Found this little gem via Greg Sargent:
And [White House Communications Director] Dan Pfeiffer tells Politico that the White House will step up efforts to spotlight GOP obstructionism, but this quote may irk folks a bit:It irks me. Apparently, the White House accepts the fact that Senate Republicans will filibuster every single legislative item. Or, they accept the fact that the Senate Republicans have no fear of repercussions for obstructing the Democrats' agenda because the President doesn't make them pay a price. Mitch McConnell is putting his political interests above the well-being of the nation. We're in two wars and slowly climbing out of the Great Recession (maybe.) But, there's no price to pay for blocking everything and anything in the Senate. Obama should be picking the GOPers off one-by-one. And, he should spend some time in Maine to let everyone up there know the games that the two alleged Republican moderates are playing with our nation's future.“With 59 Senators, it is mathematically impossible for Democrats to do everything on their own."Some will respond that it’s only mathematically impossible if Dems accept the filibuster as an inevitable fact of life, rather than something that might be campaigned against and changed. But the White House doesn’t appear to have an appetite for doing that.
Thern there are the Democratic obstructionists who not only don't get called out, they get rewarded for their bad behavior. Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and Joe Lieberman come to mind.
Remember how George Bush whined about the mathematical impossibility of doing anything when he only had 49 GOP Senators for most of the first two years of his first term? I don't either. As John noted earlier this month, during Bush's presidency, the most Republican Senators he had to work with was 55.
On the good news front, Chris Bowers reports that David Axelrod seemed somewhat amenable to efforts to supporting a change in the filibuster rules for the next Congress.
