An American Lion

Messing with established institutions is what crazy people do when they want things to fall over and collapse. Think of someone who starts trying to re-imagine how the house of cards you just set up on the dining room table would look like with a bridge over it so that people can pass cookies from one place to the next. Hello? How stupid is that? I’m not naming names, Mr. Peej.

There is a discussion out there that centers around the mistaken belief that the rules of the United States Senate are keeping us from getting anything done. Far from it. The rules are keeping Senators from doing too much to weaken and injure the republic. Any fool can see that:

For those of us on the train for Senate reform, Elizabeth Drew’s Politico piece is worth reading, as she offers a very strong — and very convincing — defense of the chamber’s status quo. The short of her argument is that reformers are vastly overstating the extent to which the body is paralyzed or “dysfunctional”; by and large, Drew argues, this Senate has “essentially met all of the president’s major goals,” including one of the most significant public-policy “breakthroughs” in a generation. Yes, the Senate hasn’t moved on climate change and immigration, but as Drew notes, those are issues where there is significant disagreement within the Democratic caucus.

As I’ve argued before, I think this line of defense misses the damage intense minority obstruction does to the Senate’s other priorities; in addition to passing legislation, the Senate is responsible for confirming the president’s executive-branch and judicial nominees. Thanks to the filibuster and other parliamentary maneuvers, GOP senators have kept hundreds of executive-branch nominees and dozens of judges from filling their positions. PresidentObama has the lowest judicial confirmation rate of any president in the last 30 years, and for a long time, key executive-branch agencies were pitifully understaffed.

That said, there’s a lot Drew gets right in her piece, and this in particular needs to be said more often:

A lot of people also confused the fact that for the first time in 30 years a party, in this case the Democrats, had 60 votes (actually, 58 Democrats and two independents who caucused with them) with the idea that it automatically had 60 progressive votes, or 60 votes for the president’s program, which it rarely had. Some of those 60 are moderates from more conservative states (or smaller states, which have disproportionate power in the Senate). Also, Democrats technically had 60 votes for only seven of the 13 months of this Congress so far.

I noted this:

Intolerant governments across the globe are "slowly crushing" activist and advocacy groups that play an essential role in the development of democracy, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday.

She cited a broad range of countries where "the walls are closing in" on civic organizations such as unions, religious groups, rights advocates and other nongovernmental organizations that press for social change and shine a light on governments' shortcomings.

Among those she named were Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia.

"Some of the countries engaging in these behaviors still claim to be democracies," Clinton said at an international conference on the promotion of democracy and human rights. "Democracies don't fear their own people. They recognize that citizens must be free to come together, to advocate and agitate."

And that's a great sentiment, but:

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is blocking certain websites from the federal agency's computers, including halting access by staffers to any Internet pages that contain a "controversial opinion," according to an internal email obtained by CBS News.

The email was sent to all TSA employees from the Office of Information Technology on Friday afternoon.

It states that as of July 1, TSA employees will no longer be allowed to access five categories of websites that have been deemed "inappropriate for government access."

The categories include:

• Chat/Messaging

• Controversial opinion

• Criminal activity

• Extreme violence (including cartoon violence) and gruesome content

• Gaming

The email does not specify how the TSA will determine if a website expresses a "controversial opinion."

There is also no explanation as to why controversial opinions are being blocked, although the email stated that some of the restricted websites violate the Employee Responsibilities and Conduct policy.

Clearly, our government fears that someone might be exposed to a "controversial opinion" and is moving to shut that sort of thing out of a government computer network. I agree with keeping porn, games, weirdos and maybe even my own personal blog out of this, but unless the "controversial opinion" is a site that advocates the overthrow of the government, the irony is not lost on anyone with a brain.

Here you have the Secretary of State overseas, touting freedom, and back home the TSA is banning people from being exposed to opinions. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, in other words. That's some fine leadership we have.