White House wants to make filibuster a campaign issue?

By: Mark Hemingway
Commentary Staff Writer




02/08/10 2:24 PM EST

Or so Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post is reporting:

Over the past week, President Obama and his senior aides have repeatedly cited Republicans' filibuster threats as the primary reason for the lack of progress on big ticket
legislative items, an early sign that Democrats will seek to use this
bit of legislative arcana against the GOP in the coming midterm
election.

At a meeting -- televised, natch -- with Senate Democrats last week, Obama harped on the GOP's willingness to invoke
the filibuster, noting that Democrats had taken more cloture votes to
end debate and force votes in 2009 than they did in the 1950s and 1960s
combined.

Added Obama:

"We've had scores of pieces of legislation in which there was a filibuster, cloture had to be invoked,
and then ended up passing 90 to 10, or 80 to 15. And what that
indicates is a degree to which we're just trying to gum up the works
instead of getting business done."

Later in the week, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer penned a blog post on the evils of the filibuster, reciting -- almost word for word at times -- the
argument Obama had made to his former colleagues.

"Historically, the filibuster has been used as a way to try and reach a bipartisan
compromise, now it's just a tactic used to gum up the works," wrote
Pfeiffer. "This has prevented an honest debate from taking place, which
has made it impossible to find agreement on important legislation that
would benefit working families in this country."

Cillizza offers this bit of analysis:

The White House believes that the filibuster can be used as symbolic image for why the government (still) isn't working and why it's Republicans fault.

"In the Senate, the filibuster only works if there is a genuine spirit of compromise
and trying to solve problems, as opposed to just shutting the place
down," Obama told Senate Democrats last week. "If it's just shutting
the place down, then it's not going to work."

The White House recognizes the deep distrust of Washington coursing through the
electorate, reflected most prominently in the defeat of the
establishment Democratic candidate in last month's Massachusetts
special election.

Given that Democrats control all levers of power in Washington, the White House needs to win the battle over who
is working to maintain the status quo on Capitol Hill since the default
position will be that it is their fault that more change hasn't come.

If this is what the White House is really thinking, they're incredibly obtuse. Voters in Democratic Massachussetts just elected Scott Brown on the explicit message he would be the 41st vote in the
Senate to filibuster health care reform, but the White House thinks
people are unhappy for not getting more done? Isn't the problem as much
what the White House is trying to accomplish as it is that they haven't
accomplished much?