I Like It...

...when people I don't like adopt positions that I don't like. Less cognitive dissonance!

So I was very glad to see Holy Joe Lieberman, on his way out the door, endorse term limits (via Political Wire).

Holy Joe says that if we only had term limits, we would have more new blood...but there's of course plenty of new blood in both Chambers of Congress (I haven't double checked this one, but someone said on twitter last week that once we hit January half of the Senate will be in their first terms). But that's not all! He also claims that  term limits will reduce partisan polarization. How? He didn't exactly explain that part. But he doesn't like polarization, and he's decided that he likes term limits, so why not?

In fact, there's no reason at all to believe that term limits would have any effect at all on polarization. But it certainly would be bad for Congress, and bad for democracy, as I noted in my column over at TAP last week.

Okay, I'll give Holy Joe credit for another thing: he gave me an excuse to push my term limits column. That, plus reducing my cognitive dissonance? And, as regular readers know, I think that hypocrisy is overrated, so I can't be upset with him for just coming to support term limits now that he's retiring after 24 years in the Senate; it's no worse, in my book, than if he had supported it from day one and retired on cue after 12 years or whatever. So for today at least, I'm quite happy with Holy Joe Lieberman. Nice job!

The Lieberman Gambit

Holy Joe's retirement closes the book, more or less, on a great question: was the decision by liberals to go all in on the primary challenge in 2006 a good idea?

I called it "a reasonable gamble by liberals gone bad" a while ago, but I think I was wrong. 

Going back to the gamble...in 2006, Joe Lieberman was a very annoying Senator for many liberals, but he was not the most conservative Democrat in the Senate. He was, however, probably the Democratic Senator farthest to the right compared to his state, which made him a logical primary target, even if he wasn't so personally annoying. Alas for liberals, the primary wound up with probably the worst possible result. Had Lieberman won, he probably would have shrugged it off and continued on with his career; if he had been clobbered by Ned Lamont, he probably would have quit at that point. Instead, with Lamont edging him by 10,000 votes and everything else falling perfectly into place, Lieberman wound up returning to Washington as a party-defying independent.

As it worked out, however, I can't recall a single instance in which Joe Lieberman was the deciding vote against the Democrats. He was with Barack Obama on the stimulus, on health care, and on Dodd-Frank. He was a leader in the successful repeal of DADT, and the unsuccessful climate/energy bill. His voting record really didn't even shift very much. Against that is that he probably became even more annoying to liberals (here, I'll link again to Gail Collins's appreciation). And then there's whatever electoral value derived from his party-defying endorsement of John McCain in 2008, which I'd say was practically zero (and that's assuming he wouldn't have done it if he hadn't been challenged in 2006; if he would have done it anyway, and as a Democrat in good standing, the endorsement would have carried a bit more weight, for what it's worth). 

And, now, his retirement. It seems to me very, very likely that had Lieberman won renomination unchallenged in 2006, he would now be running for another term and heading for renomination, at least. If 2012 turns out to be a fair-to-good year for Democrats, then as it is Connecticut will probably send a liberal Democrat to Congress, instead of returning Holy Joe for another term as a moderate. 

Regular readers know that I'm usually pretty quick to point out the downside to ideological primary challenges. But I think liberals can be pretty happy with themselves on this one; even though things didn't work out how they wanted, they probably did wind up beating Joe Lieberman six years down the road, and with very little cost in the interim.  

Catch of the Day (and Harry Reid and Conservative Daydreams)

It goes to Ezra Klein, for noticing:

That seems less weird when you know that Lieberman -- an independent -- votes with the Democrats 90 percent of the time (though his apostasies tend to come on such big-ticket items as health care and Iraq). Tales of the rift between him and his former party seem increasingly overstated.

Although of course Lieberman did eventually vote with the Dems on health care; his dissent was on the public option (and expanded Medicare, and other attempted public option compromises).  Even then, his vote wasn't the decisive one against some form of public option (it's pretty clear that Ben Nelson would never have been on board, and there were probably four or five others who would have let the whole thing sink rather than voting for any form of public option). On the votes that counted, though, Lieberman was there -- at one point even walking halfway across Washington through serious snow (on Shabbat) in order to cast a key vote.

