For the last two agonizing years, the existence of the filibuster in the Senate has been the excuse of excuses to prevent any wildly popular progressive legislation or mildly progressive changes from being enacted.

Public option overwhelmingly popular? Too bad; the filibuster.

Wall Street regulation overwhelmingly popular? Too bad; the filibuster.

Immigration reform? Filibuster.

Ending the wars? Filibuster.

Climate change work? Filibuster.

Actual liberal nominees for the courts? Filibuster. (Sotomayor is a fine choice based on her body of work experience, especially vital trial judge work, but not exactly a liberal firebrand. Kagan’s grossly unqualified and her presence on the Supreme Court is a disgrace to the legal profession.)

So, now that the lower House is in Republican hands, and the Senate likely to fall in 2012, what do the Dems in the Senate finally want to get around to doing?

Removing the filibuster. Aka, the only tool that liberals have to even slow the Tea Party infused Conservative juggernaut down.

Naturally.

Greg Sargent reports that Harry Reid will respond to the call of his entire caucus and devise rules to reform the Senate rules.

At a caucus meeting this week attended only by Senators and no staff, Reid and fellow Dems devoted a significant chunk of time to a discussion about specific ideas on how to proceed, the aide says [...]

“They are already talking it through and devising a plan,” the aide said of Reid and fellow Dems, adding that Reid is having “conversations” with other members of the caucus “about the best way to move forward.”

Let me spell this out so that any of my fellow travelers on the Left who haven’t caught on to the scam:

This was the plan all along.

No, it’s not an elaborate conspiracy of every single Democrat in the Senate to disenfranchise liberals. Quite the contrary; the scam lies in disreputable centrist hacks like Reid knowing full well that, given a bit of good governance, Civics 101 rhetoric at the right moment, Progressives will shoot their agenda, their power, and their constituents squarely in the face to do The Right Thing for Democracy.

Like this:

The decision to reform the Senate rules has engendered some controversy among the progressive community. They question whether the timing is right, with a Republican majority in the House and the Senate likely to tip to Republicans in 2012, to make this reform. I wonder why they think that Republicans haven’t considered abolishing the filibuster rules outright the moment they get into power, but OK.

My position is that democracy can only work with a functioning legislature. If the people of the United States choose a Republican government, they endorsed Republican solutions to the nation’s problems. Those solutions should be advanced for the nation to endure. That’s the only way accountability in government can occur. This kabuki dance, where one party or another takes power and then laments the rules from stopping them from action, does not serve the public.

Why don’t I think the Republicans will do that? I’m not sure if they will or won’t. They didn’t previously, largely because Senate Republicans would be making the call, and as much as they love their agenda, they love their sense of self-importance more. That might hold true again, or not. But regardless, it wouldn’t happen for TWO MORE YEARS.

Here’s how this has gone, will probably play out, and keep in mind, this is The Plan:

-For two years, Republicans block all vaguely progressive legislation, ‘forcing’ Obama, Reid and Pelosi to tack to the right and give quasi-fascistic policies on everything.
-This serves the corporations well, weakens Dem support, and the Republicans can frame it to their base as, paradoxically, ‘socialism’.
-Then after the election, Dems disassemble the filibuster.
-Now, the Republicans in the House can ‘force’ Obama to…. tack to the right and give quasi-fascistic policies on everything.

It’s all about which corporate interests they needed to serve. In the first two years, we got massive bailouts of Healthcare and Finance, lobbies traditionally either friendly to Dems, or not actively unfriendly. (Witness how New York is very solidly blue, and yet very solidly in bed with Wall Street).

In the second two years of the Obama term, we’ll get bailouts of more traditionally Red corporate interests. The prisons, the military, Big Ag, Resource Extraction, Fossil Fuels, etc. Your full gamut of Captain Planet Dystopian villainy.

We needed Dem majorities to pass the first bailouts; we need unopposed Republicans for the second batch.

