Except the problem isn’t independence here, rather the make up of the senate. The country is clearly split on this sort of issue in terms of electoral representation, so is it the unrepresentative thing for what is a huge change to go through much compromise?

I wish it would just go through, don’t get me wrong, but arguing that massive bills like this should go through because of the slimmest majority in a house is not exactly much of an argument either.

I agree completely with the gist of the article, but I’d point out that although the Republicans in the Senate are fairly disciplined, Olympia Snowe was willing to compromise on one form of a public option, it’s just that Lieberman wasn’t willing to go with it, so it didn’t matter.

It’s not just the independence problem, though, it’s also the daft procedures the Senate has, and the very fact of having a second chamber with equal legitimacy to the first. (Which is why I’d rather abolish the House of Lords than make it elected.) If Charles Clarke was in the House of Lords, and had the same procedural tools available to him as Lieberman does, I’m sure he would create the same kinds of problems for equally petty, vindictive, personal reasons.

Sunny

you do realise that the reason Lieberman has it in for the liberal wing of the Democratic party is that they forced him out over Iraq which is why he had to stand as an independent. Liberals only have themselves to blame which is ironic as they criticise the conservative base for their “litmus tests”.

But nevermind, Sen. Nelson has been bought off with $100 million of taxpayers money going to Nebraska. Along with Mary Landrieu’s 2nd louisiana purchase, there’s a lot of prostitution going on in the Democratic Senate caucus. In Zimbabwe, bribery is called corruption, in American liberal circles it’s called “governance”.

#3

No, they didn’t force him out. He has consistently been allowed to be part of the Democratic caucus despite extreme provocation and even after he backed McCain last time. The reason he has it in for liberal Democrats is that he didn’t win nomination for the Presidency in 2004. He didn’t stand as an independent in 2006; that’s not how the US system works – he may not have had his local Party’s endorsement, but he still stood as a Democrat.

As for #1, the Democrats have a reasonable majority in the Senate; the trouble is the Senate is set up to require enormous majorities to guarantee passage without individual Senators being able to scupper legislation. Only revenue-neutral bills can be passed through reconciliation, so any effective bill required 60 votes, not a majority. And how many times has a Party had well over 60 votes in the Senate?

Sunny, do you really mean MPs (UK members, do your own pun) or US Senators and Representatives?

Well, one issue is this daft supermajority rule in the US Senate that requires you to have 60 out of 100 votes to get anything important passed…

But there are independents and independents. Take, for instance, Jackie Healy Rae, the independent TD for South Kerry on whom the Irish government relies for its majority. There is only one road being built in the entire state, and guess whose constituency it’s in? While the health budget is being slashed, there is a new 40-bed hospital being planned for South Kerry.

A lot of south Dublin sophisticates find it intensely annoying that the government has to keep giving goodies to an elderly man with a flat cap and a thick rural accent. But if I lived in South Kerry, I’d vote for Jackie in a heartbeat. He’s good for the area, and doesn’t claim to be anything he’s not.

The problem with Lieberman is not that he’s an independent. The problem with Lieberman is that he’s a fraudulent old weasel, who aggravates the offence by being even more self-righteous than his mate McCain.

Sorry Sunny but you way out on this one. Joe Lieberman was given the red carpet treatment by Obama to come back into the DEm fold. All the netroots knew what a corporate whore Lieberman is and how he is really a Republican.

He may be an independent by name , but he took large amounts of Republican money from Karl Rove and relied on most Republican voters voting for him. The Republican candidate got only 10% of the vote.

Yet despite this, and despite Lieberman campaigning for McCain, Obama welcomed him with open arms. But then Joe is a very good scape goat for the real truth which is Obama had already made a deal with the healthcare companies and that is the bill that the Dems have voted on. Obama has sold out the base of his party, on health, the war, bailing out bankers, and covering up much of the Bush torture policies, and he is in deep trouble. Many are asking what was the point of voting for him.

Dems are facing electoral meltdown in the mid terms, not because the republicans are doing well, they are not, but the Dem voters will sit at home totally pissed off.

Summary:

Fuck Off Frank Field.

Rude Pundit blows his load on the issue:

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2009/12/this-is-what-liberal-sounds-like-few.html

Before looking to the US Senate for an issue, we should first put our own house in order by comparing not just the bargaining power of indpendent MPs in unusual circumstances when governing parties – or coalitions – have small majorities but the abuse of power by party leaders, like Blair, who get elected on a false prospectus and then manipulate legislative agendas to boost their own scope for making crucial decisions without challenge under the guise of offering “strong leadership”.

Parliament was not permitted to vote to endorse Blair’s decision to invade Iraq on 20 March 2003 until March 18/19. Up to then, Blair made all the important decisions exercising the Royal prerogative. But Parliament was allowed 700+ hours to debate a ban on fox hunting with dogs.

It is seriously arguable that the Thatcher governments of the 1980s had a more proactivist and frutiful industrial policy than Blair’s new Labour government, elected in 1997 on an apparent mandate which had mislead the electorate into believing a Labour government would restore the competitiveness of industry.

Instead, Blair governments applied a largely laissez-faire free market policy not just to industry but to financial markets and institutions as well. The result was a consumer debt mountain of £1.4 trillion, a record trade deficit, a house-price bubble which pushed a million or more households off the house-purchase ladder, the collapse of a succession of banks with the consequential shrinking of bank lending to business as banks rushed to repair balance sheets, a record fiscal deficit and a deep recession which, at one stage, looked as though it could lead to a replay of the 1930s depression.

How does that stack up compared to the political problems inflicted by independent MPs?

