confirming this.

Speaking on CNN last night, Evan Bayh promised to use some of his $13 million dollar war chest to “help our nominee” in Indiana, so despite the late entry, whoever on the Democratic side will have some resources to work with.

As an editorial aside, if it’s Ellsworth, let Bayh fund him.

The signers to Michael Bennet’s letter to pass the public option through reconciliation have continued to roll in. Before I get to that, I want to respond to a couple comments in the last thread on this about why I’m monitoring this action.

There are two questions being asked – one about whether Senators would be willing to use reconciliation to pass the health care bill, and one about whether they would sign on to the Bennet letter. These questions should be viewed separately. The reconciliation question essentially asks whether these Senators want to pass health care at all, because a reconciliation sidecar is really the only way to get the bill done. The public option question gauges what kind of support there is within reconciliation for something beyond the set of compromises that were determined before Scott Brown won in Massachusetts.

First off, if you’re following the health care debate, this is one of the two remaining hurdles to get to a bill. The other is abortion funding and the Stupak amendment, which could prove an eventual brick wall, as I’ve been saying for weeks and weeks. But it’s worthwhile to know if reconciliation has majority support in the Senate, in addition to the public option. Whether these events actually occur or not, knowing a clear whip count demystifies the process. It puts legislators on the record. It forces accountability. And that’s never a bad thing. Harry Reid cannot say “we don’t have the votes” if you can wave a piece of paper in front of his face and announce “yes you do.”

So, where are we at with this project? Last night, Dianne Feinstein signed on to the Bennet letter. along with Jack Reed. Amy Klobuchar and Ben Cardin endorsed using the reconciliation, but were more noncommital on the public option. I can confirm this morning that Tom Udall of New Mexico, who yesterday agreed to reconciliation as a means to finish the bill, is now a yes on the Bennet letter. And Barbara Boxer signed on as well.

There is an indication that HELP Committee chair Tom Harkin would also support reconciliation and the public option, but he has not formally signed on to any process.

So, the current tabulation has 28 yes votes for reconciliation and two maybes (Harkin is listed as a maybe along with Mark Pryor, I think that’s pretty cautious), getting us 3/5 of the way to a majority in support of using the process. On the Bennet letter, there are 15 yes votes and 5 maybes.

How does this compare to the original public option letter in the Senate, signed in October by 30 members, calling for it to be placed in the merged Senate bill? Well, most of the names are the same. The only new addition is Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), but the original letter included Paul Kirk of Massachusetts, who has since been replaced by Scott Brown.

Of the five “maybe” votes on the public option – Klobuchar, Cardin, Harkin, Bob Casey and Claire McCaskill, three of them (Klobuchar, Harkin and McCaskill) were not original co-signers. The remaining original co-signers have not indicated a preference yet:

John D. Rockefeller (D-WV); Russell D. Feingold (D-WI); Daniel K. Akaka (D-HI); Ron Wyden (D-OR); Debbie Stabenow (D-MI); Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ); Barbara A. Mikulski (D-MD); Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI); Edward E. Kaufman (D-DE); Arlen Specter (D-PA); Maria Cantwell (D-WA); Robert Menendez (D-NJ); Herb Kohl (D-WI).

They would represent the low-hanging fruit of this project. And if they consented to reconciliation, we would approach a majority in the Senate favoring the strategy.

(photo: supertobor)

Harry Reid slimmed down the jobs bill because he didn’t want it loaded up like a Christmas tree with items unrelated to job creation. He took out $31 billion in tax extenders, some safety-net extensions which he promised in a different bill, and a variety of other pieces. What he really did was nix the promise Max Baucus and Charles Grassley demanded, to hand over $230 billion from the Treasury to super-rich inheritors of estates by dialing back the estate tax permanently to 2009 levels.

As so, because he preferred a jobs bill, however modest, that wasn’t held hostage to tax cuts for the rich, the Senate won’t provide the votes to even move to debate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) lacks the votes to begin debating his targeted jobs bill, according to sources monitoring the legislation.

Reid needs 60 votes to open debate on the $15 billion jobs bill. The vote is scheduled for Monday, when lawmakers return from the Presidents Day recess.

“I understand Reid does not have the votes for cloture on Monday on his jobs bill,” one source said.

Among those carping about how the Baucus-Grassley stick-up was preferable? Why, Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh, of course! Lincoln said in a statement that the Baucus-Grassley bill “was carefully crafted to achieve significant bipartisan support and contains several important measures to spur business growth and encourage new hires.” That’s simply not true, relative to Reid’s bill, which took every job creation measure from Baucus-Grassley and left the pork behind. On CNN last night, Bayh complained that “some in our caucus are allergic to tax cuts for small businesses to spur hiring.” That’s what Reid’s ENTIRE BILL is. You can reasonably question whether or not it works, like lefty radical liberal Ben Nelson. . .:

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has raised the concern that a shortage in customer demand could render the tax break useless.

