Ryan Grim is reporting that some Senate Democrats will vote in favor of Bernanke when 60 votes are required, and then against him when 51 votes are required. Because your head hadn't exploded enough over the last week:
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters on Monday afternoon after a meeting with Bernanke that some opponents of the chairman had pledged to support him on the first vote, but not on the second.
"I know that there are some Democrats who have stated publicly that they are not going to vote ultimately for his nomination as chairman of the Fed. Many, not all, but many of these Senate Democrats have said that they won't stop us on procedural votes. So we may have their support on cloture but not on final passage," he said.
HuffPost asked Durbin why they'd make that commitment for Bernanke but not for health care.
"I don't know. That's a good question. They come up with different standards in terms of how they do things," Durbin replied.
The double standard at play here is that some Senators want to make it look like they opposed Bernanke, but don't actually intend to stop Bernanke. By contrast, some of these same Senators will actually use the filibuster to block the public option, and don't want to make it just look like they are opposing the public option.
This is a good example of how some Senate Democrats use process issues, such as the filibuster, to make to appear like they are on your side, even when they are not:
- When they don't actually want to stop something the grassroots wants to stop, some will vote against final passage, but vote to invoke cloture. They will claim "hey, I voted for change at the Fed," even though they sided with Bernanke on the most important vote--the one for cloture.
- Alternatively, when they want to oppose something progressives want, but don't want to make it appear like they opposed it, they will say "hey, there aren't 60 votes," without saying which votes are unavailable or batting an eyelash about the hypocrisy with the first bullet point.
Perhaps the most gratuitous example of this behavior was when 42 Senators voted against Samuel Alito's nomination for the Supreme Court--enough to block it--but only 25 voted to filibuster him. A real profile in honesty.
This is a blow to our campaign to stop Ben Bernanke, but it also contains a ray of hope. If the Democratic leadership is urging people who oppose Bernanke to vote to end the filibuster, then there very well might be over 40 opponents of Bernanke's nomination. That would be enough to stop Bernanke, if these Democrats change their mind and filibuster.
Let's keep finding out where Senators stand: keep whipping Senators on Bernanke today! It's working--a reader told me this morning over email that Mark Begich had moved from "lean yes" to "we'll get back to you."
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