This is the plan. But ‘plan’ could be a misleading word. Perhaps it’s just the natural behavior of a captured system, a sort of emergent phenomenon. The most powerful interests acted first, and acted through Dems until they got worn out; now other interests will act through Republicans. Beyond a few truly monstrous cynics like Obama and Reid, who only care for their own power and prospects, who knows if it rises to a conscious level.

With Obama though, I’d certainly wager it does. All he cares about is the chance to make bold compromises so that he can try and buy his father’s love and approval via Republican proxy. It’s a fixation. This setup gives him another glorious two years of hippie-punching therapy.

That won’t stop some, like Mr. Dayen here, regrettably, from hoping desperately for a different future:

On key economic issues, one suspects that Democrats, nominally the party of the people, have no interest in living up to their rhetoric on the campaign trail. In this reading, they hide behind the Senate’s rules to confirm their inability to get anything done. Limiting the rules obstacles would kick the legs out from that excuse. In the words of this commenter, “The rule change issue will either save the Democratic Party or expose it as a corporate tool with a smiley face. Either outcome is a step ahead of where we are now.”

Sigh. Expose them, really? No, no, no. They already have a better excuse waiting: ‘The Constitution says all spending bills have to originate in the House. The Tea Partiers now control our budget. We’re helpless! Again!’

If the filibuster was intact, Dem voters might see through the con, and expect their Senators to, you know, filibuster. Hence it’s got to go. The ultimate goal for the Democratic Party is to appear helpless at all times, so that it can be blameless for all woe.

Hope, as they say, springs eternal.

This means, of course, that it is next to worthless. Enjoy the new Republican era, brought to you by the Democratic Party.

PS: Just earlier today, Dayen wrote this:

Regardless of whether filibuster rules change or not, political progress from the left in the next two years borders on the impossible. If we make it to 2012 unscathed with nothing more than gridlock it’ll be a miracle.

If gridlock is the best outcome, why the hell would you want to grease the skids? Oh, right. Hopeful idealism.

*rolls eyes*

I read this NYT piece myself early today and it’s making the rounds in the not-totally-corrupted side of the liberal blogosphere. Excerpt:

TRUCKEE, Calif. — When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks.

When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the words “Together Forever,” that contained the ashes of her late husband, Robert.

The culprit, Ms. Ash soon learned, was not a burglar but her bank. According to a federal lawsuit filed in October by Ms. Ash, Bank of America had wrongfully foreclosed on her house and thrown out her belongings, without alerting Ms. Ash beforehand.

The piece goes on to outline several cases, including one where the guy didn’t even have a mortgage (yet again) and the bank stole the house anyway:

In Texas, for example, Bank of America had the locks changed and the electricity shut off last year at Alan Schroit’s second home in Galveston, according to court papers. Mr. Schroit, who had paid off the house, had stored 75 pounds of salmon and halibut in his refrigerator and freezer, caught during a recent Alaskan fishing vacation.

“Lacking power, the freezer’s contents melted, spoiled and reeking melt water spread through the property and leaked through the flooring into joists and lower areas,” the lawsuit says. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount.

So to get this straight: banks will break into your home whether entitled to or not, whether you have a mortgage or not, and steal any and all of its contents as they see fit, including HUMAN REMAINS.

But we don’t need a foreclosure moratorium, right John Cole?

Schmucks.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s not only continues to do nothing, but allows the Fed (Bernanke was his choice, don’t forget) to block meaningful action to protect homeowners from thieves who are literally looting the dead:

Top policymakers at the Federal Reserve are fighting efforts to rein in widely reported bank abuses, sparking an inter-agency feud with the FDIC and the Treasury Department. The Fed, along with the more bank-friendly Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is resisting moves to craft rules cracking down on banks that charge illegal fees and carry out improper foreclosures. The FDIC supports such rules, according to an FDIC official involved in the dispute.

But we don’t need a national moratorium. I mean, they’re only stealing houses and dead husbands, right? Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Remember this from Mr. Balloon Juice himself, John Cole?

I’m not siding with the banksters, I just don’t understand what good would come from a national moratorium. Forty state AG’s are on the ball, what exactly could a national moratorium do? The idea is to stop the bad foreclosures, not grind every single transaction in this sector to a damned halt.

