West Virginia Blue
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Tim Manchin is not running for Congress this time around: Times WV.
Just to remind the folks at Politico and the DCCC, there is already a Democratic candidate in the race and she is planning to win the seat back. Sue Thorn is our Woman!
I am not going to post her entire diary here. Go to DK to read it: I'm Sue Thorn and I'm Running for Congress. If you have time tonight, drop by and chat with her and her supporters.
This has been a magical week for her campaign. Sue spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington and came back with promises of help from major national organizations. Teacherken at Dailykos offered to provide advice and assistance, which has resulted in her first diary making it on to the rec list at DK.
Sue had her diary ready to go this afternoon when Mike Oliverio made his announcement that he was not going to run. I don't think that he was trying to help us, but the timing could not have been better. Thanks, Mike, and best wishes in your future endeavors!
Wednesday evening Sue Thorn held her first campaign rally, at which she formally announced her candidacy for the 1st Congressional seat. On a frigid weekday night, a year before the election, 175 people showed up from all over the district to hear Sue's message. There were elected officials, political activists, political novices, union members, business owners, young and old. Twelve counties in the district were represented- many people drove more than an hour to attend the event in Morgantown. Sue gave a rousing speech. Judging from the cheers, comments, and donations people liked what they heard.
This capped an amazing week for the Sue Thorn campaign.
Last Friday I posted my first diary about Sue's campaign to take back the WV-01 congressional seat and it immediately made the rec list. West Virginia Blue asked me to cross-post it there.
Over 175 people showed up yesterday evening in Morgantown to hear Sue Thorn formally announce that she is running for Congress. There were people from eleven different counties in the 1st Congressional District, including those who made the long drives from Ohio, Marshall, and Wood Counties. There were elected officials, the press, county Democratic Executive Committee members, business owners, union workers, students, and just plain folks.
Does a woman raised in a working class family, who has never run for public office but is outraged by her growing realization that the economic system is rigged, have a chance to win election to Congress? Can common sense and decency defeat corporate money, political connections, and name recognition?
But enough about Elizabeth Warren. If you want to hear about a truly bizarre campaign, come with me to visit West Virginia's 1st Congressional District.
Keeping President Obama from succeeding at getting people back to work and turning the country around is the goal of the Republican Party just as it is to break the institutions of government so they then can say government is broken. A Republican staffer has come clean:
It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
snip
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.
The next section is a good reminder that while I disagree with many of our state's Democrats in office on many issues, it is important not to lump them all together because that only helps the long-term goals of the Republicans to tear down the institution of a democratically elected government itself:
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
Emphasis throughout mine.
James Fallows at The Atlantic sums up the GOP staffer's essay well how fragile democracy is when a determined minority seeks to use the very institutions to undermine it instead of governing in good faith:
More fundamentally, Lofgren argues that today's Republicans believe they are better off if government as a whole is shown to fail, not just this Democratic Administration. Republican hard-liners might seem to have "lost" the debt-ceiling showdown, in that they wound up even less popular than the Democrats are. But in the long view, Lofgren says, unpopularity for anyone in Congress, including their party's leaders, helps the Republicans: "Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy," because it buildings a nihilistic suspicion of any public effort, from road-building to Medicare to schools. (Except defense.)
Fallows also publishes an email from a Democratic staffer:
Privately, many of us who have worked in Congress since before the Clinton Administration have been complaining about the loss of the respect for the institution by the Members who were elected to serve their constituents through the institution. I don't think people realize how fragile democracy really is. The 2012 campaign is currently looking to be the final nail in the coffin unless people start to understand what is going on.
One thing that especially resonated with me about Mike's piece is the importance of "low information" voters. The mainstream media absolutely fails to understand how little attention average Americans really pay to what goes on in all forms of government. During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24 years to learn this) that the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress. All the millions of dollars of TV ads, all the thousands of robo-calls and door-knocks, and it all comes down to having a message that will stick in the voters' minds during the 5 minutes before they walk into the voting booth.
The media likes to call this group "independents," which implies that they think so long and deeply about issues that they refuse to be constrained by the philosophy of either party. There may be a couple of people out there who fit that definition, but those are not the persuadable voters campaigns are trying to capture.
