According to Michael Mahoney, GOP establishment darling Ann Wagner, accompanied by GOP legislative has-been, Jim Talent, will hold a news conference to kick-off the Wagner general election campaign for the newly configured 2nd House district.  Mahoney’s preview speculates that they’ll give us a look at Wagner’s campaign strategy:

They’ll go after president Obama’s record on the economy. They’ll claim he “failed”, and cite the fact that the unemployment rate has been over 8% for 42 months. They’ll also promote the ‘America’s Comeback Team’. That’s the name the Romney campaign has rolled out after the weekend selection of Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate.

In other words, they’ll not deviate from standard GOP slogans. It’s just so much easier to paint-by-numbers.

Touting the “come-back team” (because we would “come-back” to failed Bush administration policies?), while decrying the economy is, of course a predictable  approach, but not without risk, given what we now know about Paul Ryan’s role in planning the the last three and a half years of GOP congressional obstructionism, a course of action meant to do nothing more than damage the President by stalling the economic recovery – regardless of how much harm such a strategy would do to regular Americans.

Robert Draper in his recently published book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the US House of Representatives, writes that Ryan was one of the GOP congressional leaders who attended a dinner in Jaunary of 2009 in which just this policy of obstructionism was explicitly planned:

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

Draper is not alone. Greg Sargent comments on what he calls “juicy nuggets” in Michael Grunwald’s new book, The New New Deal, that:

… shed new light on the degree to which Republicans may have decided to deny Obama all cooperation for the explicit purpose of rendering his presidency a failure – making it easier for them to mount a political comback after their disastrous 2008 losses.

Sadly, what’s also predictable is the probable willingness of the traditional press to report GOP slogans without comment in preference to ferreting out the more complex truth. Although I’d love to be wrong, it’s not likely that any intrepid Missouri newsman will challenge Wagner and Talent to respond to the now well-substantiated allegations of orchestrated, intentional obstructionism and so take ownership of the slow-as-syrup economic recovery their Grand Old Party has engineered.

*Slightly edited.  

Greg Sargent has noticed that our careful-to-toe-the-center-line Senator Claire McCaskill is betting that the Buffett Rule is a winner (something we commented on last week):

Dems point out that even Claire McCaskill, who’s facing a tough fight in Missouri, has been flogging the issue – proof, they say, that it can gain traction even in difficult states or districts.

Of course, McCaskill’s a smart cookie (as they say in the old movies), and understands that the Buffett Rule not only appeals to our desire for a fair tax code, but makes palpable the contrast between Democratic policies that favor the middle class and the GOP’s rich man fetish. It doesn’t hurt either that, in Sargent’s words,  the GOP presidential contender, Mitt Romeny, is a “walking emblem of all the ways the economy and tax system are rigged against the middle class and in favor of the rich.” Hence the DSCC Web ad reproduced on the right side of this post.

Another indicator that, in addition to being the right thing to do on a moral level, this direction will be politically effective lies in the weak GOP response. Sargent notes that the GOP leadership is attempting to dismiss the upcoming vote on the Buffett rule as a “show” vote, taken for political purposes. All this claim does, of course, is underline the fact that if it is a show vote, it is only so because of GOP obstructionism. When the vote fails, we’ll know who’s to blame. Nor does it help the GOP cause that the Republican dominated U.S. House has staged any number of such show votes this session, most recently the vote for the Ryan Budget.

UPDATE: Not only is the GOP response weak, but the response from the Mitt Romney camp is downright dispicable. Romney’s spokesmen tried, in the wake of the President’s speech yesterday, to slime the eponymous Warren Buffet:

The rule, I think, is also an example of Washington at its worst,” Hassett said. “It exempts municipal bond interests from the harsh capital treatment and you might wonder why, given that we’re calling it the Buffett Rule – I think it’s no coincidence Berkshire [Hathaway, Buffett’s firm] has been a big player in municipal bond markets.”