You aren’t hurting the banksters when you do something like that. You’re hurting every single buyer and seller in the market. It would be catastrophic.

Yeah I bet he’s hoping we’ll all forget it too. Though maybe, years after the all the ruined lives and stolen homes, we can get another wonderfully contrite apology which supposedly restores all his credibility. (Much like it brings back the dead from a needless war based on transparent lies)

After all, we can’t have the catastrophe of an insolvent bank eating some of their losses. Stealing a woman’s dead spouse is a small price to pay to keep this wonderful mortgage market going full speed.

As we come to a close on this session of Congress and the new, Tea Party infused batch of crazies prepares to take over and do as much damage to the country as possible, it’s worth noting what this can teach us about the current political dynamic in the United States, which I will attempt to summarize:

President Obama gets precisely what he wants, almost all the time.

Don’t believe me? Try to name a major policy initiative that Obama wanted that he didn’t get. Note: one he *actually* wanted, not one he said he did.

–President Obama did NOT want a public option in his so-called healthcare reform bill. We didn’t get one. He lied to Congress about supporting one, but we know for a fact that he had traded it away months previously.

–President Obama did NOT want drug reimportation allowed under HCR, and when it looked like it might pass, his administration sabotaged the measure, at considerable taxpayer expense. Remember those higher prices whenever you get a script filled at Walgreens.

–Obama, also known as President Fierce Advocate, did NOT want DADT repeal initially, and so it languished, despite another of his patented public displays of support, until the gay rights lobby made it so painful for him that he DID want it, and then, when he needed a victory to validate his so-called liberalism, he was able to make it happen within *days*

–Lest you forget how much his administration hates gays, they passionately defended DOMA by comparing a state’s authority to refuse gay marriages to the authority to refuse to acknowledge incestuous marriages or child marriage.

–President Obama did NOT want to empower unions or any other major Democratic power center outside of his own party, and so Unions in particular have gotten the shaft, repeatedly, throughout his administration. (brutal pay-cuts at the American Automakers alongside loans to foreign competitors, attacks on their healthcare premiums under HCR, a total lack of support for the Employee Free Choice Act, the new trade deal with South Korea which will cost us over 150,000 American jobs, etc)

–President Obama hates Social Security with a white hot passion. When the Congress refused to create a ‘Deficit’ Commission exclusively designed to cut it, he created one on his own, and stacked the deck with people who shared his dream of destroying or at least crippling the premiere social safety program in the United States. When the commission still couldn’t come to a consensus, he set up a ‘tax deal’ that cuts billions out of Social Security’s revenue stream, to be paid for out of general revenue, which for the first time makes Social Security part of the deficit problem and opens it up to be cut by the new, Teabagger Congress.

–President Obama hates the poor and the middle class. Sorry to break this to you, but he does. Hence his administration’s heinous to the point of absurdity implementation of HAMP, a program that was supposedly created to help struggling homeowners, but in fact was nothing more than predatory lending backed with taxpayer funds. Hence his support for Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, two of the men who are most responsible for the current economic disaster that has destroyed so much of the American middle class. Hence this newest tax cut ‘deal’ which actually raises taxes on 1/3 of American workers; the poorest third.

Yes, that’s right. President Obama is about to raise taxes on the poor, so he can cut taxes on the rich. It also shuts out public employees who don’t pay into Social Security because they have a different pension system.

–Speaking of, President Obama loves the rich. Loves them. That’s why his new tax cut deal, the one that raises taxes on the working poor, slashes them on the rich and further lowers the estate tax.

–President Obama is literally taking food from poor childrens’ plates to make a crass political point. Ie, to fund a shiny new school lunch program that is amongst his wife’s pet projects, he slashed funding for food stamps. Next year TANF, the federal successor to welfare, also gets steep cuts.