Indeed, while there are plenty of places where I think Reid could have done more to break GOP obstruction, the case of Joe Lieberman is surely something for which he (and perhaps the president as well) deserve a lot of credit.  A lot of liberals outside the Senate wanted Holy Joe punished for his (extremely vocal) support of John McCain in 2008, and the Democratic leadership of the Senate took a lot of heat for ignoring it.  It's hard to say, at this point, that the liberal critics were right -- and it's not hard at all to imagine that had the Democrats stripped Lieberman of his committee chair position, he could have walked across the aisle and not only caucused with the GOP but started to vote with them regularly as well.  And without Holy Joe, there's every possibility that there's no ACA, and perhaps a smaller stimulus, no banking bill, and an even tougher road on unemployment insurance extensions.  Indeed, I would think that "Lieberman flips" is #2 on the conservative daydream list about 2009-2010, just after "Al Franken comes up short."

Granted, one can never tell about these things from outside -- and perhaps not even from inside.  But I think it's pretty clear that Harry Reid deserves a lot more credit than he's received from liberals for holding his caucus together most of the time in most cases, and Joe Lieberman is probably the prime example.

On Joementum, 2010

I haven't commented yet on the news that Joe Lieberman is carrying the bill to repeal DADT.

For all of those who were upset that the Democrats didn't throw Holy Joe out of their caucus at various points of the last year: do you get it now? 

Yes, Joe Lieberman is a very annoying Senator, by all accounts, and certainly (well, I suppose I should say in my opinion) in his public persona. 

But kick Holy Joe out, and:

He wouldn't have voted for the stimulus, whihc passed with one vote to spare.

He certainly wouldn't have walked for miles in the snow to vote for health care reform, which is alive now because it made it through the Senate with no votes to spare.

And one can never know, but I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't be taking a leadership role in DADT repeal, which in my opinion at least is very helpful to that cause.

All that, because Harry Reid and Barack Obama treated Joe Lieberman as if he was King of the World, despite liberal pressure to exile him to the other side of the aisle.   

Hey, a lot of the people who were upset with Reid and Obama had never been active in politics when their side had a chance to actually get something done, and may not have realized that there's more to it than just winning elections.  Consider it a useful lesson: sometimes, Congressional leaders, presidents, and White House staff actually know what they're doing.  Not always, of course (I'd never say to just assume that Obama or anyone else in office Knows Best), but sometimes, they really do, and it's generally a good idea, especially for activists, to try to understand why things are happening.

Lieberman's Weekend 2

So, Holy Joe seems to have what he wants -- if he'll stick to a yes this time. Looks like we're going to have a health care bill in which, as Tim Noah says, liberals are going to trade the public option for nothing, and like it.

Let's say that's what actually happens (and of course there are at least two rounds to go, with cloture on final passage and then on the conference report, and Lieberman is certainly capable of flipping multiple times by then). And let's say -- and I'm not sure if this is correct, but suppose it is -- that Lieberman is entirely responsible for sinking all the possible public option compromises. So that's Lieberman's Sunday. No public option. No opt-out, no opt-in, no trigger, no nothing. No Medicare buy-in. Perhaps also no CLASS Act (don't know yet), and who knows what else.

That's Lieberman's Sunday.

But the weekend had two days, as I talked about earlier. I was pretty vague earlier, but via Feministing here's a Reuter's article with details about what Joe Lieberman -- same guy -- hiked over three miles in the cold in order to secure:

Needle-exchange programs for drug addicts -- intended to ensure that diseases such as AIDS are not spread by infected needles shared by injection drug users -- would have an easier time getting federal funding. Abstinence-only sex-education programs for school children would get less money.

The measure would reverse a ban on Washington's ability to use local funds to pay for abortions. The capital city, unlike the 50 U.S. states, is subject to congressional control.

