Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) voiced her support for a $26.1 billion state-aid package Tuesday. (D. Ross Cameron/ZUMApress.com)

The bill will come up for a cloture vote — meaning it needs 60 votes to move forward — tomorrow. It is fully offset, meaning it does not add to the deficit. And it will provide much-needed and promised dollars to states to keep teachers on the job and to provide funds for Medicaid.

Without the bill, states would be forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers in the next few months. States will cut firefighters, services for the elderly and services for the disabled, Boxer said. Patients using Medicaid will pay higher co-pays. Fewer doctors will accept Medicaid patients, eventually increasing emergency-room use.

The bill is a whittled-down version of earlier jobs, education and state-aid funding bills that could not pass — Republicans refused to vote for legislation that would increase the deficit.

Here is a flash transcript of some of the remarks:

Boxer overviewing the legislation:

We’re here today to talk about critical legislation that is so important, really to every state, and I can say to my home state for sure. The legislation is clearly about jobs. It’s about protecting our critical investments in our safety, in health care, in public safety and in the education of our children. This recession has hit our cities and states very hard.

The economic downturn has forced schools across the country to make painful decisions between firing teachers, over-crowding classrooms, canceling summer school and shortening the school year. In Calif., 26,000 teachers received pink slips this summer.

The good news is, if we just get one Republican tomorrow, we will be able to mitigate this damage quite a bit. … [The legislation] would keep 140,000 teachers in the classroom [and would] also provide critical support to Medicaid programs in our states.

[Not passing this bill] will set back our efforts to help the economic recovery. This bill is fully paid for through a combination of spending cuts and closing tax loopholes. So it’s hard to understand why any [of my] colleague[s] would not [vote for it].

Rendell on the importance of the bill to Pennsylvania:

There’s a lot of debate about [whether] stimulus creates jobs. The debate should end here. Because…if these funds are not extended for an additional period of time, in Pennsylvania, we would lay off 12,000 people by the first or second week of September, [mostly teachers].

It would be particularly tragic for Pennsylvania, because we’ve done very well. In the last four months, we’ve gained jobs … We’ve seen a little momentum building. To lay off 12,000 people…it would be crippling for us.

It would be tragic and I can’t understand why our Republican colleagues [would not vote for it]. I understand pay as you go. I’ve vetoed many bills in my time as governor because they were not paid for. Republicans should be for it. No ifs, ands and buts. If they say they care about job creation, they should be for this. There’s no excuse that it’s not paid for. Stand up and be counted for the American economy.

Ritter on the importance of the benefits to Colorado:

Our state constitution requires that we balance our budget. If it’s out of balance, I have to make up the shortfall. … We’ve done that for $3.5 billion over the last few fiscal years. That’s a significant amount of money when you have a $7 billion general fund.

We have tried to do our level best to preserve essential services, vital services for our citizens. … But doing that at the same time you’re balancing your budget can be quite difficult.

I heard that there was the likelihood of an FMAP extension…and so we balanced our budget against that. And we believed in our legislature there would be that extension in place. Now, we’re down to the last hour. Our fiscal year started July 1. If this [legislation] does not happen in the next few days, it’s likely I’ll have to present a [new] balanced budget [to the legislature.] That means making $200 million in cuts immediately.

I’ll tell you where those cuts will come from. Public safety, we don’t want to cut that. Human services, prisons, health care, those are caseload-driven. So we [are left with] higher education, which has already been cut, and K-12 [which we don’t want to cut]. That’s the likelihood.

We’re looking at the very real possibility of governors [having] to make the decision about whether to extend the cuts in their education systems [that have already faced cuts].

It’s just one of the sad consequences of this. Our revenue is also starting to pick up. We have the prospect of growing in the last two quarters this year. The growth might be slow. But having said that, there’s a good chance the economy is turning around.

Rendell on the immediate impact:

There were 30 states that included [the FMAP funding] in [their] budgets, Pennsylvania included. We’d lose $850 million. … The reason we [included the funding in the first place is that] the Senate has passed [a bill containing it] twice and the House has passed it once, and the President is in support of it. We had every reason to believe it was going to get done. Then, it became a political football.

