Stevens Expulsion Vote Postponed
Democrats Let Lieberman Keep Senate Chairmanship
It’s the world’s most exclusive kleptocracy. There is nothing a United States Senator can do, apparently, that will cause his fellow senators to hold him accountable. A regular person sneezes wrong at work they might get fired. A United States Senator gets convicted seven times over, or actively helps the competition try to ruin his own side’s chances, and oh well.
Get the figurative pitchforks. As if our country doesn’t face enough challenges, we have to contend with this Bozo the Clown “leadership” in Congress.
You enable crooks and liars, the people don’t respect you. It’s pretty simple.
I’m guessing Harry Reid is not faring too well in the Daily Kos leadership poll. (Note: the poll is not scientific and is only a rough gauge of the sentiments of people who chose to participate because they were so fucking pissed.)
Get out the guillotine.
Once again the GOP demonstrates its moral relativism: Whether Stevens won or lost the election matters more than his conviction on multiple felony counts.
Apparently Jeff Merkley, our new senator to the south, spoke out against Lieberman. I hope this is confirmed — it’s the kind of leadership we need.
Harry Reid:
Primary challenge.
any info on where Murray and Cantwell stood?
I’d really really like revenge but if this means that Obama owns Lieberman, that would be better. A puppet Liberman is better than a cast out one.
If he acts up, then strip him….
Hey it’s the U.S. Senate. Most people don’t know they do things a bit differently there.
It’s better (at least right now) that Joe’s in our tent than in the other. Like other people have hinted, Obama owns him (to some extent anyway). If he screws up then he goes to the GOP or does a Jeffords.
Yeah it’s hard to see past the ugly statements Lieberman has made but to the other Senators, it’s nothing personal.
It’s just politics.
It’s not about retribution, although that would certainly be satisfying and not unjustified.
The fact is, that as Chair of the Homeland Security Committee, Lieberman has tremendous control over what bills get moved in that committee. He will be a tremendous roadblock to getting anything accomplished there.
As the the 60-vote question, we might be able to get Arlen Specter or Olympia Snow to vote to break a filibuster.
I think this was a huge mistake.
maria and patty are all over lieberweasel though, right?
Marc Ambinder called the shot:
Progressives be punk’d.
So, you’ve had your revolution, but now it’s not going according to Hoyle?
The first victim of the revolution are the revolutionaries.
And while we’re at it…over in the House of Representatives, what’s doin’ with the Ice Man? Lousiana Congressmen William Jefferson, he of the frozen cash and currently under indictment for a penumbra of offenses emanating from Title 18 of the United States Code, seems to be conspicuously absent from your rogues’ gallery.
The sooner Ted the Bridge Man gets the boot, the better for all concerned.
Wouldn’t you all agree the same applies to Bill the Ice Man?
Oh…BTW…any new arrests among Dem congressional aides? Just checking.
The Piper
10: “… is seen as a sanctimonious creature who leeches; he takes the benefit of communion with the Democratic Party without performing the rituals.”
Excellent description of Joe Lieberman. When he should be hanging his head in shame and humility, he acts like he’s got all the cards. He is thoroughly untrustworthy and has defrauded the people of Connecticut.
@11 Welcome back, crackpiper! How did it feel to get your ass kicked? As for intraparty quarrels, I’d rather have our problems than yours! It sucks to be you.
Looks like we get to keep Gregoire. President-Elect Obama (GMRS*, I love the way that phrase rolls off my pink rabbit tongue!) reportedly picked Eric Holder to be Attorney General.
* Abbreviation for Great Mother Rabbit Spirit
@12…PL…
Joe Lieberman is the latter day incarnation of Henry M. Jackson – in fact, he represents what used to be the vast majority of Dems from the time of the building of FDR’s New Deal coalition through Truman, JFK, and others.
LBJ screwed it up by lying about Vietnam and selling the soap of both guns and tax-funded butter all at the same time.
