( – promoted by odum)

Seems like there’s more buzz on the possibility of Bush’s favorite Senator, Joe Lieberman (CT-Party of One) picking up his toys and jumping the fence to join the Repugs (officially, that is – Joe’s been unofficially one for a long time).  Joe’s been filling up a diaper load on a daily basis with his obsessive love of all things Iraq, not giving two shits to the overwhelming majority of his constituents who oppose the war.

The panic line seems to be that if Holy Joe jumps ship, he’ll ‘return control of the Senate to the Republicans’. Not completely true. At that point, it would be a 50-50 Senate, with Dick Cheney breaking any tied votes. But a point to ponder… considering the way the Senate has voted lately, and with Repubs jumping ship on Iraq quickly, the chance of 50-50 votes on anything is becoming extremely unlikely. The other concern is that if he did, there would have to be some new kind of power sharing agreement in regards to committees and such, as there was when Sen. Jim Jeffords left the Repubs a few years back.  I can’t remember where I read this, but I think that once the Senate rules are in place and agreed upon at the beginning of the term, they can not be changed, short of a supermajority. If anyone has more details on this, please leave something in the comments and I’ll update it. But if that is indeed true, him leaving  the Dems won’t really do much in terms of shifting the power.

There are a lot of reasons for him not to make the switch. If indeed, the Senate rules stay in place, it’s a damn good bet that he’ll lose his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Considering it’s the committee responsible for overseeing his buddy in the executive branch, nothing would be better than to get him out of there. He seems intent on not overseeing the President on anything, as evidenced by his response to investigating the Katrina debacle.

It’s amazing how the mainstream media is spinning this, as evidenced by the garbage Time put out today on the matter:

If he were to jump ship, the ensuing shift of power to Republicans would scramble the politics of the war in Iraq, undercut the Democrats’ national agenda and potentially weaken their hopes for the White House in 2008.

What kinda horseshit is that? Lieberman has recently made it his life’s work to undercut the Democratic agenda. By what stretch of the imagination would he somehow undercut it more in the GOP? And potentially ‘weaken their hopes for the WH in 2008’? How? I thought that was Hillary’s job. If the implication is that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would somehow have some chance in hell of winning, then methinks someone at Time’s been spending too much time with the crack pipe.

David Sirota has a good take on how Joe jumping ship works out to be a positive for the Dems:

Democrats control the House, and as we’ve seen on the Iraq debate, a narrow majority in the Senate effectively stops that institution from doing anything. Thus, we have basic gridlock right now. Additionally, most believe that President Bush will veto any good legislation that manages to get out of Congress right now – meaning that gridlock is ensured by the White House. Throwing the Senate to the Republicans by one vote wouldn’t change this gridlocked situation at all. Democrats would still have the House and filibuster-ready Senators to stop anything awful from getting to Bush’s desk. Meanwhile, Democrats would still have investigatory/oversight power from their House chairmen…

So, to sum up: I hope Lieberman switches because A) it would be advantageous for Democrats in the long-term B) it wouldn’t hurt Democrats or progressives in the short-term, if Senate Democrats developed the spine to filibuster horrible nominees (admittedly an “if”) and C) while he already is politically irrelevant in terms of actual power, Lieberman’s switch would, finally, make him widely perceived as irrelevant, meaning that he would cease to have any effect on the national debate and that his melting, Emperor-from-Star-Wars face would stop appearing on my television set and freaking out my dog, Monty.

So those of you who are frettin’ over this, don’t. He’s nothing but a liability to you Democrats. Him leaving would just hasten his demise into political irrelevancy. So relax. Heck, send him flowers if he does it. He’ll need all the friends he can get at that point.

crossposted at five before chaos

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