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• Tuesday, November 18, 2008 12:42 PM

  Baffling

  Glenn Greenwald makes his usual point about how this is business as usual in the Senate. But in this case it's not.

  When in living memory has the majority in the Senate chosen a black-sheep outlier as its leader, and not only caucused with a non-member (a junior non-member at that) who actively campaigned against them but granted that member a committee chairmanship?

  And that's not to mention that both the majority leader and the non-member in question are in increasingly precarious positions at home. Obviously it's impossible to predict the future this far out but the way things are now, the next 4 years are more likely than not to see the Senate's decision superseded by constituents in Nevada and Connecticut.

  The Reid-Lieberman accord is not business as usual in the Senate. It's bizarre and baffling and nothing like it has ever happened before. Not even Tom Daschle's selection was this weird.

  I can see Obama, or any president, wanting the Senate majority organized in as dissolute and self-defeating a way as possible: weak or isolated Senate leaders make for strong presidents. But why are people like Dodd, or Jeffords for pity's sake, going along with it? Are they really holding out some kind of dim hope for a caucus supermajority? Are they figuring that even if they don't get it in 2008, they might squeak by in 2010 if they keep Lieberman on board now?

  Or is there some other payoff?

  All the talk about wanting to avoid vindictiveness seems like it should be hinting at something but frankly I'm at a loss at this point. It's not vindictive to fail to give someone who works for the other party a position of leadership in the majority, especially when his presence in your coalition gives you absolutely nothing at all, and he's not even going to be around in another term.

  It's axiomatic in observing the Senate from the outside that we don't really know what the deals are that are driving decision-making on a given day. But the decisions to keep Reid and Lieberman go quite a bit beyond that.

  —Amity Read Amity's other letters
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