Also, the SEC gets to hire 420 people so that they can actually, you know, regulate the securities industry. Going to Obey's press release, there are all sorts of goodies for liberals in here: new funding for job retraining, for community colleges and adult ed, for community health centers, for Pell Grants, high speed rail...it goes on. Liberals would find plenty of things to dislike in this year's appropriations bill, I'm sure, but there's still a dramatic difference from 2003-2006.

That's thanks to Joe Lieberman, hero of the Weekly Standard crowd. That's what he did on Saturday.

Look, I'm not a Joe Lieberman apologist. I don't even, particularly, have any suggestions for what Democrats should or can do about their Joe Lieberman problem. I'm just noting that the idea that he's out to get liberals, if true, seems to be mostly at a symbolic level, or at least doesn't extend to a lot of the things that liberals care about.

The Joe Lieberman problem is the result of, more or less, two things...one is the playing out of the Lowell Weicker story many years ago (a liberal Dem couldn't have defeated Weicker in 1988, but Lieberman just barely did) and a reasonable gamble by liberals gone bad in the 2006 primary. There isn't anything that liberals can do about it now. Democrats can live with him as he is, knowing that he'll sometimes help them and sometimes won't. That stinks. Or, they can boot him out and live with no chance of having his vote. Face it: he votes like McCaskill or Webb or the Benator or Snowe now; kick him out, and he's going to vote like John McCain.

And that's how it's going to be until his term ends. About the only way out I can see for the Dems would be to elect a Democratic governor of Connecticut next year, and then Obama could appoint Lieberman, oh, Ambassador to Israel or something, and then take the heat when Holy Joe resigns in protest after a few weeks. Until then, though, there isn't much anyone can do.

Is a Health Care Deal Available?

Jonathan Chait's Lieberman blogging today (we're all posting about Holy Joe today; if that's his goal, well played!) contains an excellent reminder:

I don't think that health care reform is in peril. If Harry Reid decided to submit to Lieberman's demands, the health care bill would basically revert to what the Senate Finance Committee produced. That's still a major piece of legislation. Expectations among liberals have risen since then, so the come-down is understandable. But this isn't the end of reform.

Excellent point. Countering that are the threats of the House liberals, as reported here by Greg Sargent. But given that they're still threatening to walk without a strong public option, even after having not walked on the House bill, I think it's safe to say that their threats are not too serious. Not because they're wimps; because, as Steve Benin has been discussing, the logic of their position is that ultimately, a weak bill is better than no bill.

My suggestion? If liberals really believe that the public option is popular, then just go ahead and pass the bill without it and then campaign on it. There's no reason that a public option couldn't be added in 2011, or 2013. Or, in exchange for enthusiastic support for a bill now without public option, liberals could secure a commitment from Pelosi, Reed, Obama, and Kent Conrad that they'll try again, through reconciliation, in 2011 (I'm fairly sure it could be done that way, and moving one piece through reconciliation is a lot less dicey than moving the entire bill, with lots of moving parts, that way). Or get a commitment from Obama that he'll campaign on a public option in 2012, including a very public, unequivocal statement of support (and regret for failing on it this time) right now. Make that once the bill gets to him...best not to rile up Holy Joe just yet. Some combination of those commitments should be a perfectly good trade-off for liberals, assuming that what they really want is a substantive and not a symbolic victory.

Put it together -- give moderates what they want now, and liberals a shot at what they want in the future -- and you have a deal.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I think Chait's characterization of Lieberman is excellent.

Lieberman's Weekend

You know the first part. On Sunday, Lieberman double-crossed the Dems on health care. Again. It's hard to argue with Ezra Klein's take on it:

To put this in context, Lieberman was invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill's failure that much more. And if there's a policy rationale here, it's not apparent to me, or to others who've interviewed him. At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

And yet...

On Saturday, that very same Joe Lieberman walked from Georgetown to the Hill in the cold to provide Democrats with the 60th and winning vote on the remaining-but-one 2010 Appropriations bill.

