On the 19th, the AP's Jim Abrams published a piece on efforts to limit or reform the filibuster. There's some decent information in there on efforts by McCaskill, Bennet and Udall each of whom have their own particular reform effort going. In what I attribute to an attempt at balance, the piece includes a skeptical quote from the Senate Historian, Dave Ritchie (and I have to ask, should he be allowing himself to be quoted in a way that appears to take sides in Senate matters?) and this far more irksome bit:
Supporters of the 60-vote supermajority say it helped prevent Democrats from attaching a government-run public option - an idea unpopular with many Americans - to the health care law. And growing national sentiment that Congress should quit adding to federal deficits was reflected when Democrats needing Republican votes to reach the 60-vote threshold were forced to cut future food stamp benefits and an energy program to pay for a $26 billion jobs bill this month.
Aside from the view-from-nowhwere "supporters say" construction here (Which ones?) the big problem is the vague and misleading statement "an idea unpopular with many Americans" about the Public Option. This is technically true, "many" Americans did disapprove but the implication is that a public option was net unpopular. I'm not aware of any poll which found the public option negatively popular. Quite the reverseactually. The consensus of numerous polls was that it was popular, in some cases strongly and under other formulations with only a plurality in favour.
Then there is next sentence about how the filibuster is working to limit the deficit. It might be worth mentioning that the CBO scored at least one version of the public option as deficit reducing to to the order of about $53B by 2019. So this is the best that AP's unnamed "supporters" can say in defence of the filibuster: It saved America from a deficit reducing, popular legislative proposal and took food out of the mouths of the hungry. Hooray!
The saddest part about this attempt for balance, is that it predictably failed to impress the right as Newsbusters shows in its flailing and bizarre attempt to claim that a factual article about 3 Senators' reform ideas is "praise" of the effort to eliminate the filibuster. Abrams went out of his way to find some scintilla of good policy outcome that could be credited to the filibuster, straining credulity to do so, and it wasn't enough. We know this is because organizations like Newsbusters and the Media Research Center only exist to work the ref, but still AP strives to appease the unappeasable.