We have made bitter choices in the last three years. We’ve raised more than $1 billion in revenue and cut spending by $3.5 billion. It’s not like we’ve done nothing and are coming to Washington to say, “Bail us out!”

Boxer on the importance of the bill:

Here’s the thing for me. The question is: Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of our children?

The question to me is not a discussion over an academic issue over who’s helping whom. We all have to step up.

We know we’ve got to help [states]. We know we want to do it on a paygo basis. … We have figured out the way to do it. … We can do this. We can pay for it. That’s the key.

Boxer on valuing public employees over private employees:

I’m trying to help all workers. We’re also, before we leave here, we’re trying to get a single Republican vote on small business jobs bill. It would create tens of thousands of jobs, because it would leverage $30 billion in [loan-backing to community banks] to more than $300 billion [in loans for small businesses].

I don’t pit one kind of working person against another. … I’m willing to do what I can do and do it in a responsible way. This is responsible.

Boxer on the likelihood of passage:

I’m just going to say that Harry Reid, our leader, is very optimistic. He has not said he has secured [the 60th vote]. But he has said he’s very optimistic. The reason we hope we’ve had movement is because of the governors. The governors have really let people know we need to pass this — Republican governors, Democratic governors — and that has been very, very helpful.

A spokesman for Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), for example, told Politico that the senator withdrew his support “over concerns that the commission will be able to raise taxes.” The offices of Sens. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) said exactly the same thing.

What’s fascinating about that argument is this: Sens. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) and Kent Conrad (RD-N.D), the heads of the Budget Committee, have been pushing their task force idea for years, and a central element of the proposal has always been that everything would be on the table — tax hikes, benefit cuts and everything in between. Here’s their statement from 2007, which indicates that the commission “will analyze all potential solutions.” And here’s a summary of their more recent bill, which clearly states that “all options will be considered by the Task Force.” It’s a concept that practically defines the bill.

So either (1) the six Republican flip-floppers are lying and voted against the commission solely under pressure from GOP leaders to deny the Obama White House a legislative victory, or (2) they threw their support behind a proposal they knew nothing about. Neither explanation says great things about their leadership skills — and both are indications of why Americans think Washington is broken.

Dear Friends,

Respectfully, I disagree with this rally to “vote no on the cloture” for this or any nominee that one would expect a Democratic president to nominate, if the sole purpose is to block or “stop,” and not merely and genuinely to prolong a debate. Calling for a Democrat-style obstructive filibuster, that is likely impossible, is just another “throw them red meat” distraction and yet another easy out for a Republican leadership that has historically been to cool-for-school on judicial nominations.

We should ask Republican Senators to dedicate the time and effort needed to illustrate in vivid colors, on and off the Floor, the reasons why they believe this or any other judicial nominee should not have been nominated, and show the proof of why the elections of a president and senators have consequences.  This begins with Senator Sessions doing what his two predecessors never did.  Neither Hatch nor Specter ever went to the Chairmen’s Meeting and demanded more time and effort on judges, which is why other leaders had to lead that effort.

I won’t go into the error we Conservatives make in losing the high ground of defending the Constitution against the extra-constitutional use of the filibuster against judicial nominees.  There may be institution-based exceptions to a no filibuster stand, such as preventing windfalls from past obstructions, as in the 4^th Circuit, or preventing the godparents of obstruction like Cass Sunstein, Lisa Graves, etc., from being confirmed to a court.  But this is not that, and moreover a vote against cloture, with no other noticeable Floor effort, does not get the public attention that an honest up-or-down vote and statesmanlike Floor effort would get.

Best,

Manuel Miranda

But who’s going to protect Americans from the worst practices of Congress?

That’s the question being asked by Steven Pearlstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist for The Washington Post, who wonders today whatever happened to the concept of majority rule on Capitol Hill? As an example of how the House has gotten away from its Democratic beginnings, Pearlstein points to the floor debate over the $894 billion health reform bill passed over the weekend, which allowed for votes on just two amendments — precluding even a chance to gauge support for some of the most hot-button health care issues.

