Harry Reid Takes on Senate Rules

Continuing his efforts to re-make the United States Senate into a more pompous version of the House of Representatives, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tried to change the Rules of the Senate with a majority vote Thursday. He succeeded. The Senate changed its Rules, 51-48, despite the Senate Rule that demands a 67-vote margin for any rules change.

While much attention has been paid to the immediate anger of Republican Senators to the Reid maneuver, not as much has focused on what impact, if any, this might have on future Senate action nor on the impact it might have on the operation of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.

First, a candid look at the problem that Reid confronts: he doesn’t have enough votes to pass President Obama’s jobs bill. Pure and simple. So, the first thing Reid must do is to prevent any up-or-down vote on that jobs bill. Thus, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s goal must be to precipitate an up-or-down vote on that jobs bill.

For Reid, and the White House, preventing any vote on the President’s plan is a strategic imperative. It would look worse than bad if the Democratically-controlled Senate rejected the jobs bill of a President of its own party. It would collapse the “Republicans are against jobs” strategy that will act as a public relations bulwark if “the Republicans want to push Granny over the cliff” initiative fails in next year’s elections.

And, what would happen if the Democrats in the Senate voted against the Obama jobs bill in the middle of the President’s “jobs” trips through the Midwest? That might prove a mite embarrassing.

McConnell’s thinking remains about three steps ahead of most of his colleagues. He isn’t helped any by House Majority Whip Eric Cantor’s “we will never take up that jobs bill” statement earlier this week. The proper statement, of course, would have been simply, “When the Senate passes the President’s jobs bill, we will certainly give it proper consideration.”

Our economic forecast hasn’t varied for 18 months. Emerging from financial distress caused by over-leveraging takes years and years. Instability in the banking system yields deep fractures in the economy. Job creation lags. That was true in the 1930s and remains true now. Thus, the widely-bandied about “green shoots” metaphor for the economy more than a year ago was almost as ludicrous as the “summer of recovery” mantra that preceded it.

A realistic economic forecast has undergirded many investors globally for some time. Emerging markets were all the rage for a couple of years. China was on its way toward world dominance, just as Japan was once thought to have the economic “answer” 25 years ago. It was the century of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). While a cute acronym, the BRIC concept has itself fallen into some disrepute. China is slowing and some folks have noticed its tendency to send thousands of special troops to quell the hundreds of large-scale riots that occur annually in the country side. India still confronts deep social and political divisions that make consistent economic growth difficult. Brazil’s interests rates soar as it tries to contain an over-heated economy. And Russia. Ask BP how that works. Or, ask the investors in the Russian stock exchange that have seen it tank by about 30 per cent so far this year.

American job growth now depends more than ever on global growth. As the International Monetary Fund intoned recently, global grow is slowing. American job growth will remain slow. QED.

So, the bottom line politically for McConnell and other Republican strategists is simple. The economy will not greatly improve between now and November, 2012. Jobs will remain a top-line issue with voters. More “stimulus” from government spending or machinations by the Federal Reserve will prove at best useless. So, make sure that the President gets stuck with the blame for the inevitable.

As President Johnson once said, “Politics ain’t beanball.”