"Shabbat shalom [peaceful Sabbath]," Lieberman said to photographers as he entered the Capitol, after attending morning services on the second day of Hanukkah and then walking more than three miles to the Capitol on a cold December morning. He cast the 60th vote -- the minimum number needed -- for the $446.8 billion spending bill covering the Justice and State departments, among other agencies.

I have no conclusion, other than that it makes plenty of sense for the Dems to continue keeping Lieberman in the family; he really is providing important votes for them sometimes. Take away his committee, and he probably crosses the aisle for good, and starts voting more like McCain than McCaskill.

And then, you get what he did Sunday. Same guy. Go figure.

Hey Liberals: He's a Statesman

Jonathan Chait ridicules Bill Kristol today for "sucking up to" Joe Lieberman. Chait is mostly concerned with how silly Kristol looks, but on this one, I think the conservatives are massively outplaying the liberals.

What do liberals think of Joe Lieberman? They think that he's a sanctimonious jerk, with an inflated opinion of his own importance and seriousness, and with an outsized resentment of liberals and the left.

And how do they act? They do everything they can to push the buttons of someone who is a sanctimonious jerk, with an inflated opinion of his own importance and seriousness, and with an outsized resentment of liberals and the left. They hold sit-ins in his office, they pressure Senate Democrats to strip him of his committee, they accuse him of being in the pocket of the insurance industry, and they mock him and his pretensions.

Not so Bill Kristol. As Chait says, Kristol calls Holy Joe (oh, and don't call him that) "principled and responsible," and plays to Lieberman's sense that he's saving Good and Decent America from those Weird Hippies.

I think you can see the problem here: if the liberal diagnosis of Joe Lieberman is correct, then he's apt to react to all of this by shifting more and more to Kristol.

My advise to liberals? Swallow a little bit of your dignity, and pretend that you have a deep and abiding respect for that independent statesman, Joe Lieberman. Constantly bring up his brave support over the years for civil rights, for equality for women, and for all other manner of Good American Values. Don't protest him; thank him for his tough votes on several of the health care amendments (he's been with the Dems more often than with the GOP on amendment votes). Be sure to point out how brave he is for standing up to those insidious special interests in those votes -- and, yes, how his other votes show his admirable independence. Keep MoveOn and the like out of his line of vision, but do remind him of crazy things that Beck, Palin, and Bachmann say. Remind him especially that health care opponents are happy to hang out with Pat Buchanan, and that the Tea Party crowd isn't sufficiently respectful to the horrors of Nazism.

Would smarmy insincerity work on Joe Lieberman? I don't know -- but Bill Kristol certainly thinks it will, doesn't he?

Public Plan and the 2008 Campaign

Liberals are up in arms, and with some reason, because Joe Lieberman is insisting that the Democrats running for president last year, including Barack Obama, did not include a public option in their heath care reform proposals at the time.

Lieberman is wrong.

But he's not the only one rewriting history, and his version is, as much as I hate to say it, a lot closer to reality than the idea that Democratic fraidy-cats abandoned a single-payer system after the election. That's a version of history that some liberals are pushing; it's the version of history that, for example, Robert Reich seems to be pushing in this post. Here's Reich:

First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada -- which, by the way, cost Canadians only 10 percent of their GDP and covers every Canadian. (Our current system of private for-profit insurers costs 16 percent of GDP and leaves out 45 million people.)

OK, let's stop right there. Medicare for all might be a great idea, but it wasn't defeated by private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans, and centrists. It was defeated by the Democratic voters of the Iowa caucuses, who supported three candidates who opposed that plan.

OK, let him continue:

So the compromise was to give all Americans the option of buying into a "Medicare-like plan" that competed with private insurers.

Yes...and no. Yes, Obama (and Clinton, and Edwards) supported a public plan...as a relatively minor component of their health care reform plans. The idea that the public plan was in any way, shape or form central to the Democrat's health care reform ideas in the 2008 campaign is just not true.

Evidence?