Almost nobody — including the House members themselves — found it odd that this process offered no chance to vote on what kind of “public option” they wanted, or whether they wanted to add some form of malpractice reform, or whether there should be some limit on the value of tax-free health benefits or any of the other two dozen key issues in the health reform debate. In the world’s oldest continuous democracy, these apparently are questions considered too important to be decided individually by a majority of the elected representatives.

And then there’s the Senate, where the filibuster has evolved to the point that 60 votes are required to pass even the most non-controversial proposals — a trend that’s slowed the legislative process to a frustrating crawl. That, Pearlstein argues, was hardly the intended design.

Despite what you hear from legislative leaders, there is nothing preordained about this wholesale disregard for majority rule. In fact, it violates the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution, which expressly delineates a limited number of instances in which anything other than a majority vote is required. And it makes a mockery of Senate rules and precedent, which for nearly two centuries were grounded in a tradition of comity and mutual respect between majority and minority.

Pearlstein has a novel suggestion: restore majority rule by bringing everything — even the controversial health reform proposals — to the floor for an up-or-down, majority-wins vote.

[F]orget about spending another six weeks searching for those elusive 60 votes to break a filibuster, going back and forth with weak-kneed centrists like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu who can’t seem to decide what they really want, or self-righteous egotists like Joe Lieberman, who thinks he can call all the shots. If they have suggestions for improving the bill, let them do it the old-fashioned way: propose an amendment on the floor and see if they can get 49 other senators to agree.

This is hardly just a criticism of Republican obstructionism. After all, it’s Democratic leaders who decide which provisions get floor consideration and which don’t. And their choices are often as politically motivated as the GOP strategy of forever stalling legislation. (Democrats, for example, could easily have passed an extension of unemployment benefits much more quickly than they did if they had only agreed to votes on several controversial GOP amendments — provisions that would have touched political buttons and been potentially embarrassing to the majority party.)

All Pearlstein has suggested is that even some of those contentious things be given consideration.

Sound crazy? Only to those grown accustomed to the dysfunctional, back-room process that’s evolved.

What I do think makes sense is for the majority to actually require the minority to filibuster — as in talk and talk and talk. We’ve arrived at a point in which it’s become standard, even in the most contentious of cases, for the minority to be allowed merely to signal the intention to filibuster rather than doing the actual thing itself. Filibustering is a tool of obstruction. It’s a critical right of the minority in the senate. But it is, by definition, obstruction. So it makes sense to put the obstructionists to their task, make them do it publicly. I don’t know why the Democrats are not doing that in this case.

Senate Cloture Votes (97th - 110th Congress) *courtesy of Campaign for America

I couldn’t agree more. As the bar graph at right (courtesy of Campaign for America’s Future) clearly shows, the Republican legislative strategy since slipping into the minority in 2006 has been obstruction. Republican senators threatened a filibuster and forced a cloture vote more than 100 times and counting during the current 110th Congress — breaking the previous record of 62 filibusters in a two-year legislative session in less than one year. Is it any surprise that Congress’ approval rating fell, as Sen. John McCain liked to say on the campaign trail, to just nine percent, and the Republicans subsequently took a walloping at the polls last month.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called the Republicans out on their threat and forced a traditional all-night “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”-type filibuster only once during the current session, on a proposed amendment to a 2007 defense authorization bill that would have mandated the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. In many cases, the mere threat of a filibuster was enough to effectively kill a piece of legislation.

If Reid forced the Republicans to actually go through with all, or at least some, threatened filibusters, chances are pretty good we’d see a lot less of them. GOP leaders might pick and choose their battles a bit more strategically if they knew there’s a good chance they’d have to make good on their promises and stay up all night.

Of course, it would suck for the Democrats as well, as nobody likes to stay up all night to listen to politicians ramble on and on, but do it a few times on key issues just to show you mean business. With Democrats holding 58 or 59 Senate seats, a few real filibusters with the threat of more might be enough to wear down one or two moderate Republicans and separate them from the pack once in a while.

At the very least, it would be a symbolic gesture that would let the American people see clearly why its so difficult to pass legislation, and who is responsible for gumming up the works — and might help solidify a 60-seat filibuster-proof super-majority in 2010.