Thursday, December 30, 2010

Will Harry screw the pooch again?

It remains to be seen what, if anything, comes of this but Harry Reid is talking about filibuster reform with Mitch The Chin. With the memory of his failure to reform the filibuster at the beginning of the last Congress still fresh, Harry does have us worried.
A handful of junior Democrats, including Sens. Tom Udall (D-NM) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), have done an impressive job building momentum for a package of modest, but meaningful, changes to the Senate's filibuster rules. But their plan could be completely upended and replaced by even more modest reforms, if Democratic and Republican leaders successfully negotiate a bipartisan rules reform compromise.

In a phone interview with me Wednesday, Udall described negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) as a "separate track" from his own efforts.

A Senate Democratic aide confirms that those discussions are ongoing, and haven't yet yielded consensus. But if they do, that consensus would serve as a stand-in for Udall's approach, not as an endorsement of it, as previous reporting has suggested.
So far The Chin is very much against removing the filibuster from the Motion to Proceed, the one thing that most needs to be removed. Harry does have the whip hand because he has the votes to do it without the Republican/Teabaggers but does he have the nuts to do it?

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