This jubilant post from ThinkProgress yesterday just made me sad:

BREAKING: SENATE DEMS WIN BIG JUDICIAL CONFIRMATION FIGHT | A senior Democratic senate source tells ThinkProgress that the Senate agreed to have a confirmation vote on the nomination of Paul Watford to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit at 5:30 today….

Breaking news: The Senate will do its jobs and vote on the President’s nominations, as required by the Constitution.

The fact that this is big news is a sign that the Senate is horribly broken. It’s time to end the filibuster.

Over at MN Progressive Project, Joe Bodell has a similar reaction Kurt Bills’s endorsement as I had — it doesn’t really matter who the MNGOP nominates. He then asks an important question: Will Klobuchar play a larger role in the 2012 elections here in Minnesota than just cruising to a second term?

So what to do in the meantime? Well, there is the question of that Legislature, and Amy Klobuchar could have a lot to do with whether the DFL gets it back. Will she sit back in cruise control and rack up endorsements, money, and favors with an eye toward 2016, or will she run up the score in a serious way, running hard statewide, and be the tide that helps raise all DFL ships at all levels across the state, helping put the current form of the GOP in history’s dustbin?

I’ve been wondering the same thing. While we know that Klobuchar has to approach her campaign seriously, the fact is that she’ll have resources — both money and time — to spare. What will she choose to do with it? Will she, as Joe puts it, “sit back in cruise control?” Or will she use her political capital to help take back the legislature and defeat the marriage discrimination amendment?

Over the last two years, Republicans have voted for tax cut after tax cut for the rich, while insisting on sharp cuts to programs for the poor and middle class. Without a trace of self-consciousness, they have insisted that this is all in the name of fiscal responsibility, all the while ignoring that their giveaways to the rich far outweigh their petty and vindictive cuts for the rest of us. Surely, sooner or later someone had to call them out on this hypocrisy, right?

That’s why, as a preemptive measure, Speaker John Boehner has invented a brand-new metric by which Republicans will now measure the deficit. Boehner’s new metric is “spending-driven debt,” as reported by Ezra Klein:

I got a weird e-mail from John Boehner’s office yesterday. “No Reason to Wait,” it said. “Let’s Address Spending-Driven Debt Now.”

So what’s “spending-driven debt”? I’m not exactly sure. But there are a whole lot of references to it in my inbox. Later that same day, I got another e-mail from Boehner’s office about “the spending-driven debt that threatens job creation and economic growth.” And on May 4, I got an e-mail from Boehner’s office saying “those looking for work can’t find it because ObamaCare, our spending-driven debt, and the threat of tax hikes are making it harder for small businesses to hire.”

What is “spending-driven debt?” That’s easy. It’s a way for Republicans to measure success only by how much they can cut from programs that benefit the poor and middle-class, while absolving the super-rich of any responsibility to make sacrifices themselves.

The GOP will approve hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the super-rich without batting an eye, but they’ll fight tooth and nail to make sure programs like affordable student loans are “paid for.” They view programs for the 99 Percent as a zero-sum game, in which help for some must be offset by pain for others. When it comes to the 1 Percent, though, there are apparently unlimited funds.

This has been the standard Republican policy since George W. Bush took office. After more than 10 years, though, people are starting to ask why the 1 Percent never need to sacrifice. Boehner’s “spending-driven debt” is an effort to re-frame the debate to get us to stop asking that question.

Over the weekend, Kurt Bills won the MNGOP endorsement to face Amy Klobuchar in the 2012 Senate race. With Bills’s endorsement, the November match-up is now most likely set. But I’ve never seen a less dramatic race. All Bills’s endorsement really means is an answer to the question Who will be crushed by Amy Klobuchar?

Klobuchar’s approval ratings are sky-high, and she regularly polls at 55 percent against any challenger — including Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. Throw in her enormous cash advantage, and she looks practically invulnerable.

I know I shouldn’t treat Klobuchar’s victory as a foregone conclusion, and in her defense, she has signaled that she’s not taking this race for granted. Klobuchar has always been a formidable campaigner, and she’ll be working hard against Bills, so don’t take my confidence as reflecting on Klobuchar and her campaign. But let’s be honest — it would take a major, major surprise to even make this campaign competitive.

So congratulations, Rep. Bills. You get the honor of being creamed by Senator Klobuchar.

Over the long-term, a large deficit is a problem. Right now, however, it is not a problem — in fact, more government spending will help the economy to improve. The right has been arguing for three years now that we need to prove to the markets that we’re serious about deficit reduction, or “bond vigilantes” will wreck our economy. So far, there has been absolutely zero evidence that they’re right.

Still, short-term economic stimulus and long-term fiscal responsibility aren’t at all incompatible. That’s the point Bill Clinton made in an interview on Tuesday:

Go ahead and plan for deficit reduction, Clinton said, but trigger it to actual improvements in the real economy.  You want your deficit to temporarily go up in recession to make up for the fact that consumers and businesses aren’t spending enough. Then you want it to come down when the economy is really picking up.  But pivot to deficit reduction too soon, and you’re asking for trouble.

That’s exactly the right approach. Convinced that we need to prove we’re serious about the deficit? Fine — let’s pass a budget that will automatically reduce the deficit once the economy comes back. 

Someone should really listen to Bill Clinton. I don’t think any of us would object to returning to an economy that works like it did throughout his presidency.

Republican leaders are already hard at work for Chip Cravaack:

Top Republican leaders in the U.S. House are pitching in to help first-term U.S. Rep. Chip Cravaack try to hold onto his seat ahead of what’s likely to be a tough campaign.