“There’s a question of whether that puts the cart before the horse,” said Nelson. “If I don’t have enough customers for my product, hiring more people is not going to help and tax credits are not going to be to my advantage.”

But then the answer is to INCREASE AGGREGATE DEMAND through direct public spending, which Nelson and Bayh don’t want to do. Incidentally none of that kind of public output appeared in Baucus-Grassley.

The bottom line is that lobbyists wanted to lard up the Baucus-Grassley bill with goodies for themselves, and Reid saw exactly what would happen, that Republicans would drop their support at the last minute and then decry the bill for its pork. And the thing is, if they wanted to add back in all the Baucus-Grassley elements, they could do that on the floor. It’s called “legislating” by offering amendments. If a majority wants to see the tax extenders or the unemployment insurance and COBRA extensions in the bill, and if they’re so popular, they should have no problem getting the required votes. But they don’t want to even proceed to debate on the bill.

On a conference call yesterday touting the infrastructure parts of Reid’s jobs bill, Barbara Boxer said that she has assurances from George Voinovich (R-OH) and James Inhofe (R-OK) that they would vote for the jobs bill, but it sounded like those assurances came before Reid scaled it back. “I’m very hopeful. It’s hard for me to understand how anyone could vote against this particular package, it’s very targeted,” Boxer said. She supported Reid’s plan to scale back the bill. “I support a lot of what was in that package, but a lot in there wasn’t job creation. What Sen. Reid did was right. Eventually, we’ll do a lot of what was in there.” Reid’s modular, rolling jobs agenda process makes some sense, but the dirty secret is that Senators, even Republicans, WANT bigger bills, making it easier to slip in favors for this or that.

This is basically why people think the Senate is broken, because individual hurt feelings have become more important than the common good.

(photo: Dom Dada)

I’m wondering if it’s the New York Times and not the Washington Post with the content-sharing agreement with Pete Peterson’s deficit-hyping “Fiscal Times.” Because the Grey Lady’s output over the past 24 hours has been curiously tilted toward deficit mania.

First, there’s the front-page story today from Jackie Calmes, which makes the logical leap from partisan gridlock automatically into a deficit crisis, not a jobs crisis or a health care crisis or a climate crisis, all of them also candidates for being casualties of the inability for the legislative branch to govern:

Senator Evan Bayh’s comments this week about a dysfunctional Congress reflected a complaint being directed at Washington with increasing frequency, and there is broad agreement among critics about Exhibit A: The unwillingness of the two parties to compromise to control a national debt that is rising to dangerous heights.

After decades of warnings that budgetary profligacy, escalating health care costs and an aging population would lead to a day of fiscal reckoning, economists and the nation’s foreign creditors say that moment is approaching faster than expected, hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety-net programs.

Yet rarely has the political system seemed more polarized and less able to solve big problems that involve trust, tough choices and little short-term gain. The main urgency for both parties seems to be about pinning blame on the other, before November’s elections, for deficits now averaging $1 trillion a year, the largest since World War II relative to the size of the economy.

This is apparently a news story, though I see precious little news and a hell of a lot of editorial opinion. Again, the idea that partisan gridlock is only responsible for allowing deficits to expand, not soaring ranks of the jobless and uninsured or a boiling planet or any of the 1,000 other crises locked into place by the filibuster, is not only nonsensical, but reflective of a real agenda.

Allow me to name the only sources of quotes in Calmes’ article:

G. William Hoagland, a former fiscal policy adviser to Senate Republicans; Alan Simpson, the former Republican Congressman and co-chair of this new Presidential deficit commission; Alan J. Auerbach, an economist.

Sounds like a balanced panel of experts. And it wasn’t until the very, very end of the story that Calmes noted recent polling from the NYT and CBS showing that voters would much rather cut military spending than health care or education.

Later on in the day, The Times uncorked this story about Federal Reserve officials talking about the deficit:

Though only a minority so far, the officials are warning that a failure to bring the budget under control could lead to a dangerous spiral of inflation. Worries about the possible long-term effects of the deficit have galvanized political debate in recent days, culminating in President Obama’s decision to create a bipartisan commission to tame the nation’s debt.

The comments by Fed officials reflect, in part, a concern about the central bank’s ability to maintain its political independence over the long term, a concern shared by the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke. Next week, Mr. Bernanke is set to deliver the Fed’s semiannual monetary report to Congress, and economists will be watching closely to see if he too says anything about the debt and the deficit.

Thomas M. Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City since 1991 and the longest-serving of the 12 Fed bank presidents, warned on Tuesday that in the worst case, the Fed could face pressure to inflate the nation’s way out of its indebtedness.

