What are the odds civility will prevail?

I'm not feeling it.



Ted Kennedy's Vote
Ezra Klein


Any reconciliation-oriented strategy you can think of is predicated on the Democrats having 60 votes. In fact, any really good outcome you can think of is predicated on the Democrats having 60 votes. Happily, the Democrats do have 60 votes. At least in theory.

In reality, Ted Kennedy is very sick, and may well have to relinquish his seat. For Democrats, that poses a particular problem: Under Massachusetts law, an unexpected vacancy takes at least 145 days to fill. It would be viciously ironic for Kennedy's death to deprive Democrats of the final voice they needed to make good on the work of Kennedy's life, and so he has sent a letter to the governor of Massachusetts and the leaders of the legislature asking them to change the law so there is an interim senator who represents Massachusetts between the vacancy and the special election. This interim senator, Kennedy says, should be someone who has made a commitment not to run in the special election.

It's unclear whether the governor and the leadership will act on Kennedy's request. But this could be the difference between the 60 votes that could pass health-care reform and the 59 that can't.

That said, this is also the place where the rubber hits the road on all that talk about Senate civility and courtliness and respect. If the Massachusetts political order doesn't move to preserve Kennedy's voice, surely there is some Republican who will agree to trade his vote for cloture with Ted Kennedy. That is to say, where Kennedy's great friend Orrin Hatch would have voted to uphold a filibuster, now he will vote to shut it down, as that's how the vote would have gone if Ted Kennedy were still alive, and it is neither decent nor small-d democratic to doom health care because the bill's greatest advocate contracted incurable brain cancer.

Such a trade would not only be a grand show of respect for Kennedy's life work, but it would uphold the outcome that Americans chose when they voted 60 Democrats into office in 2008. Conversely, if not one Republican can be found who feels enough loyalty to Kennedy to make sure that his death doesn't kill the work of his life, then what are all those personal relationships and all that gentility really worth?

Photo credit: Charles Dharapak — Associated Press

that gave the rattlesnake the ride across the river?

coming to the rescue.

Did the snake eat the muskrat?

said that guys like Hatch and Grassley can never support health care because they wouldn't be re-elected, their conservative base at home would primary them.

He basically admitted they care about nothing other than being re-elected.

That Ted supported dems in the Mass. legislature that pushed that Mass law in 2004, replacing the ability of the governor to appoint a replacement with a special election.

It was passed in a partisan play specifically to deny a then repub governor Romney the ability to appoint a repub senator to fill Kerry's seat in 2004 when Kerry was running for President. A wasted change of law as Kerry didn't win.

And now the very partisan senate succession law he supported and Mass dems passed in 2004 to thwart Romney from replacing Kerry with a rebub, might be the undoing of his lifelong dream taking place.

Somehow I don't see a lot of repubs having a lot of sympathy about this.