In lieu of sausage…
In his speech on the jobs crisis last week, President Obama called the mass unemployment caused by the Great Recession “a continuing human tragedy.” Today’s front page of The New York Times reports on a Times/CBS News poll of unemployed Americans in a story headlined “Poll Reveals Depth and Trauma of Joblessness in U.S.”
A major new Work Trends Survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers finds declining job satisfaction and severe loss of confidence in the economy (pdf) among workers in the last decade.
Seth Michaels at AFL-CIO NOW BLOG provides all the links needed to tune-in to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s live online conversation and jobs crisis Q&A at 4pm EST today.
After giving the heads of some of the biggest U.S. banks a talking to designed to press them to help spur recovery through more lending, President Obama today plans to bring the entire Senate Democratic caucus to the White House to address the need for health care reform.
If you’re not quite sure whether you ever want to see the words “Joe Lieberman” again, check out this continuously-updating Lieberman Google search page.
Will Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) ever get a vote on his drug importation amendment?
John Walker at Firedoglake looks at the drug importation issue and what he calls the “Double-Double-Cross”.
Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) thinks it may be high time to scrap the whole 60-vote thing in the Senate and put an end to the filibuster, noting with some irony that his last attempt to do so, in 1995, was co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman.
Tags: filibuster, health care reform, Jobs Crisis, unemployed
In 2005, Senate Republicans threatened to carry out the “nuclear option” of abolishing the filibuster, because Senate Democrats had blocked 10 of the federal appeals court judges George W. Bush had nominated, while allowing 35 to be confirmed. This was intolerable obstructionism, Republicans charged, and everything brought up deserved an “up or down” vote.
In 2003-2004 there had been 49 filibusters; in 2005-2006, there were 54. In 2007-2008, there were 104.
And we all know what’s happening now. Any important legislation “has” to get 60 votes. Although until recently, the filibuster was an extraordinary measure, today it’s taken for granted. Nobody questions that this is the way things are.
But an HCAN poll shows that people—at least in Nebraska, Louisiana, and Arkansas—do question if this is the way things should be.
The poll described the motion to proceed, for example, and asked respondents, “In the Senate, before a bill can be voted on, there must be a vote to allow it to be debated. Regardless of whether you support or oppose the health insurance reform plan itself, do you believe that it should be debated on the floor of the Senate?”
Support was overwhelming in all three conservative “red” states — 88% of Nebraskans, 82% of Louisianans, and 84% of Arkansans all agreed that health care reform should be debated. (It makes one wonder how voters in, say, Maine might feel if they knew that both of their “moderate” Republican senators are opposed to even letting the bill comes to the floor for a debate.)
The poll then asked about cloture: “Once a bill has been debated in the Senate, senators must then vote on whether to allow the bill itself to be voted on. Regardless of whether you support or oppose the health insurance reform plan, do you believe that senators should allow it to be voted on?”
The numbers weren’t quite as strong, but again, support was largely one-sided — 80% of Nebraskans, 77% of Louisianans, and 77% of Arkansans agreed that senators should let health care reform come up for a vote.
Tags: filibuster, health care reform