“It seems inevitable that a government turns to its central bank to bridge budget shortfalls, with the result being too-rapid money creation and eventually, not immediately, high inflation,” he said at a policy forum here, sponsored by the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform. “Such outcomes require either a cooperative central bank or an infringement on its independence.”

This is actually a story, if for no other reason than Fed bank Presidents talking about fiscal policy is unusual (and also beyond their mandate, but that’s another matter). But Thomas Hoenig has made a multitude of notable comments over the last year, like openly advocating for restoring Glass-Steagall and resolution authority for “too big to fail” banks. Yet the Times, based on a cursory search, has never seen fit to put these opinions in print, and the only time they get mentioned are in blog posts on its site by Simon Johnson or Paul Krugman.

It’s a matter of emphasis. And story after story about the “out-of-control debt,” which is not that out of control, tend to give an impression to the public that they are the biggest problem facing the nation. But the 10 million-odd unemployed Americans would beg to differ. And trusted media outlets favoring the concerns of deficit scolds over those jobless do a disservice to the nation.

This was a nice try by the business front group the Workforce Fairness Institute:

A business group urged lawmakers to vote on other nominees for spots on a labor board after the Senate rejected a third, controversial nominee last week.

The Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI) pledged not to mobilize supporters against the one Republican and one Democratic nominee left for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) after the leader of the AFL-CIO lamented that the rejection of a third nominee, attorney Craig Becker, would hinder the productivity of the board […]

“I think you could confirm them with very little fanfare, and have an effective, functioning NLRB,” WFI executive director Katie Packer said of Pearce and the other nominee, GOP staffer Brian Hayes.

Understand what Hayes is saying here. The party in the White House typically gets the majority of members from their party on the NLRB. That’s been the case since its inception. The Workforce Fairness Institute wants the President to get an even 2-2 split on the board, and nothing more, which would be unprecedented in the history of the NLRB. What’s more, traditionally these nominees are moved as a package.

Who is the Workforce Fairness Institute, and why should they drive the number of nominees that a President gets to select for a labor board? They happen to be a wingnut welfare front group for business lobbying interests like the US Chamber of Commerce, populated with the usual assortment of former George Bush and Mitt Romney staffers.

The AFL-CIO last week called for recess appointments for all NLRB nominees, and the labor coalition American Rights At Work picked up that call today with an email tool to demand those appointments as well.

Evan Bayh must have drank some Birch beer before sitting down with Andrea Mitchell today. Instead of simply blaming all the horrible partisanship and gridlock in the Congress without addressing the means by which that partisanship causes the gridlock, Bayh actually stood up and said the filibuster needed reform. Here’s a rough transcript.

BAYH: I go back to my father’s time, the great civil rights debates. The filibuster was being used to frustrate some basic, fundamental equities in this country. So the threshold was 67 votes in those days. They reduced it to 60. Now it’s being routinely used to frustrate even low-level Presidential appointees. So perhaps the threshold should be lowered once again.

MITCHELL: Would you propose steps, would you lead an effort in the Senate to change the filibuster rule?

BAYH: You know, I would… (crosstalk) Well, that’s right, but Tom Harkin and others have talked about this. I think it’s something we need to do, perhaps looking at changing the threshold once again, down to 55. Perhaps saying that, Administration appointees, other than the very highest ones, should not be subject to the filibuster. Because it’s just brought the process to a halt, and the public is suffering. So the minority needs to have a right. I think that’s important. But the public has a right to see its business done. And not routinely allow a small minority to keep us from addressing the great issues that face this country. I think the filibuster absolutely needs to be changed.

One of Bayh’s ideas, that lower-level political appointees should get an up-or-down vote in a prescribed period of time, mirrors an idea Jeff Merkley offered to me last year. On lowering the threshold to 55, I don’t really see why you don’t just advocate for majority rule.

However, this was important for a variety of reasons. Bayh here finally cited the MEANS by which all these abstract concepts of “partisanship” and “gridlock” get their purchase. Before he sounded like a self-important blowhard assuming the superiority of his “centrist” policy ideas, as if partisanship hasn’t been a function of American government since its founding. Here, he actually identifies the problem – fix the process and suddenly the problems of gridlock start to melt away. And he actually manages to offer a pretty good case for majority rule – the public, who selects its representatives, has a right to see its will expressed after it delivers a mandate.

It’s immaterial whether Bayh thinks his brand of mushy centrism and fiscal peacockery would fare better under a change in Senate rules. What’s crucial here is that we have a Democrat actually stating the reasons for the lack of action from Washington, combined with a real proposal to fix it.

Of course, it would be preferable, if Bayh wanted to actually change the rules of the Senate to make it a better institution for his children and the future of the country, for him to STAY and actually get that done. So his departure because of the difficulty of things smacks of cowardice. However, if someone like Bayh is willing to identify the Senate rules as the source of the problem, then old lions like Chris Dodd, who called such reforms “foolish,” are probably in the deep minority in the chamber.

