Remember on Seinfeld when George Costanza was caught in an embarrassing situation and he had no clue what to do about it? Remember what he said? "I got nothing. I got nothing Jerry."
That's pretty much where Virginia's Right-Wing blogosphere finds itself today. They got nothing.
Imagine my surprise when I left work today and looked in on the blogosphere to find that no one, NO ONE, Left or Right was writing about the single biggest story of . . . well hell, at the very least the biggest story of the last four years. Did you guys fall asleep on me?
Senate Republicans have punted!
Remember kids, it takes at least 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate because any Senator can signal that he or she intends to filibuster and if 60 Senators don't agree to invoke cloture, the bill is dead, dead, dead. Republicans in the Senate are employing a kind of meta-passive-aggressive strategy: they are letting the bill to fund/end the War in Iraq go by!
Let's break this down: there are 51 Democrats/Independents and 49 Republicans in the Senate. One Independent--Lieberman--votes with the Republicans on the war. Another Democrat, Tim Johnson, is out on sick leave recovering from bleeding in the brain caused by cerebral arteriovenous malformation. That makes 49 Democrats against 49 Republicans-plus-Lieberman-equals-50-right? Wrong.
Two Republicans bolted their party and voted with the Democrats: Gordon Smith of Oregon and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. Here's where it gets interesting folks: with 48 votes the Republicans, in theory, have more than enough votes to filibuster this bill and avoid cloture, BUT THEY DIDN'T!
No, they didn't. The bill, along with a provision calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq passed the Senate and will now proceed to conference committee, where differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill will be ironed out. When the bill returns to the Senate, there will be no chance to filibuster, just one of those "up or down votes" Republicans are always babbling about.
Now let's not kid ourselves: George W. Bush is going to veto the hell out of this bill. When he does, the Republican Party will lose several Senate seats. The Senate seats won't be lost until November 2008, and we don't know how many, but that's the gamble the Republican Party is taking.
Now before Republican bloggers start whining about Gordon Smith and Chuck Hagel, calling them "RINOs" and other more graphic terms, remember: if Republicans in the Senate really wanted to stop this bill they could stop it cold with ease. They are counting on your complete lack of knowledge in the area of civics, they think you'll blame Smith and Hagel and forget that they could have shut this bill down if they wanted to.
Were Republican Senators to block the war funding/ending bill themselves, as they easily could, they would almost certainly lose even more Senate seats. The Republicans in Congress have passed over to a "blame Bush" strategy as their best hope for avoiding total extermination in Congress next year!
Recent polls show that a whopping 59% of Americans approve of the Democratic plan to fund one more year of war and then get out in August or September of 2008. If that percentage holds steady (and there's no guarantee it will) Republicans face massacre at the polls next year.
There it is folks: the biggest story of the last four years. The Republican Party has abandoned George W. Bush and is trying to cut it's losses in 2008.
No wonder Republican bloggers prefer to talk about Jim Webb's pistol. I'll cut to the chase folks: the charges against Thompson will probably be tossed because there's no way the prosecutor will ever be able to prove intent (yep, that's lawyer-talk).
Read more here.
Cross-posted at the world-famous Richmond Democrat.
Update: Egg on my face--they can't filibuster an appropriations bill.