These are the members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee:
Democrat Republican
Joseph I. Lieberman Chairman (ID) (CT) Susan M. Collins Ranking Member (ME)
Carl Levin (MI) Ted Stevens (AK)
Daniel K. Akaka (HI) George V. Voinovich (OH)
Thomas R. Carper (DE) Norm Coleman (MN)
Mark L. Pryor (AR) Tom Coburn (OK)
Mary L. Landrieu (LA) Pete V. Domenici (NM)
Barack Obama (IL) John Warner (VA)
Claire McCaskill (MO) John E. Sununu (NH)
Jon Tester (MT)
Since this is a pre-resignation list, note that BHO is among them. He obviously has some working knowledge of Joe Lieberman’s capabilities and qualifications to chair the committee, and since he’s no doubt being consulted on any and everything these days, it’s a safe bet that he bought off on retaining Sen. Lieberman as the chair.
Besides, who in his right mind would want Carl Levin to chair the damn thing?
Don’t make decisions purely out of spite or revenge or in the end you’ll have only the former and nothing of the latter.
The Piper
Piper:
Are you saying Henry Jackson was a slimy weasel who rewarded support with betrayal? That he worked to undercut multiple Democrats in national elections?
Man, give us some references for THAT.
RE Senators Murray and Cantwell,
I just called their WA DC offices to ask how they had voted on Leiberman. According to their staff people they had not informed their offices yet. The Sen. Murray phone person was kind of weasely about secret ballat blah blah. I suspect she voted for him to retain his chairmanship of the HS committee. Cantwell’s office said she hadn’t told them yet (or did he say hadn’t made a press release yet), and asked me what I thought.
Anyway, we’ll keep asking til they tell us and why. Why the secrecy?
@16…Cracked…
I’m saying that, were he alive today, Scoop would have stood with Lieberman in support of McCain.
Remember…he came within the width of one of Goldy’s mustache whiskers to being Dick Nixon’s SecDef.
Or is there no truth at all to the notion that once an election is over, the job of government is to govern with the interests of the nation in mind, not just engage in political vendettas worthy of Micheal Corleone?
The Piper
@18 I guess it is a intraparty squabble. I and many thousands of other Democrats spent lots of time and money trying to elect Democrats. Leiberman spent his time working against the Democratic presidential nominee, and working against Democratic congressional candidates running against incumbent Republicans. Plus, Leiberman is not in the Democratic party. Why should he be REWARDED with a key position in the Democratic party? Leaving aside revenge, what they hell is the logic of it?
I know what you want. But your people lost in the national elections, yet your Leiberman is being rewarded. I can see how this would be some consolation to you, but to me it feels like an overt slap in the face.
I think the delay on the Stevens expulsion vote is actually somewhat sensible. Why bother expelling him from office when it looks more and more likely that the voters of Alaska have already done so?
And as far as Lieberman goes, in 2 years he’ll be expendable anyway. The R’s will stall by any means necessary, then blame the gridlock on the D’s. Nobody will buy that bullshit, and any seats to reach supermajority status that we didn’t win this year will be won then.
And being the only Nevadan on the boards here, I can tell you for a fact that Harry Reid is definitely being looked with some anger by local Progressives for his long swallows of the Bush kool-Aid. The only problem that I see here is that there really aren’t any good candidates to replace him among local D’s. The most likely candidates to challenge Reid are a pair of Hillary dead-enders, Rep.-elect Dina Titus (NV-3) and former NDP chairwoman Jill Derby, who’s lost two consecutive elections to Republican Dean Heller in NV-2 (my district).
On a personal note, I met Derby at a caucus prep meeting in January, and while I voted for her, I honestly don’t have a problem with her losing to Heller. Derby has all the charm and charisma of a turnip.
I’d have to agree with Piper on Jackson. I have come across some articles before that named him as a source of inspiration for the neoconservative movement, so it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if he’d done just that.
Guess he shouldn’t have had that kung pao then, eh?
But I still say Lieberman will become irrelevant and expendable after the 2010 midterms, and possibly be out of office after 2012, either by way of retirement or electoral defeat.
Let’s see. Since Connecticut doesn’t have a recall mechanism for senators, Mr. Lieberman will be in the Senate for at least four more years.
We have two possible choices as to how we deal with him. We could:
1) Bring down holy vengance upon him, strip him of any leadership positions and toss him out of the party, encouraging him to caucus (and vote) with the Republicans. This seems to be the preferred position around here.
2) Keep him around, with some finger wagging and mild disapproval, and get his vote on important issues.