…Hilariously, in a successive segment Andrea Mitchell and her warmed-over pack of Villagers focused not on Bayh calling for process reform but, yes, “partisanship.”

Barack Obama just spoke and offered a strong defense of the Recovery Act, which he signed into law one year ago today. This complements a wide-ranging set of efforts from Administration officials to both show the importance of the stimulus in moving the economy from failure toward recovery, and to put Republicans in a box, calling them out for hypocrisy on voting against projects they tout in their districts.

The graphic at right can be seen pretty much everywhere today, showing the gradual decline in job loss since the enactment of the Recovery Act. In the three months before enactment, 2.2 million jobs were lost, and the economy has not been handed over to a new President in such a shambles since the Hoover/Roosevelt trade in 1933. Since then, Administration officials say, job growth has converted from a 6 percent loss to a 6 percent gain, with much of that turnaround attributable to the Recovery Act. And job loss has slowed dramatically, with net job gains expected in the spring. This annual report prepared by the Vice President’s office provides much of the rhetorical bulwark for this defense, and you can see the bullet point version of this on an Organizing for America page blasted to supporters. But David Leonhardt’s analytical case for the stimulus in the New York Times today has the benefit of being from a source without a vested interest:

Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.

Yet I’m guessing you don’t think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You’ve read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you’ve heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.

And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it’s almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.

In addition to this defense, Democrats from the Administration on down are trying to pin some hypocritical behavior on Republicans, faulting them for voting against the Recovery Act, continuing to term it a failure, and then showing up in their own districts touting the funding for various projects. President Obama made special mention of that in his remarks today, saying that Republicans continue to argue against the stimulus “even as many of them show up for ribbon-cutting ceremonies for projects in their districts.” This Web ad put out by the DNC similarly details Recovery Act hypocrisy.

But Democrats have to walk a tightrope when discussing the Recovery Act. As David Leonhardt noted, the stimulus should have been bigger to cover the tremendous shortfall in demand from early 2009. Its more modest size and reliance on tax cuts for about 1/3 of its total has blunted its impact. While 2 million jobs have been created or saved, people are still losing work and the unemployment rate is still unreasonably high. Obama said today that, “Despite the extraordinary work that has been done in Recovery Act, millions of Americans are still out of work… it doesn’t yet feel like much of a recovery. That’s why we’re doing everything we can to return people to work.”

This is just a difficult rhetorical pirouette; saying “we’re only half done” is cold comfort to the jobless and job-insecure. And it isn’t helped by the fact that Obama led off his remarks by saying things like “No large expenditure is ever that popular,” which depresses any enthusiasm for another jobs bill, and is also fundamentally untrue. All of the “new foundation for growth” investments on things like education and high speed rail and infrastructure and US manufacturing and clean energy poll very high, and there’s no reason to dampen that popularity with such a blanket statement.

The Recovery Act has undoubtedly been a boost to the economy, and it’s good to see some energy spent on defending it. But its initial size makes it difficult to view as a success without major public education, and until job growth returns – which necessitates real job creation measures, not the sliver that’s moving through the Senate – the task grows even more difficult.

(photo by Phil Romans)

The only way for the health care bill to pass is for the House to pass the Senate bill with fixes achieved through a reconciliation “sidecar” process. There is no other path to 218 votes in the House, without changes to the Senate bill. While the bulk of those changes have largely been covered and even resolved in negotiations, Senate Democrats need to be willing to use the process, which has been trash-talked by Republicans into something extraordinary.

That’s how you get media reports like this, with a former Senate Parliamentarian saying how it my be difficult to pass policy fixes in reconciliation not related to the budget, when this is well-known by those who want to use the process, and nobody has suggested using it for anything else. The article, appearing in an insider paper, is nothing more than a way to depress enthusiasm for using reconciliation among Hill Democrats. The fact that the conservative Galen Institute hosted the conference call where this ex-Parliamentarian spoke gets short shrift in the article. Henry Aaron from the Brookings Institution, not exactly a lefty organization, disagrees and thinks that this situation is exactly what reconciliation was built for.

I question whether the House can round up the necessary 218 (actually 217 at the moment, because there are two vacancies) votes for passage, because of the elements that cannot be fixed in reconciliation, like the abortion funding issue. But the greater hurdle is the willingness among Senate Democrats to use the process, which could open it up for significant on-budget changes to the bill, like subsidy increases, Medicare buy-in or even the public option.

That’s why Chris Bowers of OpenLeft has crowdsourced a journalism project, seeking answers from as many Senators as possible on whether they favor the process.

