Joe Lieberman’s gag-inducing horse trade: Health care reform for cap and trade?

The root of the disaster (Getty Images via Daylife)

Ezra Klein puts out the possibility that the Democrats are kowtowing to Senator Lieberman on health care reform because they want his backing on cap an trade down the road:

And if you want proof, turn your attention to climate change, where Lieberman seems — and seems is an important word there — like he’ll be a crucial ally. Six months from now, liberals may be rallying around Lieberman as he defends against attacks on “cap and tax.” Political realities change quickly, and today’s allies are worth more than yesterday’s resentments.

via Ezra Klein – The 80 percent friend.

My oh my this is some disgustipating politics that we’ve got going on here. The truth is the Democratic majority doesn’t really need an ‘80% friend.’ The Democrats in the majority only need a 20% friend if she or he will vote with the Democrats in those moments when it’s needed. If you rely on 80% friends to be the cloture-invoking vote, it would appear that you ultimately get 20% of what you want.

I mean, let’s face it: If Senator Lieberman is such a man of principle (and let me tell you, I don’t believe that he is), he’ll vote in favor of cap and trade because he believes that it’s in his interest to do so. That’s one of the enduring messages of the realist school of international relations: Nations don’t have permanent friends, they only have permanent interests. Take out ‘nations’ and replace it with ‘Senators,’ and you start seeing the world a little more clearly.

President Bush and his Republican majority certain understood this point, as John Aravosis beautifully articulated the point today at Americablog:

What the GOP lacked in numbers, they made up for in backbone, cunning and leadership. Say what you will about George Bush, he wasn’t afraid of a fight. If anything, the Bush administration, and the Republicans in Congress, seemed to relish taking on Democrats, and seeing just how far they could get Democratic members of Congress to cave on their promises and their principles. Hell, even Senator Barack Obama, who once famously promised to lead a filibuster against the FISA domestic eavesdropping bill, suddenly changed his mind and actually voted for the legislation. Such is the power of a president and a congressional leadership with balls and smarts.

How did they do it? Bush was willing to use his bully pulpit to create an environment in which the opposition party feared taking him on, feared challenging his agenda, lest they be seen as unpatriotic and extreme. By going public, early and often, with his beliefs, Bush was able to fracture the Democratic opposition (and any potential dissent in his own party) and forestall any effort to mount a filibuster against the most important items in his agenda.

It’s not about the votes, people. It’s about leadership. The current occupant of the White House doesn’t like to fight, and the leadership in Congress has never been as good at their jobs, at marshaling their own party, as the Republicans were when they were in the majority…

John’s trenchant remarks bring out the part of me that wonders if the Democrats weren’t better off when Arlen Specter was still a Republican and they only believed they had a 58 vote majority rather than assuming they had 60. One of my fears about President Obama, versus say a President Hillary Clinton, was that the young first-term Senator is not a man with a lot of experience in a legislative knife fight. I think the addition of Specter to the Democratic caucus may have almost made this problem worse. Rather than assuming that he was going to need to fight like hell to secure four or five votes in most scenarios, President Obama appears to have been starting from the assumption that he’s got a filibuster-proof majority to work with. And the result of that is that one or two senators will now always believe that they can play dealbreaker instead of Democrat and secure major concessions in the process. When they’re Joe Lieberman and believe that they’ve been transformed into a latter day “Mr Smith Goes to Washington,” all we end up with is dreck that no voter in America is going to get excited about.

Some spectators are talking about marching back to reconciliation as a means of passing health care reform in pieces without a filibuster threat. But really, why are we still standing on the shrinking ice floe of the assumption that all of the so-called 60 members of the Democratic caucus need to vote for a bill? We know that Senator Olympia Snowe is open to a ‘trigger’ for the public option, which may be imperfect, but has hardly been debated seriously as a potential tool for getting the Democrats closer to what they want than the latest mess. If President Bush’s 55 Republicans in the Senate were able to routinely bring 5 Democrats over, why isn’t Harry Reid figuring out how to get Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and another vulnerable Republican or two on board the trigger as a means of having the possibility of a public option out there for the Senate to vote on?

They could do it without Lieberman, too. Instead, America’s upper chamber labors on underneath the burdens of the Independent Democrat of Connecticut, and hopes against hope that he won’t burn them next time around. He probably will. Our young president just doesn’t yet seem to understand that.