So assuming the War Powers Resolution passes constitutional muster, the way for the Congress to get the American armed forces out of Libya is with a concurrent resolution, which is passed by both houses of Congress. That's important. The reason the War Powers Resolution calls for a concurrent resolution is precisely because it's considered and passed by the entire Congress, which is granted the power to declare war in the Constitution, not just with one house or the other, but the whole thing. Declarations of war, of course, are traditionally made using joint resolutions, which differ from concurrent resolutions in that they are signed by the president. But the War Powers Resolution is all about cutting the president out of the loop (which is why there are such serious constitutional questions about its validity), so naturally the preference was for a resolution passed by the entire Congress, but not dependent on the president's acquiescence.
Boehner's resolution is just a simple House resolution. It won't go to the Senate at all, and thus won't be expressing the voice of the Congress. In addition, there's the simple fact that Kucinich's resolution directs the president to remove U.S. forces from Libya, whereas Boehner's resolution merely demands a stack of reports and that certain documents be turned over to the House. In fact, Boehner's document reads much more like a House subpoena to the executive branch than any sort of direction to the president about what must happen regarding U.S. forces in Libya.
On May 24th I'll be sixty five and another 1st generation Baby Boomer will be officially "Old" (though, because of our cruddy economy which stands between employment and age, I am already retired and at the mercy of Social Security... which my Congressional leadership wants to do away with).
Most of my adult life I have been a liberal Democrat... in college during the height of the Civil Rights movement and the fiercest part of the anti-Vietnam War campaign, as a working citizen through booms and busts in the economy ending in the major recession we are apparently now out of (except in my house... yours too?)... and I voted as a liberal Dem in the past couple of elections. Now I'm not certain that "liberal Democrat" has meaning anymore.
I'm watching the vote as the Republican majority votes on debate rules to defund National Public Radio. So far all Republicans are voting to cut the funds and all Democrats are voting to save the funding. If it keeps up like this, NPR has no chance.
C-SPAN is taking in phone calls during the vote, alternating between Democrats and Republicans, and the trend among callers of both parties is that NPR should keep its funding. Oh, there are a few who are supporting it because they claim it's the government telling people what to watch (where they get that from, I don't know.)
It's hard to get stuff done in DC. Being a Jr. Senator makes it even harder. Unfortunately for West Virginians, our new Sen. Joe Manchin has failed so miserably in his first few months in office, he's digging a hole he may never get out of.
- Every job in politics is different. Manchin has failed to adapt from the executive position of Gov. to a quite different role of Senator.
- Much to the chagrin of progressives, President Obama is embracing many Republican ideas in his budget proposals and other administrative policies. Instead of praising Obama for reaching out to conservatives, Manchin keeps moving further and further to the right. Joe's not making any friends in the White House.
- Manchin didn't have the horse sense to suck up to his new boss before he got there (or, at the least, keep his mouth shut). Instead he was bad-mouthing Harry Reid on the campaign trail. Predictably, this cost him (and WV) coveting committee assignments.
- The least influential members of the Senate are the unpopular members of the majority party--they don't have anyone to turn to. That's where Joe is quickly headed.
As Sen. Byrd said: "If you're not at the table, you're going to get eaten." Manchin has made mistake after mistake in DC. His chair is slipping farther and farther away from the table.
West Virginians need two effective Sens. and we don't have that now.
NG made a good point in the comments that "With a minority party that fillibusters everything, passage of bills often turn on those unpopular people who hover in the middle." I clarified:
I agree, but I'm talking about a different kind of popularity. Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe are actually at the table and get along with Reid and Obama. They're both Very Serious People. They show up for votes. They do the work. Manchin isn't playing that game.
Also, the dynamics in this Congress have changed considerably. With GOP control of the House, that's where more of the action is going to be for determining what is possible. What are the odds of a White House-supported bill passing the GOP controlled House but not the Senate?
Yesterday afternoon Sen. Manchin sent out the following press release:
MANCHIN EARNS 3 SUBCOMMITTEE SPOTS ON SENATE ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES PANEL
Washington, D.C. - United States Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) today was named to three critical subcommittees of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources panel: the Subcommittee on Energy, the Subcommittee on National Parks, and the Subcommittee on Water and Power.
"I am proud to serve on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where I will fight for a commonsense, balanced energy approach that uses all of our resources - coal, natural gas, wind, biomass, hydroelectric, geothermal - and recognizes West Virginia's critical role in our nation's economy now and into the future," Manchin said. "My position on these three subcommittees will allow me to hone in on the issues that are most important to my state - such as coal and natural gas policies, mining and our exceptional national parks in West Virginia. Serving on these committees will ensure that I am a strong voice for West Virginia's needs, concerns, and priorities. I will always stand up for energy policies that are good for West Virginia jobs, America's security and our way of life."