We will be engaging in a major group journalism event to help provide information on this whip count. To do this, we need a couple dozen volunteers willing to make media inquiries to Senators asking them the following questions:

Hello, my name is [FILL IN BLANK, use real name] and I have a media inquiry from Openleft.com. Can you please put me in contact with the pres secretary / communications director?

[And then, once in contact]

Hi, my name is [FILL IN BLANK, use real name] and I have a media inquiry from Openleft.com. Can you please tell me if:

1–Senator [FILL IN BLANK] supports using the reconciliation process to forge a deal with the House of Representatives and finish health reform?

and

2–Does Senator {FILL IN BLANK] support including a public option in that reconciliation process, including signing onto Senator Bennet’s letter on the public option?

The responses have been rolling in. Thus far, 20 Senate Democrats are on the record supporting the reconciliation process, with one maybe (Mark Pryor) and only two definite no’s (Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh). What’s more, John Kerry, Patrick Leahy, Sheldon Whitehouse and Al Franken have backed the effort started yesterday to pass the public option through the reconciliation process, making it 8 Senators on the record for that. Both of these responses need 50 yes votes out of the 59 Senate Democrats, because reconciliation cannot be filibustered.

This crowdsourcing effort has just begun, and I’ll be both monitoring the progress and participating to see how many Senators will go on the record about using this tool available to them to pass health care. If we learn by the end of the week, the guessing game can then stop.

photo: David Blackwell via Flickr

Evan Bayh’s sorrowful retirement speech, and its claim that the Senate “is not working” and is “dysfunctional,” could have been a wake-up call about the difficulties of a de facto super-majority process grafted onto what amounts to a Parliamentary culture. But instead, filtered through the Village’s collective auditory canal, Bayh’s frustration becomes not about the filibuster, but about the need for wise centrism and bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake. Chris Matthews just spent 15 minutes on the “broken Senate,” bringing on the first two former Senators he could coax out of his green room (for accuracy, John Breaux and William Cohen), and the word “filibuster” or “super-majority” somehow never entered the discussion. Instead it was a conversation about how to punch the “far left” repeatedly in the face, and to an exceedingly lesser extent the far right. Apparently Bayh was frustrated by a lack of such pummeling, so he took off.

Bayh is an anomaly of sorts; he really grew to dislike the influence of liberal activists on his Senate colleagues. To him, these activists increased the cost of doing business. Reaching out to the other side became more risky than rallying around an ideological pole, even though that rallying around contributed to stasis. When it became clear to Bayh that the White House wasn’t going to play his game — wasn’t going to sell out liberals at every turn — Bayh decided he had had enough.

Not only does this show Bayh’s essential nature, but it’s fundamentally incorrect. Democrats had their best chance to deliver on campaign promises when they held 60 votes from September to January, and they just didn’t do much with the power. Expecting Republicans, even those blessed “moderates,” to join in on any initiative from Democrats at this stage is just a sucker’s bet. Far from a radical fringe agenda, any collective action that just the Democratic caucus would look upon favorably could have passed in that window. And by and large, practically nothing did.

Matthew Yglesias spells out this radical, crazed, DFH agenda, which looks a lot like… everything that the Democrats ran on in 2008:

One annoying recurring feature of talk about the present political situation is the presumption on the part of the centrist members of congress who’ve been driving the legislative agenda that the left has, in fact, been driving the legislative agenda. It’s worth reviewing the mainstream liberal policy agenda for the 111th Senate:

• A $1.2 trillion stimulus.
• The forcible breakup of large banks.
• Universal health care with a public option linked to Medicare rates.
• An economy-wide cap on carbon emissions, with the permits auctioned.
• Repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
• A path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
• An exit strategy from Afghanistan.
• An end to special exemption of military spending from fiscal discipline.
• An independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
• The Employee Free Choice Act.

As Yglesias notes, not only has none of this happened, but by and large most of it wasn’t even pushed for in any substantive way. Certainly the Administration wasn’t jamming the majority of this down anyone’s throat, and the Democratic leadership was extremely, to a fault, solicitous of concessions, one after another, on all of this. Bayh wasn’t frustrated by the lack of passage of the above agenda; he was frustrated by the inability to pass some separate agenda, which he preferred and which included tax cuts for billionaires and social spending cuts for the poor. The only reason the above agenda couldn’t pass was because Bayh, and people like him, wouldn’t allow it, and the Senate’s particular rules made Bayh and his compatriots relevant, rather than part of a majoritarian body.

You cannot talk credibly about a “broken Senate” unless you talk about the essential nature of the problem, and it’s not because people disagree about stuff. I think disagreement is a general state of being since the beginning of time. Using words like “gridlock” and “dysfunction” without pointing to the actual means by which the chamber stays gridlocked and dysfunctional is just the usual hippie-punching, using a few different words.