The Democratic Party platform devotes about three and a half pages to health care reform. It mentions a public plan. Once. At the end of a sentence about increasing choice, after the part about increasing choices among private plans. No one could honestly read the Democrat's platform and walk away thinking that a public plan is a key component of health care reform.

There's one paragraph about health care in Obama's acceptance speech from the Democratic convention. It doesn't mention a public plan.

Remember the debate between Obama and Clinton right after Edwards dropped out? It was in Los Angeles, with Wolf Blitzer moderating? They spent plenty of time on health care. They focused on their differences (the individual mandate was the big thing), but they each got a chance to roll out their talking points. Obama did talk about a public plan, right at the beginning, but he hardly talked about it as the centerpiece of his plan. Clinton, for her part, didn't mention a public plan; she stressed letting Americans into the "congressional plan," but that's more about the exchanges than it is about new government-run insurance. Again, while both candidates certainly supported a public plan, it was peripheral at best to the discussion.

One more example. The second Obama/McCain debate was over domestic programs, and contained a lengthy discussion of health care. By now, Obama had dropped talking about a government option, and had adopted Clinton's "congressional plan" rhetoric. In fact, McCain didn't even attack Obama on the public option; he attacked him over employer and individual mandates.

So, just to be clear, there's no question that Joe Lieberman is wrong: Obama did in fact include a public plan as part of his reform proposal during the campaign.

But liberals are also wrong to think that Democrats campaigned mainly on a public option, and that compromising it down to a smaller size or even (should it happen) moving ahead with out it is some sort of inexplicable betrayal. I want to get back to Reich. He says:

Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.

Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no pre-existing conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice -- dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.

To which I think the only possible reply is: of course that's what's going to happen! That's what the Democrats -- not just Obama, but all the presidential candidates -- campaigned on.

The truth of this is that Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Ted Kennedy campaign for universal care, not public insurance. It's outrageous that a supposed liberal could consider coverage for 30 million Americans a minor point, less than ten percent of the goal. Certainly, liberals should be fighting for the best bill they can get, and if in their judgment a public option is critical to that, they should fight for it. But the idea that the public option trumps anything else isn't about fighting for the things that Ted Kennedy fought for; it's about seeing the world through ideological blinders.

One more thing. Reich concludes by insisting that the Senate vote on a single-payer system, and on a robust public option. Senators will be glad to do so; I don't know what small fraction of the Senate would support the former, and it's clear that the latter would draw somewhere south of fifty votes. Everyone on both sides would be happy to cast those votes. In fact, I think every Senator has declared positions on those policies, although I don't know that they'll bother to vote because the outcome is clear. Now, a weak public option probably could clear fifty if that were enough, and the Reid public option (weak with opt out) seems to have close to fifty-five votes, so liberals have a reasonable complaint there about the rules of the Senate and majorities. (I'm not saying I agree, but it's clearly reasonable).

But complaining because Harry Reid can't get single-payer?

Take it up with Democrats in Iowa.

Roaming the Halls

I can't say I'm a big fan of the Tea Party types, or of Michele Bachmann in particular...but I do have to say that I like today's event. Not so much the rally, with the crazy speeches (and, yes, do GOP leaders really want to associate themselves with crazed rants on the same day they're trying to pretend that their own bill is A Serious Effort?) , but I do like the idea that after the rally the activists were urged to go inside and lobby their Members of Congress in person. Good for them. Alas, there's a problem of democratic frustration here -- it's really hard to understand that you can have all these people here, and all the people you know back home, but that you're still in the minority. Still, to the extent that they behaved themselves (and I don't know; TPM is usually my source for this kind of thing, and they have little outside of a bit of an incident in Pelosi's office), I'm all for citizens getting involved in that way.

