President Obama, during yesterday's Q&A with Joe Sudbay and four other progressive bloggers:
I'm President and not king. And so I've got to get a majority in the House and I've got to get 60 votes in the Senate to move any legislative initiative forward.Oy.
Now, during the course -- the 21 months of my presidency so far, I think we had 60 votes in the Senate for seven months, six? I mean, it was after Franken finally got seated and Arlen had flipped, but before Scott Brown won in Massachusetts. So that's a fairly narrow window.
George W. Bush never had more than 55 Republican Senators during any time of his eight year presidency, and at one point he had only 50. You never saw him talking publicly about how powerless he was to do anything because he didn't have 60 votes, and because he wasn't "king." He sure acted like he was king. And funny thing, George Bush got a long done during his presidency, including starting two wars, passing the Patriot Act, getting two uber-conservative Supreme Court appointments, and a massive tax cut.
And actually, even though the Democrats weren't filibustering much at all, the Republicans went CRAZY complaining about how Dems were filibustering too many judicial nominees (they weren't). The Rs played the Ds like a fiddle, did a pretty good job of convincing the public that the Democrats were doing something they weren't, and then when the Republicans came to office, what did they do? Went filibuster crazy. For the Republicans, complaining about the filibuster wasn't an excuse for not doing anything. It was a tactic for scaring the Democrats away from future filibusters, and for turning the public against the Democrats. When the President complains about the filibuster, it doesn't feel like a tactic. It generally feels like an excuse.
I simply cannot fathom who told the President that it was a smart talking point to tell people how powerless he is. They've been saying it a lot, over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and it needs to stop.
And one more thing. If the filibuster is such a problem, then why did the President refuse to go after Senator Bunning when he was filibustering unemployment benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans? And I quote from AMERICAblog this past March:
A few minutes ago on CNN, Ed Henry reported that he'd been tipped off by the White House that Obama was going to take "a jab" at Senator Bunning today when he got off Air Force One today in Georgia. Bunning certainly deserves the jab.Back in March, the filibuster was just a "minute detail of what the Senate does." Now it's the excuse for why the President doesn't keep many of his promises.
Didn't happen.
According to Henry, the White House informed him that the Bunning line was removed from the President's speech because Obama felt it would be too partisan. And, in any case, the brain trust at the White House doesn't want to involve the President in every minute detail of what the Senate does.
The reason the President doesn't have more power isn't because he's not king - it's because he had the power, and he simply let it slip away.