UPDATE: Bob Corker of Tennessee basically offered the same points on dysfunction without noting the means for it. He says that people just don’t get along with one another in the Senate anymore. I don’t think for a second that members of the Senate believe that – it’s something nice to say that people respond to. The idea that parties would change their strategies if they just sat down to coffee with someone from the other side every once in a while flies in the face of almost everything we know about institutions of this type. Republicans obstruct because it works for them. When it stops working for them, it’ll stop. Democrats aren’t passing anything because too many of their members really don’t want to pass anything, at least not anything that could be remotely considered “Democratic.” If those members left, suddenly Democrats would be a more cohesive entity.

Four Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) have written a letter to Harry Reid calling for the Senate to pass a public option for health care reform using the budget reconciliation process.

Bennet was joined on the letter by Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). In the letter, they discuss how the public option would save money (over $25 billion, even using the “level playing field” version), provide an alternative to private insurance companies and force competition on price and quality.

More significantly, Bennet and his counterparts made a strong case (using the AEI’s Norm Ornstein!) that budget reconciliation is a normal process to resolve policy issues that impact the bottom line.

There is a history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation.

There is substantial Senate precedent for using reconciliation to enact important health care policies. The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicare Advantage, and the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA), which actually contains the term ‘reconciliation’ in its title, were all enacted under reconciliation.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein and Brookings’ Thomas Mann and Molly Reynolds jointly wrote, “Are Democrats making an egregious power grab by sidestepping the filibuster? Hardly.” They continued that the precedent for using reconciliation to enact major policy changes is “much more extensive . . . than Senate Republicans are willing to admit these days.”

I think that the renewed push for the public option is nice, but the renewed push for using reconciliation to make the health care bill more palatable to pass the House actually might get this thing off the mat. It appears that the policy differences between the House and Senate are largely being ironed out; the process is more of a hurdle at this point. So if Bennet and his colleagues can actually calm the nerves of those skittish Senators who don’t want to use reconciliation because it’s “icky” and “partisan,” that would represent a significant step forward. It also happens to represent the only step forward; the House cannot do anything without reconciliation fixes.

Bennet, Gillibrand, Brown and Merkley are not the only ones itching to use reconciliation to finish off the health care bill. . .:

Given the unified GOP opposition to their health care effort, Senate Democrats argued just before departing for the Presidents Day recess that Obama’s summit is no reason to shelve reconciliation as a potential strategy. The tactic would allow Democrats pass certain aspects of health care reform with just 51 votes.

“I think it should be constantly pursued,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said Thursday when asked whether Democrats should take a break from drafting a reconciliation bill until after Obama’s summit.

“I think the Republicans are pretty committed to the notion that obstructing everything that President Obama would like to accomplish is very key to their base and their political success,” Whitehouse added. “I don’t see them departing from that strategy.”

Given that Democrats are choking in a desert looking for results right now, Bennet and these other Senators are at least offering that path out of the desert.

(photo: afagen)

LGBT and progressive bloggers are engaging in an all-out push today to contact the Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay rights organization in America, and have them show leadership on repealing the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy on gay and lesbian service members.

OUR MESSAGE TO HRC IS SIMPLE:

Publicly demand that President Obama take the lead in getting DADT repealed this year.

1) That means the President needs to state publicly that he wants Congress to repeal DADT this year; and

2) The President needs to take the lead in working with Congress to make sure the repeal happens.

If you’re a member or donor to HRC, tell them, and ask to speak to Members Services:

HRC Front Desk: (202) 628-4160
TTY: (202) 216-1572
Toll-Free: (800) 777-4723

HRC Web site comment page.
General membership email at hrc: [email protected]

Many gay rights advocates have been frustrated, not only by the pace of change in the Obama Administration, but the muted response from the national organizations, who they feel should be more aggressive in advocating for those changes. This action against the HRC seeks to push them into the spotlight with public pressure on the White House and members of Congress, and bloggers note that their close working relationship with the White House would mean that public statements of the type they desire would send a powerful signal.

Sponsors of the blog swarm include Joe Sudbay and John Aravosis of AMERICAblog, Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend, Michelangelo Signorile from Sirius OutQ & the Gist, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, and several others.

While the President did call for repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in his State of the Union Address, and while the movement has received major boosts in the past few weeks from public supporters like Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen and even former Vice President Dick Cheney, many gay rights bloggers have expressed concern over the lack of a defined strategy. Sudbay and Aravosis write:

But that momentum is quickly slipping away. After talking to people around Washington over the past two weeks, Joe and I have found a vacuum of leadership that is leading to confusion. The Hill has no idea if the President does or doesn’t want them to move ahead with repeal this year. The House has already said that it’s waiting for the Senate to do something. The Senate is in turmoil after the Democrats lost a single seat in January. And the DADT proposals being discussed in the Senate are focused on every possible approach except full repeal this year.