OTOH, the other constituents-on-the-Hill news of the day was that some pro-reform types staged a sit-in in Lieberman's office and had to be dragged off by the Capitol police. Assuming these were real reform supporters and not conservative double-agents, I can't think of anything stupider to do. I have no idea what Holy Joe intends to really do about cloture, but there's no way that he's going to be persuaded by civil disobedience in his office. There are lots of good reasons to do civil disobedience -- it might raise awareness of an underappreciated issue, or demonstrate the intensity of support for a measure that is thought to have only mild supporters. None of those things apply to health care reform and Joe Lieberman. Sorry, activists -- there's pretty much nothing you can do to affect Holy Joe on this one. It's very possible that the combined efforts of his various Senate friends and the President of the United States of America might find a way to appeal to his vanity and sense of self-righteousness, but the more he sees it as himself vs. the crazed lefties who tried to kick him out of the Senate, the less he's going to be open to allowing reform to happen.

Lieberman and the Filibuster, Still

I almost never disagree with Ta-Nesihi Coates, but I will this time, at least on one narrow point:

I was in the camp of people who thought that Lieberman shouldn't be punished for his endorsement of McCain. I was very wrong. Lieberman now says he will endorse other Republicans in upcoming election. I don't see how you allow a guy like that to remain in any sort of position of power. I just don't see it. If he wants to be an independent, that's fine. But make him an independent.

I think his old position was correct. Will Lieberman, ultimately, be the 41st vote to stop health care reform? Maybe. He says he will, but Harry Reid doesn't think so, and he knows more about it than anyone else outside of Holy Joe's brain. Would Lieberman, had he been thrown out of the Democratic caucus after 2008, be the 41st vote to stop health care? Granted, none of us can say for sure, but I think it's clear that Lieberman would have wound up far more firmly in the GOP camp if the Dems had given him the boot a year ago. Not only would that mean, in my view, that he would now be a clear vote against cloture on health care, but it also means he probably would have been a vote against the stimulus and other key bills earlier in the year.

In part, that's because I agree with those who believe that Holy Joe is motivated by spite. But it's also because the Democrats, by leaving him with his committee, retained the leverage to punish him for future transgressions.

I will say this: now is the time for Dems to cash in that leverage. If Lieberman votes with 40 Republicans against 59 Democrats on cloture for health care reform, there's no longer any reason to keep him in the caucus, and it's totally reasonable for Democrats to threaten him with loss of his committee over this one.

I should also say that Lieberman is mostly talking nonsense about health care. Within the Face the Nation visit that TNC describes, Lieberman said the following:

1. There was no mention of the public option in the 2008 campaign.

He's right that it wasn't a big campaign issue, but PolitiFact says that it was, in fact, part of the Obama plan from the campaign.

2. The public option would be a new entitlement.

That's wrong; the public option would not be an entitlement.

3. There's broad agreement on a bipartisan bill without a public option.

Clearly wrong: the Senate Finance Committee plan had no public option, but of the Republicans only Olympia Snowe voted for that bill. Nor did any Republican Senator on the committee describe the bill as a tough vote, or say that he would vote for a similar bill with small changes. Nor did any Republican Senator outside of the committee sign up for the Finance Committee version. It may be that there is some bipartisan solution theoretically available, although I'm with Brendan Nyhan and Matt Yglesias that it isn't. What is absolutely certain, from the Finance Committee bill, is that the public option is not the thing preventing such a bill.

Sometimes, You Can't Do Much

There have been basically two reactions from health care reform supporters to Holy Joe's comments yesterday indicating that he might oppose cloture at the end of floor action. There's the Harry Reid/Ezra Klein tack, which is to sort of laugh it off. And then there's pretty much everyone else, with the best version being Jonathan Chait's "It Was Lieberman All Along."

Two quick reactions from me. First, some liberals are having a bit of a "told you so" moment, centered on the decision by Senate Democrats to let Lieberman keep his committee chair. I think that's just nuts. Lieberman may or may not wind up voting with the Democrats on this one -- I think I'm tentatively with Ezra, but it's hard to say what's going on in Holy Joe's mind -- but I think there's no question at all what would have happened had he been kicked out of the Democratic caucus. He's voted as a moderate Democrat overall in this Congress; had he moved over to the GOP, I'm confident that he would have shifted his voting pattern to fit in with mainstream Republicans (in other words, to the right of Snowe and Collins). Lieberman is, no question about it, a problem for the Dems, but he's a problem because he's a maybe; turning him into a clear "no" is a loss, not a solution.

