Politico Looks For Causes

A headkine on Politico yesterday: Why Schumer picked a filibuster fight he couldn't win.

Chuck Schumer doesn’t typically lead his caucus into losing votes that divide Democrats. He made an exception for election reform.

The Senate majority leader has run a 50-50 Senate for a year now, longer than anyone else. The whole time, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have consistently communicated to Schumer that he wouldn’t get their votes to weaken the filibuster, no matter the underlying issue. But his decision to force the vote on the caucus anyway — and get 48 Democrats on the record for a unilateral rules change dubbed "the nuclear option" — will go down as one of Schumer’s riskiest moves as leader.

Politico does all it can to spin it as a some sort of secretlly brilliant move for Schumer, but it keeps trying to answer that pesky question -- why.

Schumer usually touts his caucus' unity, declining to engage in extended debates over issues that divide his 50 members. This time, Democrats were fine with isolating the holdouts.

. . . Republicans view the real leftward pressure on Schumer as coming from outside the chamber.

“He’s feeling incredible pressure from his progressive base. And also, his own political future may depend on his performance, too, to avoid a difficult primary,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a frequent sparring partner of Schumer’s.

But having asked the question, however indirectly, Politico never quite comes up with a satisfactory answer.

Some Democrats suggested that Schumer's move on Wednesday was only the start of a long campaign to peel off Manchin and Sinema. Another unilateral rules change vote this year isn't off the table for the party.

But as the midterms approach, now only ten months away, time for that "long campaign" is growing short, while at least for now, the prospects for success after November seem unpropitious. And in that case, is there a Plan B? This is the problem I keep seeing. Faced with the collapse of Plan A, President Biden and Leader Schumer keep insisting they can get Plan A done anyhow. John Fund in the UK Daily Mail circles a little closer to the real issue:

For Washington insiders, the decision to keep his current team into his second year as president is inexplicable.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican not known for his partisanship, called on Biden to fire his chief of staff, Ron Klain, for pushing a 'guaranteed-to-fail vote' on killing the Senate filibuster that he argued was a political ploy.

'It's CYA (cover your ass) week in Washington,' Sasse told Fox News. He said the vote was held in part 'so that Ron Klain can throw some chum at the Democratic Party's progressive base.'

. . . Sasse focused on Klain, because it's common knowledge that the 60-year-old backroom operator has unusual power in the Biden White House.

Klain first worked with Biden in 1987, when he was counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee while Biden was chair and assisted Biden during his ill-fated 1988 presidential campaign. That campaign ended after Biden was caught plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, head of Britain's Labour Party.

Klain later served as Biden's chief of staff when he was Barack Obama's vice president.

As President Biden's chief of staff he has been dubbed 'the most influential chief of staff of recent vintage' in an admiring New York Times profile and The Master of Disaster by his critics.

But neither account -- Politico's theory that the failed filibuster vote was actually evidence of Schumer's unacknowledged brilliance, nor Fund's theory that it all goes back to Ron Klain and Biden's unwavering faith in him -- explains the why in any satisfactory way. Schumer can be brilliant only if he pulls the rabbit out of the hat before November, which is not a realistic prospect. Klain is nothing but a chief of staff, whom presidents routinely fire no matter how much they like them.

It's hard to avoid the choice Politico wants to avoid, that the pressure for the failed filibuster vote came from outside the senate with the cooperation of Klain. My sense of things continues to be, though, that it's related to the putative deal that was made for Sanders to drop out of the 2020 Democrat nomination race in favor of Biden, in exchange for Biden's support for the Plan A agenda. The problem continues to be that there's no Plan B.