As we painfully learned last year during health care reform, nothing happens in Congress unless the President leads. And when the President doesn’t lead, disaster is guaranteed.

Whatever HRC has been telling the White House about DADT, it clearly isn’t working. In spite of the President’s positive comments during the State of the Union, no one knows where President Obama stands on repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” this year. All the while, unnamed administration officials are telling the media that it could be years before repeal finally happens. The White House clearly didn’t get HRC’s message, and as a result, we are losing this historic momentum.

Joan McCarter has more.

The campaign to get Democratic-leaning groups to advocate for legislative action probably should not be confined to gay rights issues. Indeed, the biggest threat facing Democrats right now appears to be themselves, with the constant agonizing and self-analysis outstripping the actual electoral danger and really making it worse:

If we told you that Democrats were favored to lose about eight Senate seats (six of which are in states Obama carried in ‘08), lose some 30 to 40 in the House, and see their top domestic issue — health care — stalled in Congress, you’d guess that President Obama’s approval rating was, what, 35%? Maybe 40%? But as any close follower of American politics knows, Obama’s approval is at or near 50% (even at 53% in the always-volatile Gallup daily track). Yet Democrats, including what we saw and heard from Evan Bayh yesterday, are behaving like Obama is at 35%. This is particularly ironic when we’re just a year-plus removed from a president whose approval was 25% to 30%. There is no doubt that this is a TOUGH political environment for Democrats, but are they making it tougher by running for the hills when things might not be as bad for them as was the GOP’s situation from 2006-2008? And what does it say about the Democrats and their ability to govern when they’re acting like this when their president is at 50%? Republicans rallied around their president in ‘04, when he was hovering around 50%.

Concern about losing the leadership in Congress could be alleviated by leading. And repealing DADT is but one small example of the potential for leadership.

The clock on Indiana University-Bloomington's campus ticks off the minutes till the filing deadline (photo: alykat via Flickr)

The situation in Indiana in the wake of the retirement of Evan Bayh is becoming a bit clearer.

Tamyra d’Ippolito, the cafe owner from Bloomington who had been running a no-budget campaign for the primary, used the tail end of her 15 minutes of fame to punch out multiple updates on her Facebook page, claiming she was absolutely going to qualify for the ballot and then adding this:

The leaders of our country never desired for us to be hung up on numbers of signatures. They wanted us to vote for the best person to be in office to represent the people.

It’s an interesting Constitutional challenge, to be sure, the “there were no petition signature gathering rules in the 18th century” defense. But I don’t think it’ll fly.

Now who knows, maybe she actually has the signatures, as she told Fox News today. But reaching out at the last minute to “teabaggers” to sign her petition doesn’t show a ton of political savvy or inspire confidence that she’ll get it done.

In that case, if there’s no Democratic qualifier for the ballot, there wouldn’t be a primary, and instead the state Democratic Party would handpick a candidate for November. Evan Bayh, for his part, called this a good thing last night to state Democratic leaders.

Bayh said the timing of his announcement could be a positive for Democrats. The source said that Bayh told the call that the lack of a primary would mean that the Republican party candidates would attack each other on their own, with no Democrats to get in the way. On the Democratic side of the process, according to the source, Bayh said officials would choose a strong nominee from their “deep bench.”

“He said, ‘if this goes to the state committee then we’ll have selected a candidate without a divisive primary,’” the source told me this evening.

With less than a week until the deadline for potential candidates to gather the necessary signatures to get listed on the primary ballot, it’s unlikely that there could be a Democratic primary to replace Bayh even if Democrats wanted one. But, according to the source, Bayh and Parker suggested on the call that not having a public vote on who Indiana’s next Democratic nominee for Senate will be could be a positive come November.

Yes, if there’s one thing people like, it’s not having a say in their candidates. That’s why there’s that mass popular movement to repeal the 17th Amendment.

But setting that aside, who would then be the likely candidate to replace Bayh? One pick who was talked about as a replacement bowed out yesterday. . .:

According to a national Democratic official speaking on the condition of anonymity, the Democratic short list to replace Bayh is: U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth of Evansville, U.S. Rep. Baron Hill of Seymour and Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel.

Weinzapfel, who is considering a 2012 run for governor, immediately withdrew himself from consideration, saying in a statement he is honored to be mentioned, but “not interested in pursuing this opportunity.”

Former Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson and US Rep. Joe Donnelly also declined a run yesterday, as did former Governor Joe Kernan. As for the remaining candidates, Hill and Ellsworth still appear to be available, along with names like former state Attorney General Joe Hogsett, state lawmaker Vi Simpson, 2008 gubernatorial candidate Jim Schellinger and former DNC Chair Joe Andrew.