I’m also pretty unhappy with Senator Lieberman, and hope that the good people of Connecticut deal with him at the next election.
Still, he caucuses with Democrats because most of the time, he votes with Democrats. While he tried to get Senator McCain elected as President, he failed, we won, and so we can afford to be magnanimous.
I realize the “party first” people will be unhappy with that answer, and will wonder how we’ll ever be able to maintain party discipline, especially when we try to do something really stupid or unpopular. We won’t be able to pull that “majority of the majority” BS that the Republicans pulled.
We’ll have to get Democratic Senators to vote on bills based on their merit, and will actually have to write good bills that appeal to a majority of all of the Senate.
I can live with that.
@21…BJ…
In 2006, Democrat activists in Connecticutt successfully denied a re-election nomination to Joe Lieberman in favor of someone nobody had ever heard of, Ned Lamont.
Yet Connecticut voters went on to re-elect the now independent Joe Lieberman over Lamont by 10 percentage points. It was so not close as to render Lamont subject to the same fate as the department store chain of the same name.
In other words, toast, over, and be done with…
It seems that the the people of Connecticut likeJoe Lieberman – they like his independence and support the positions he takes. Remember, these are many of the same people who supported Lowell Weicker, a moderate Republican who also strayed off his party’s reservation from time to time.
So, to all the lynch Lieberman types out there, it might be to your advantage to take two dozen aspirin (in the spirit of I-1000, of course), lie down, and lay the issue to rest.
The only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore winner.
The Piper
Hey Piper:
The voters just handed YOUR policies, YOUR politics, and YOUR candidates a thorough ass-kicking, so YOU have nothing to be smug about.
@24…ivan…
And didn’t someone over at Crosscut hand you one?
I remember 1964 and 1976 in the same vein as 2008. I also remember 1968 and especially the sweet election of 1980 in which Ronaldus Magnus Reaganus whupped Jimmy Carter.
Did you all know that it was here in Seattle where Carter was told in no uncertain terms that he would lose? Yep – he was here on a campaign stop a few days before the election when his people told him the cold, hard truth.
BTW…my policies, my politics weren’t on the ballot, so in that respect nobody handed me nuttin’. My policies and my politics are my own – they belong to no one but me.
The Piper
Your senile saint is dead, Piper, and so is his party.
You poor liberals on this blog are the most ungracious boobs I’ve ever run in to. By the way, the Senate voted SECRETLY on Leiberman (something they don’t want to give to the working man when it comes to voting whether to be in a union or not). You idiots spew your ideology down here (both right and left) and the politicians laugh at you and take care of themselve just fine while you bicker with each other and get screwed, no matter who has the reigns in Washington — pathetic!
I’m not in the ‘lynch Lieberman’ crowd. I just say that R’s will likely lose more seats in the 2010 midterms, rendering Lieberman largely irrelevant.
27:
Let me guess, you didn’t bother to vote at all, did you? If that’s case, fuck right off and go complain to the face in the mirror. I may not agree with the righties that haunt these threads (hell, I don’t even always agree with the other lefties here either), but at least most of them actually had the balls to vote, and make their opinion heard.
Didn’t vote? Then you have NOTHING to complain about. Your apathy is the REAL reason this country is in the toilet.
Any bets on what happens to CaughtInTheMiddle if he gets between Mark and his pet goat?
Hey, maybe that is how CaughtInTheMiddle came up with his name! He got CaughtInTheMiddle!
That must have hurt. HAR! HAR! HAR! HAR! HAR! HAR!
@27: Wow – what an idiot. The Senate did not vote secretly on Leiberman – the democratic caucus (a private group) voted secretly on his committe assignments.
What you don’t know could fill Quest field.
@25: Yup – your politics belongs only to you – and to a few other die-hard republicans who are on the losing end.
The people you supported lost:
McCain
Rossi
Sutherland
The republican party is now becoming a small minority party that is represented by the likes of Ted Stevens (nominated by republicans in Alaska). The republican brand stands for corruption, record budget deficits and the worst economic record since Hoover.
@23: After this last election, where Connecticut went heavily in favor of Obama, Lieberman (who supported McCain/Palin) probably could not win for dogcatcher there.
so much for that cogent analysis….