Letter 2 America for January 11, 2013

Dear America,

I say this without equivocation: Chiquita bananas are qualitatively distinct from all other brands, and no one sells as good a banana as Chiquita.  At first blush, that seems insignificant for blogging purposes...unless of course we're talking about banana blogs, but we're not.  Chiquita Brands International is an American corporation, the successor to United Fruit Company, which went bankrupt some time ago.  Chiquita doesn't grow bananas here.  It buys them abroad and then sells them here and elsewhere around the world.  Of course, no one grows any significant amount of bananas in this country because we have no real tropical rain forest type climate in this country, so I have no qualms about buying Chiquita bananas.  I like bananas, and Chiquita somehow always sells the best ones.  I try to buy American, but in this case, I can't.  However, there are many American corporations that either buy foreign goods or manufacture their products abroad, and with regard to those companies, I cannot think of a single one that produces or markets a  product manufactured or otherwise produced in another country that is superior to what we could manufacture or produce here at home.  I'm sure you can see where I'm headed now.

Congress will be taking up anew all of the unfinished business of the last congress, and given the lack of Republican compunction over their party's willingness to stop any legislation they didn't like from even being debated rather than casting a vote against it for fear of public opprobrium, there is quite a bit of that.  One of those bills-to-be-again is the one first introduced in The Senate by the Democrats just prior to the 2010 elections, and more recently in July 2012.  On both occasions, the Republicans blocked debate of the bills with impunity via filibusters.  Maybe it's even more obvious where I'm going now.  Bills that were intended to, and probably would have in my opinion, induced some major corporations to repatriate jobs that were expatriated to countries where workers make far less in wages and enjoy far fewer rights, such as in Pakistani and Indian textile factories in which quite a few workers have died in fires lately, were prevented from being debated or even coming to a vote through Parliamentary tactics rather than democratic practices.  And in the more recent case, the Republicans complained that they blocked the bill because Democrats refused to allow amendments to the bill.  That practice is called "filling the tree," which is a reference to the majority leader of one party attaching to a bill peremptory and preemptive amendments in a number that represents the maximum permitted under The Senate's rules. Filling the tree prevents the other party from obfuscating the central issue by inserting poison pill amendments into the bill so as to create what is commonly known as a "Hobson's choice," and also creating almost endless opportunities for debate, the aggregation of which is effectively an opportunity to filibuster without filibustering. The sponsors of the bill are thus denied the opportunity to address what the bill was intended to address without negative consequences of one kind or another unless they fill the tree.  Both the filibuster and filling the tree are on The Senate's agenda now on what technically is still the first day of the 113th Congress in The Senate, and that is the point of all this banana talk.  The Senate is, or at least many Senators are, contemplating repudiation of the filibuster as a means of changing that body back from the banana republic (I couldn't resist) that it has become to the democratic institution that it was intended to be, and filling the tree has a great deal to do with that.

Eliminating the filibuster is only half the battle that needs to be fought.  The other half is preserving the right to fill the tree without denying the minority party its right to be heard.  This tree filling process is so complicated that even with examples, it takes study to understand the procedure completely.  Bills can have anywhere from two to eleven or even twelve amendments of various kinds, all of which have hierarchical places among the several amendment types in terms of when and if they can be debated.  But the bottom line is this: without filling the tree, a minority can still effectively kill a bill by attaching to the amendment tree amendments that constitute poison fruit if they are passed along with the bill.  So the issue is somewhat complicated, but no matter what happens with filling the tree, killing the filibuster by allowing cloture...that is the termination of debate on a bill...with a simple majority is of paramount importance.  And as it turns out, there are 48 Democrats and independents aligned with Majority Leader Harry Reid to thus change the rules, but there are seven holdouts among Democrats, and they are preventing the cloture rule change from occurring as of this past week...Democrats, not Republicans (all of whom oppose the rules change but that is no surprise).  In effect, those seven Democrats are considering voting with the Republicans on preserving the tactic that has prevented the Democrats from accomplishing what they set out to accomplish when they held both houses of Congress in 2007, and the presidency as well from 2009 until 2011.

This business of the Democrats being their own worst enemies is becoming frustrating.  First it was the Blue Dogs in The House of Representatives during the first two years of the first Obama presidency, and now it is the pompous, old line Democrats who still believe that The Senate is so full of wisdom that democratic principles don't apply to them because they are so prudent, and the names of those Senators might surprise you.  There's Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the closest thing to a Lion of the Senate since the death of Ted Kennedy.  And then there are the two Senators from California, both women and both purportedly liberal.  In addition, there are the two Senators from Hawaii, also both women.  (I mention the fact that they are women because I recently saw a group of new female senators and congressional representatives being interviewed en masse, and they think that they will bring a new cooperativeness to our legislature...a dubious claim if these potential votes of the incumbent women in The Senate are an indicator.)  Until the power to obstruct the will of the American people is denied the minority in The Senate, whichever party that is, there can be no compromise.  With each party having the undeniable power to say no, there is no power to say yes without 60 votes, which no party gets almost ever, including now.  So, if you have the opportunity--say Patrick Leahy is coming to your house in Vermont for dinner--maybe you can prevail upon him to do the right thing about the filibuster.  Because if those seven Senators don't have three among them who will see the light, we are doomed to experience two, and maybe four more years of what we have had...which was less than nothing.

Your friend,

Mike