The issue with Hill and Ellsworth is parallel to the issue with Bayh; if they are plucked out of their House races, whatever candidate running in a primary against them gets to fight to be the nominee, and if there is no candidate, the state party would choose that nominee as well. There are a couple no-budget candidates in Hill’s race, which essentially means conceding that seat to former Rep. Mike Sodrel. As of the moment nobody is challenging Ellsworth, which means the successor could be handpicked (Weinzapfel, from this district, would return to the mix in that case). But that open seat would still be difficult to hold in this environment.

Indiana Democrats have until June 30 to make this decision, provided that d’Ippolito doesn’t surprise and make it onto the ballot.

Evan Bayh’s retirement announcement blamed excessive partisan gridlock for his stepping down:

“Two weeks ago, the Senate voted down a bipartisan commission to deal with one of the greatest threats facing our nation: our exploding deficits and debt. The measure would have passed, but seven members who had endorsed the idea instead voted ‘no’ for short-term political reasons,” he said. “Just last week, a major piece of legislation to create jobs — the public’s top priority — fell apart amid complaints from both the left and right. All of this and much more has led me to believe that there are better ways to serve my fellow citizens, my beloved state and our nation than continued service in Congress.”

The shorter version of this is “Every Senator wasn’t willing to do exactly what I wanted, so I’m leaving because this is too hard.” But the subtext is that partisan gridlock frustrates Congress, particularly the Senate, from getting things done. If there only were some quirk in the Senate rules that added additional veto points, in many cases causing the gridlock of which Bayh speaks. I wonder what he had to say about those Senate rules:

Democratic leaders should be able to tell where Bayh is headed based on his vote on whether to move to a debate. The Indiana Democrat said Tuesday that he doesn’t see “much difference between process and policy at this particular juncture,” and that he’ll be “looking at those two things as one and the same.”

In other words, Bayh sees procedural votes that block a final vote as the same as the final vote, essentially installing an artificial 60-vote supermajority on the Senate.

But see, he’s retiring because he’s really concerned about partisan gridlock. Presumably while he contributes to it.

Senators who actually want to get something done in Washington are signing on to the effort to change the Senate rules. Those like Evan Bayh, who don’t, whimper and whine and leave.

Earlier this afternoon, Evan Bayh stepped up to a podium in Indianapolis to announce that he will not seek re-election this year. I’ve monitored it for all the inherent wankery. . . .

His family is behind him, his staff is in the room.

“I was raised in a family that believed public service is the highest calling…” He’s now going through his record as a Secretary of State, Governor and Senator.

Incidentally, this list of accomplishments is fairly thin. “I’ve been civil!”

“My passion for service to our fellow citizens is undiminished, but my passion for serving in Congress has waned… I’ve had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should… the people’s business is not getting done.”

His two big examples for that is that not enough people would sign on to the cat food commission to cut Medicare and Social Security, and that Harry Reid didn’t keep the crappy pork unrelated to job creation in the jobs bill.

“I do not love Congress.” Who says that?

I like how he said that Congress is broken, but everyone in Congress is a saint.

“I simply believe that I can best contribute to society in another way…” and then he doesn’t really come up with how to do that. A business, a philanthropic society, a university?

“If Washington DC could be more like Indiana, then Washington would be a better place.”

Yadda yadda and yadda.

Rep. Brad Ellsworth with Sen. Bayh and Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel (photo courtesy of Evan Bayh)

Barring some miracle of Tamyra D’Ippolito qualifying for the primary ballot in the Indiana Senate race (a miracle that even she doubts as she’s only collected 77% of the required signatures with one day to go and will have no support from the state party), it’s likely that Indiana Democrats will be able, by virtue of having no primary candidates on the ballot, to select their own candidate for November, avoiding the primary entirely. So who will that candidate be?

The name that keeps coming up in various conversations is Rep. Brad Ellsworth. Ellsworth, a former sheriff, beat Rep. John Hostettler, who is an announced candidate on the Republican side for the Senate seat, in 2006. That seat is perenially seen as a bellwether swing seat in Indiana (meaning that opening it up would make it an instant Republican target. He’s a fairly right-leaning candidate for a Democrat, but so was Bayh.

Among the other names being kicked around are Rep. Baron Hill, who would be lucky to win his own seat in Congress, let alone a Senate seat; and Evansville mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel. Who is that? He’s a 44 year-old two-term mayor of a city in that swing district of IN-08 (he took 85% of the vote as Mayor in 2007), and he previously served in the Indiana House. He’s considered the most popular mayor in Indiana, and what’s more, he has nothing to do with Washington, which is probably important in this anti-incumbent climate.

Put me down for Weinzapfel, though I’m not in a back room.

UPDATE: Ellsworth has already responded: “I appreciate the support of those Hoosiers who have already encouraged me to run for Sen. Bayh’s seat. The next step will be taking a few days to talk to my wife and to folks in Indiana about where I can best serve our state.”