×
Ryan Grim's excellent article detailed Harry Reid's reason for not forcing long filibusters -- more on that here -- but didn't really explain he refuses to simply shut down the Senate and try and break the obstructionism. At the end of the day, letting senators gum up the Senate by reading from phonebooks and letting them stop business with a thousand quorum calls amounts to much the same thing: It pits the progress of the Democratic agenda against obstruction. Reid seems to have made the calculation that in that collision, his agenda will lose. I asked Grim why:
My guess is he doesn't want to alienate Specter, Collins and Snowe (and Voinovich). As long as they're gettable, he would want to keep them happy, I assume. Because if he's breaking a filibuster, he's saying they're obstructionist and he can't get their votes. Once down that road, it might be hard to get them on anything in the future. I'm not saying that's what Reid is thinking, but it might be.That makes a certain sense. It's also not the sort of thing that Reid would have tried with Bush in the White House. Even if he could break the filibuster, he couldn't overturn the veto. If GOP obstructionism emerges as an insurmountable impediment to Obama's agenda, however, you might see that calculus change.