Earlier this year, Senator Manchin was named to the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Additional subcommittee assignments will be forthcoming.
This is a good reminder that Sen. Manchin did land that seat on the Energy and Natural Resource committee he wanted. (Remember, that was supposedly what the GOP was going to give him to switch parties.)
I still stand by my note--Manchin has not transitioned well to Washington. And, I wonder... when Manchin met with Harry Reid to discuss assignments... how much crow did he have to eat to finally "earn" the ones he wanted?
The FArCES of Coal:"With Our Head in the Sand, As Loud As We Can" Edition
Well, I'm not sure how it happened. But it seems like southern West Virginia has survived its first post-apocalyptic, economy-annihilating, way-of-life-ending weekend after EPA heroically vetoed Arch Coal's Spruce Mine permit last Thursday. As bad as Joe Manchin, Shelly Moore Capito, and the Friends of Coal said life was going to be after the veto, myself and most folks in West Virginia ended up having a pretty decent weekend, all things considered. Heck, we even learned that despite the snow many if not most nearby residents are celebrating EPA's veto of Spruce #1 mine.
Which leads me to wonder...has anyone ever been so loud and proud about shoving their head in the sand and ignoring the cries of their constituents and colleagues, the consensus of scientists, and the pleading of health professionals as loudly as Joe Manchin and Nick Rahall? Senator Manchin certainly hasn't had a very positive first few weeks in the United States Senate. In fact, despite not taking too many big votes, he has found that his actions have already left him with a lot to apologize for. He set another high bar last week when EPA announced its decision on Spruce. Not only was his rhetoric irresponsible, but his information is just plain incorrect - particularly in asserting that EPA was "retroactively" vetoing this permit.
First of all, if you do your research (as Ken Ward does) you know that EPA never signed off on the Spruce Mine Permit. GOT THAT? EPA has raised concerns since the very beginning about this permit, and when Arch Coal was pressed to address those concerns, what did Arch Coal do for the people of Appalachia? They walked away.
Despite EPA's willingness to consider alternatives, the company did not offer any new proposed mining configurations in response to EPA's concerns based on science and the law.
SNL Financial goes into further detail about a meeting between top EPA officials and Arch Coal from November 16th,2010:
"The permittee also indicated that other approaches previously discussed, such as 'sequencing' or 'phasing' of valley fills, remained unacceptable to Arch Coal, Inc., due primarily to economic considerations," EPA said. "In the meeting, the permittee did not propose new or additional corrective actions for EPA's consideration."
"This transaction gives us a direct stake in participating in the growth of U.S. coal exports off the West Coast," said Steven Leer, Arch's chairman and CEO. "With our superior operating position in the Powder River Basin and Western bituminous region, we have the capability to service growing coal demand in Asia, the world's largest and fastest-growing coal market. We believe this first project - along with others in the pipeline - will provide Arch with more exposure to the seaborne thermal market and will further unlock the value inherent in our western coal assets.".
Thank you to Sens. Rockefeller and Manchin for signing on to filibuster reform efforts in the next Congress. It's evident that something needs to happen. Filibusters do not work like most people think. Some possibilities include:
Among the chief revisions that Democrats say will likely be offered: Senators could not initiate a filibuster of a bill before it reaches the floor unless they first muster 40 votes for it, and they would have to remain on the floor to sustain it. That is a change from current rules, which require the majority leader to file a cloture motion to overcome an anonymous objection to a motion to proceed, and then wait 30 hours for a vote on it.
"There need to be changes to the rules to allow filibusters to be conducted by people who actually want to block legislation instead of people being able to quietly say 'I object' and go home," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
This is important, significant, and a huge step in the right direction.
As of this morning it seems that Obama is ready to deal with the Right... extend the Bush tax cuts for a couple of years in exchange for one year's extension of Unemployment funding. The tax cut deal is tentative. It hasn't gone through Congress yet (although McConnell is probably dribbling with laughter in his office), but it probably will.
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Which leads me to wonder...has anyone ever been so loud and proud about shoving their head in the sand and ignoring 
First of all, if you do your research (as Ken Ward does) you know that