Second...Chris Bowers over at Open Left asks progressives:

One thing that is not speculative is that we are going to have to find a way to pressure Lieberman hard as a result of this statement. Any suggestions?

Well, I have one, but Bowers isn't going to like it: Ignore him. There are no carrots that liberals can offer Lieberman -- they certainly aren't going to support him for reelection even if he becomes the most enthusiastic single-payer advocate, and they can't even offer to remain neutral. Since liberals are going to oppose Lieberman (and rightly so) full-out whatever he does on this issue, they really have no remaining ammunition. If Chait is correct, however, and as a long-time Lieberman watcher I tend to agree with him on this point, then Holy Joe is primarily motivated on this one out of spite. If that's right, the more direct confrontations with liberals he's forced into, the more he's apt to see this as a chance to get back at them.

Of course, there's always my Big Compromise proposal (see step six), but somehow I don't think Bowers would go for it.

Lieberman Against a Filibuster?

So thinks Ezra Klein, based on this from the New Haven Register:

Lieberman said he was “inclined to let the motion to proceed” (or cloture) go forward, but “I haven’t decided yet.”

I don't think that's what he's saying, although the Register's syntax here is almost impossible to parse. The next sentence, I think (although I'm not sure) clarifies it a bit:

He said he and others would attempt to negotiate changes in the bill before there is a filibuster.

Remember, there are multiple filibuster points on any piece of legislation. If I had to guess, what Lieberman is saying here is that he intends to vote cloture on the motion to proceed (which gets the bill to the floor), but he's not committing at all to voting for cloture on the final debate over the bill.

Moreover, I think it's fairly likely at this point that Republicans are not going to attempt to keep the bill from being considered. A better plan for them is a death-by-amendment strategy, in which they always have just a few more amendments to offer, and they can portray their eventual vote against cloture as a defense of procedural fairness (because they still have amendments to offer), rather than as a flat-out attempt to kill the bill. That pose attempts to entice Democrats (Nelson, Lincoln, Lieberman) by allowing them to kill the bill (by opposing cloture) without actually opposing the bill.

If I had to bet, I'd bet that Democrats are going to hang together and that the bill will eventually pass with 61, 62, or 63 votes -- I think Ezra's right about where Holy Joe winds up. But the specific quote hints only that the battle isn't going to come on the motion to proceed.

Liberals and Conservatives Agree: We've Been Sold Out

Two comments on the question Yglesias raises about ideological purges.

First, it's just par for the course that liberals are upset that the Democratic Congress and Democratic president aren't liberal enough. Progressives think of 2000-2006 as dark times indeed, but conservatives at the time and looking back see only new federal controls in No Child Left Behind, a huge new entitlement commitment in Medicare expansion, and a spending explosion featuring massive numbers of earmarks. Conservatives reacted to those things, in part, by taking on moderate politicians (most famously in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania Senate contests). For their trouble, they wound up with very liberal Senator Whitehouse and votes-like-a-liberal Senator Specter. Just as conservatives managed to overlook their achievements under GOP Congresses, liberals are now overlooking the considerable achievements of the current Congress and President Obama and focusing on the compromises necessary to pass health care, or Obama's failures to date on things like DODT.

Second, while I think it would be completely nuts for liberals to go after Baucus or Landreau or Conrad, all of whom would likely be replaced by extreme conservatives, Joe Lieberman is obviously a special case, since he's far to the right of his state and barely a "real" Democrat at all in a formal sense. Still, as annoying as he is to liberals, pushing him to flip to the Republican conference would almost certainly wind up moving his voting pattern sharply to the right, and it's hard to see how that helps progressives. Connecticut and national Democrats should try to knock him out when they have a chance to do it at the ballot box, but until then I think the Senate leadership has been correct in playing along with him.