Bob B is right. Since 1997, the Labour Government has worked hard to marginalise Parliament… and Parliament has acquiesced in making itself irrelevant…helped by a massively incompetent Speaker…the Labour majority has fucked up enormously to give the Government powers that Governments seldom revoke…well done Sunny!

Thanks to diogenes1960.

This is the BBC report on the Iraq debate in Parliament on 18/19 March 2003 with the vote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2862325.stm

This reports the names of MPs who voted for the rebel amendment to the government’s motion for the war:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2862397.stm

I’m saying we should hail all those Labour MPs with the convictions, courage and good sense to vote against the Iraq war and the smaller number of Conservative MPs who also defied their party line to vote against the war. All the LibDem MPs voted against the war.

At the very least, without the Iraq war, our public finances would be in better shape and our troops in Afghanistan could be better resourced.

Sadly, there were too few independently minded MPs to stop the rush to the war that Blair had planned for with Bush in their meetings during 2002.

Too few avowed “leftists” in Britain have retained sufficient political detachment and objectivity to appreciate that Blair was and is a complete and abject disaster for the Labour Party and radical causes. Remember that President Obama, as a US Senator, opposed the Iraq war from the very start.

diogenes1960

You do spout a lot of tosh.

I remeber the huge Thatcher majoritys of the 80s when Thatcher rammed through the poll tax and the European single act on a friday afternoon.

diogenes1960

You do spout a lot of tosh.

I remember the huge Thatcher majorities of the 80s when Thatcher rammed through the poll tax and the European single act on a Friday afternoon.

Then we had the comedy of the Major govt and all those tory eurpsceptics who wore out the leather on all the couches they sat on in TV and radio studios for the best part of 10 years whinging about Europe and European law. Then when it came to it, all Major had to do what make it a confidence vote and all these so call men of principle U turned and voted for the Maastricht treaty. Priceless.

Truth is that Parliament does not work with the power of the party system. Your attempt to make it a Labour issue is pathetic.

Ben Nelson is not an independent. The two independents are Lieberman and Bernie Sanders, who is, in his own words, a democratic socialist.

what do Bob B and diogenes1960 make of the undisputable historic evidence that the current ‘supine’ parliaments are easily the most rebellious in the last 60 years? I know everybody always claims the opposite, but I don’t see how it makes it true
http://www.nextleft.org/2009/08/parliaments-golden-age-that-never-was.html

Phillip Cowley addresses this in much detail in this Hansard Society transcript
http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2007/parliament/transcript.cfm

“This is a central idea, this idea that there used to be very brave backbenchers, and now, to use Hattersley’s phrase, we have these supine backbenchers …

going on to say of one example of this argument [the Power Inquiry]

There is, as some of you know, a very snobbish academic put down which is to say dismissively that you would not give somebody a 2.2 if it was handed in as an essay. If this was handed in to me, I would not give it a 2.2, I would fail it, and then I would expel them from the University and bar them from any other academic institution in Britain, and then I would hunt down and kill all of their family, and even then I would think they had got off pretty lightly! This is just cobblers from start to finish. None of it is backed up by evidence, however much it might be part of conventional wisdom.”

Do you disagree with him?

It’s about money and the Health Care lobbyists have sacks full. Conservative-minded politicians are more likely to be fighting in tight states/districts. Tough fights are expensive. The system is toxic.

@16: “what do Bob B and diogenes1960 make of the undisputable historic evidence that the current ’supine’ parliaments are easily the most rebellious in the last 60 years?”

Where have I posted anything to the contrary, although I certainly do go along with assessments that Blair’s governments persistently downgraded and sidelined Parliament – a view Betty Boothroyd took as Speaker – and shamefully exploited anti-hunting sentiment to divert political attention from more crucially significant issues? I’m reminded of the perennial relevance of Harold Wilson’s observation:

“The Labour Party is like a stage-coach. If you rattle along at great speed everybody inside is too exhilarated or too seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.”

What I did say is that we should hail independently minded MPs, like those who had the good sense to reject their respective party whips and oppose the Iraq war. I also reminded readers that President Obama, in his previous capacity as a US Senator, had opposed the Iraq war from the start, which was not the line most Democrats were taking at the time.

I’d be interested to read something by Philip Cowley about the political phenomenon in Britain of supine cabinets. To all appearances, Blair’s cabinets were largely complicit in his decision to go for the Iraq war and, at least as importantly in political terms, to support a mostly laissez-faire free market policy on industry and financial markets and institutions until Darling’s recent heroic endeavours to patch the financial system..

On reflection, the rebelliousness of MPs was evidently of little consequence, more’s the pity when we consider the state we’re in.

When I retired just over a decade ago, Britain was behind only the Scandinavian countries in Europe in the penetration and use of computer, information and communications technologies. The latest boast now is that while we lag Europe in broadband speeds, we watch more digital TV than any other country. Wonderful.

So to summarise:

Independent politicians are bad because they may oppose what another representative of their party has committed himself or herself to achieve.

Two things here. Firstly, I doubt Senator Lieberman was elected on a platform of healthcare reform, so he has no moral obligation to support President Obama, other than apparently being in the same party. If Nick Clegg suddenly said he wanted to reintroduce the death penalty (to choose an unlikely example) would we criticise Lembit Opek for refusing to support the measure in parliment. The difference here is that the writer (Sunny) supports the measure in question, and therefore sees opposition as morally wrong.

Secondly, has anyone checked whether Senator Liebermann’s constituents have an opinion on this? It may be that as an elected representative he is representing his electorate. Because democracy is not about party and principle, it is about the will of the people (there is a clue in the name – demos). Sunny seems to have missed out this rather important issue.

Independence of politicians may or may not be good in terms of our own views. It is however democratic.