MyDD :: 60 is the magic number

60 is the magic number - U.S. Senate

by NoThirdBushTerm, Mon Oct 06, 2008 at 01:16:31 PM EST

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/100 8/14280.html

My take on the above link at Politico.com:

60 - it is just a number, but it is an important one.

If the Democrats can get 60 members in the Senate, they can disallow filibustering, and allow progressive legislation to follow a much quicker route through the Senate.

Consider this - for all of Obama's intelligence, charisma, and drive, he needs legislators who are willing to live up to the challenges we face: ending the war in Iraq, fixing the economy, ramping up production of renewable energy. The laundry-list goes on and on.

That will not happen if the Republicans can filibuster bills to death in the Senate. And they will. The Republican Party has been hijacked by such a messianic movement that passage of legislation that they do not author is not only bad policy, but an affront to America in general.

They will stop and nothing to thwart an Obama administration's progressive agenda.

Per Politico: VA, NM, CO, AK, NH, OR, NC, MN, KY, MS & GA are all either going to go to the Democrats or states were Republican numbers are falling, and the races are becoming competitive.

Tags: senate, democratic majority (all tags)

Permalink :: 3 Comments :: Post a Comment

Re: 60 is the magic number - U.S. Senate (none / 0)

After last week, do you think it really matters if we have 60 seats?

by the mollusk on Mon Oct 06, 2008 at 01:22:54 PM EST

Re: 60 is the magic number - U.S. Senate (none / 0)

I hate to say this but to get to 60 votes we would need to keep leiberman in the party and IMHO i would rather not. The first thing the new senate Dems need to do is kick his ass out and take away his DHS chair, PERIOD.

david

by giusd on Mon Oct 06, 2008 at 01:59:23 PM EST

Re: 60 is the magic number - U.S. Senate (none / 0)

If the Dems get to sixty we'll probably have a health care package by the end of 2010. The map next cycle is good for the Dems, and for a few GOP senators (eg. Arlen Spector) opposing such a bill would probably be career suicide (which is fine by me, the Dems would make up the difference next time around).

It'll be interesting to see what the Dems do with Leiberman. While they'd want his vote it's not clear they'd need it. It's also not clear that Leiberman would vote against the Dem domestic agenda whatever happened (that would be career suicide for him, he might still have this belief that he could win reelection in 2012).

by IncognitoErgoSum on Mon Oct 06, 2008 at 04:25:07 PM EST

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