House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and other GOP leaders attended a fundraiser just a few blocks from the Capitol Thursday afternoon to help Cravaack and four other House Republicans representing potentially swing districts. Attendance cost a minimum of $5,000 per political action committee present.

They must be getting nervous. Cravaack is going to have his hands full defending his seat in a high-turnout year, and he’s going to need all the money he can get. It’s a good thing he’s got party bigwigs to raise cash for him, because he’s way out of touch with the voters in his district.

Who is Barack Obama? He’s a practicing Muslim who pals around with terrorists. He was born in Kenya and his birth certificate is an elaborate conspiracy. He’s a socialist who has presided over the largest expansion of government since the New Deal, with soaring taxes and exploding deficits to match.

These are all lies the Tea Party tells about Barack Obama. The trouble is, only the first two are treated as the lunatic conspiracy theories they are, even though the facts disprove all three. The fact is that spending, taxes, and the deficit are all lower today than when Obama took office.

I know the Tea Party Republicans hate Barack Obama, and nobody is going to change that. But it doesn’t matter if they feel like taxes and spending are going up; the fact is, they aren’t. That’s just one more way the Tea Party tries to rationalize their baseless hatred for our president.

What’s really sad is that our economy would be better off if Obama would actually do the things the Tea Party Republicans accuse him of. More government spending is just what we need right now. And since everyone seems convinced that Obama’s a big spender, it would be nice if he would actually push for higher spending. Right now, he has the dual disadvantage of being blamed for high spending, without the economic benefits of actually doing said spending.

Have you read the bill that put the Poll Tax Amendment on November’s ballot? The final version sets a strict standard for identifying potential absentee voters. In fact, it’s so strict that I wonder how absentee balloting would possibly work. Here are a couple of relevant excerpts (the full text is here):

(b) All voters voting in person must present valid government-issued photographic identification before receiving a ballot….

(c) All voters, including those not voting in person, must be subject to substantially equivalent identity and eligibility verification prior to a ballot being cast or counted. [Emphasis added]

Voters not voting in person “must be subject to substantially equivalent identity and eligibility verification.” I can’t help but wonder — how in the world will that work for absentee voters? And even if it can be made to work somehow for most absentee voters, how will it work for soldiers serving oversees? At least some of them are going to lose their right to vote.

It seems to me that only way to provide “substantially equivalent identity and eligibility verification” to presenting a photo ID in person is to appear in person yourself. But voters who are voting absentee often do so because they can’t appear in person, like our military oversees. How will these voters be able to exercise their constitutional rights?

Ending absentee ballots is just one of many far-reaching consequences the Poll Tax Amendment will have on our elections. It will strip thousands of their right to vote, end same-day registration, and end absentee balloting. On top of that, it will cost millions to implement. We can’t afford this radical change that would deprive thousands of their right to vote.

It’s amazing the sorts of things you discover after a sweetheart deal like the Vikings bill is shepherded through the legislature:

One provision would shield “any financial information” from the team from public eyes. Critics say the blanket protection goes beyond current state law, leaving taxpayers in the dark on one of the state’s biggest public works projects. Minnesota law already allows businesses that get state money to avoid disclosing trade secrets, business plans, tax returns and other financial data….

That means the public won’t be entitled to find out how much the team makes on stadium naming rights or parking or how much team owners Zygi and Mark Wilf put in themselves.

I guess the legislature was in too much of a hurry to get our money into Zygi Wilf’s hands to stop and read the bill carefully. This is just another indication of how we got rolled. Legislators could have played tough and extracted some concessions from the desperate Vikings. Instead, even though they had all the power in the negotiations, they went out of their way to appease Wilf and the Vikings.

I wonder what other gems we’ll find in the bill now that it’s too late.

Throughout Barack Obama’s tenure as President, Congress has been held hostage by a minority party that has used unprecedented abuse of the filibuster to turn the Senate into a mockery of itself. Americans are sick and tired of Congress’s ineptitude, and GOP’s perversion of the filibuster is more than a little responsible.

So it’s great news that Common Cause and a handful of other plaintiffs — including our own Keith Ellison — are suing the Senate, claiming that the filibuster is unconstitutional:

At the core of [Plaintiffs’ lawyer Emmet] Bondurant’s argument is a very simple claim: This isn’t what the Founders intended. The historical record is clear on that fact. The framers debated requiring a supermajority in Congress to pass anything. But they rejected that idea….

In the end, the Constitution prescribed six instances in which Congress would require more than a majority vote: impeaching the president, expelling members, overriding a presidential veto of a bill or order, ratifying treaties and amending the Constitution. And as Bondurant writes, “The Framers were aware of the established rule of construction, expressio unius est exclusio alterius, and that by adopting these six exceptions to the principle of majority rule, they were excluding other exceptions.”

That should be a particularly persuasive argument for conservative justices, who base their small-government interpretation of the Constitution on a very similar argument — the enumeration of certain government powers means that those not mentioned must be unconstitutional by default. It’s hard for me to see how they would defend a sudden flip-flop from their laser-like focus on that particular rule of construction.

The beauty of this lawsuit, though, is that in many ways it’s a win-win proposition. If the courts rule against the plaintiffs, it’s likely to be on the basis of language in the Constitution that gives both houses of Congress the power to set their own rules. In other words, even if the courts uphold that the filibuster is constitutional, they’ll also be upholding the very rule that would give the Senate the power to eliminate the filibuster.

It’s high time for the filibuster to go. Elections have consequences — we need a return to majority rule.