The exemption of municipal bonds from the proposed top rate, is, of course, intended “to prevent city and state taxpayers of all income levels from picking up a bigger tab for loans taken by local governments.”

But, hey, par for the course for the GOP to go after anything that benefits the middle class directly.

Last Wednesday, Harry Reid added to the Senate calendar Claire McCaskill’s legislative baby, the McCaskill-Wyden-Grassley bill that would put an end to secret holds, which allow a senator to unilaterally stop legislation without identifying him or herself. Claire McCaskill claims she has rounded up 68 votes for the bill which seems to guarantee that it will pass.

While this will be a real feather in McCaskill’s cap if it comes to pass and is certainly worthy legislation, since nobody – or at least nobody who is serious – can deny that the more we know, the better off we are, it is, in terms of the Senate’s procedural malfunctions, pretty small potatoes. Numerous commentators (see here, here and here) have noted that the problem is not secret holds, but too many holds used as a tool for partisan obstruction, which, as Jonathan Bernstein notes, constitues an actual abuse of Senate rules.

There is little evidence that making holds public will do much to fix that problem. If you really  think that forcing these arrogant obstructionists to put their name to a hold will shame them, then you haven’t been paying attention to their outrageous behavior for the last two years. When it comes time to stand up for the de facto GOP negative hegemony, you can bet they’ll be right where they’re needed. There’s lots to be said for Bernstein’s preferred remedy:

Rather than make Senators explain themselves and have the Majority Leader judge which holds are legitimate and which are not, the Democrats should play hardball: they should let the Republicans know that unless the total number of holds on nominations shrinks dramatically, the Dems will start calling nominations up anyway, hold or not, and force the GOP to find 41 votes against considering them.

And if the Republicans can muster 41 votes, then we come to the issue of reforming the filibuster, which would fix this and lots of other problems. The Senate could change the filibuster rules on the first day of the new session, January 2011, right after the midterms. Of course, McCaskill has lately been been one of the Democrats voting with Republicans to uphold their filibusters – so do you think her concern about making things work might extend to doing something that would really help fix the broken Senate – where, as the new saying goes, legislation comes to die and the will of the majority is routinely flouted?

 

I’ve been keeping a mental checklist of the pluses and minuses that Claire McCaskill has racked up, per my druthers,  since she was elected. Sad as it makes me feel, I have to admit that for a long stretch her pluses have been few and far between, and not quite as big and bold as her minuses. Well, today she gets a great big, bold-print, double plus for taking on the Republican obstruction machine all by herself – and I am grinning as broadly as Carroll’s Cheshire cat

One of the ways Republicans have tried to hinder the Obama administration has been to stall the President’s nominations, and the secret hold, applied to about 80 nominations so far, has been one of the weapons of choice  Today, Senator McCaskill took a step that could force those who placed the holds to reveal themselves and justify their actions.

McCaskill has requested unanimous consent to vote on 18 stalled nominations – and she has indicated that she will do the same for 60 more nominations. According to Senate rules passed in 2007, this means that:

… once the unanimous consent motion is made on a nominee, the member who is holding that nominee has to file a letter explaining their hold and that has to be published in the Congressional record …

Needless to say, many if not all of those placing holds might be seriously embarrassed if they had to identify themselves and come up with plausible reasons for holding up the nomination process. McCaskill twittered earlier today that she is “trying to put an end to ‘secret’ hold nonsense,” and forcing the the guilty parties out into the light could be just the ticket. Of course, since she is nothing if not cautious, she followed up with this qualification lest anyone accuse her of acting rashly:

Only making motion so disclosure of the “secret”hold required on nominations that had NO opposition in committee.

Makes you want to reassure her that we would never suspect that she hadn’t dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s – but, of course, there are those who would. No matter – way to go, Senator McCaskill! I’m proud that a Missouri Senator took this overdue step to try to beat back Republican thuggery, and insure that our government has the people in place to do what needs to be done.