–President Obama loves torture and loves war. He continues torture to this very day, including the torture of Bradley Manning, who dared to expose some of the crimes of both the Bush and Obama administrations. President Obama has consistently refused to prosecute war criminals and torturers, and now American crimes, if they are to receive any review at all, will have to be tried in foreign courts. He has escalated the war in Afghanistan even though his process stands absolutely zero chance of success and the Taliban gain ground day after day, year after year. He’s also greatly expanded the undeclared war in Pakistan and launched a shadow war in Yemen.

–President Obama loves assassination and frequently employs assassins. That’s what you call firing a missile from an unmanned vehicle into civilian populations in a country we are not at war with, btw. It’s not a ‘battle’, and it’s certainly not war. It’s assassination, execution without trial, also known as murder. It doesn’t make a bit of difference that the assassin uses a predator drone.

–President Obama hates immigrants, wants to get rid of as many as he can and doesn’t care how much it hurts the Democratic Party. This would be why his administration is objectively worse on deportations than Bush, or why despite public promises to the contrary he never once made immigration reform a priority.

Now that we’ve established that President Obama hates Social Security, the poor, immigrants, the middle class, unions, health care recipients and loves war, assassination and the wealthy, we should be able to make some predictions about the next two years:

–Obama will go to the mat to cut Social Security. Expect cuts, or even the complete dismantling of the program. Obama hates it. It has to go. Social Security is his white whale.

–Obama will further weaken unions. It might be with more free trade deals, it might be by simply letting their membership fade away over time as it has for decades.

–Obama will slash social any and all social spending he can get his hands on, allying with the Tea Party to do it. Expect more cuts to public assistance, welfare, anything that helps keep people off the streets, in part so that he can keep getting money for his assassination robots in Pakistan and Yemen. The current tax cut deal explicitly leaves Tea Party whackos the leverage needed to cut back all the stimulative spending, such as it is, early next year. This is by design, not accident; Obama and the Dem leadership together have decided to hand Republicans the lever to ‘force’ them to do what Obama wanted in the first place.

–Speaking of overseas wars funded with money we need at home, expect them to expand. Since we can’t win in Afghanistan, in Nixonian fashion, Obama has to expand the war to somewhere he thinks we *can* win. Will Pakistan be the new Cambodia? Hard to say. Someone’s got to eat some serious civilian casualties as we head toward the 2012 elections though.

–We will be in Afghanistan until 2012, guaranteed. If Obama is re-elected, we will be there until after 2014, maybe forever. He loves that war too much, and has staked too much on its ‘success’, to stop throwing away blood and treasure on it. Someone would have to make him stop, and that’s not going to be Republicans.

–Health Care Reform may or may not be dismantled, but it doesn’t really matter. Obama wanted two things out of HCR: 1) to avoid real reform of the medical industries and their profits (because he is a Reaganite and loves corporations more than people) and 2) to avoid having to pass any real Democratic priorities (like immigration reform, DADT [at that time], environmental regulation, climate change, etc.) He got those objectives, and if the Republicans take his bill apart, he can campaign against them screaming about sick kids without healthcare (you know, like the ones whose families won’t be able to afford the outrageous copays under his plan) You wouldn’t believe the number of flyers with airbrushed actors playing sick kids I got from Dems in the last election cycle; they think this issue is a winner for them, and want to use it again and again and again. A winning policy doesn’t give them cheap election ads, so single payer never stood a chance; better the Republicans play-act as the bad guys.

–There will be no real action on Climate Change. At all. Period. See, President Obama doesn’t want action on climate change because it would hurt large corporate interests, but he needed to stall until he had a Republican Congress to block it. Now he has that, so mysteriously, the US and China hammered out a meaningless compromise at Cancun just recently. Doesn’t matter; the Republicans will play the bad guys and block any implementation of meaningful climate change legislation (cap and trade or carbon tax, doesn’t matter) and the deal will fall through or amount to nothing. As he wants it to. Meanwhile, expect Obama to help dial back any other common-sense, lifesaving regulations (as he is already doing with smog and incinerators)

–Since the Gulf really is filthy and full of poison, it will turn out that the food that the Obama administration pushed to get back into supermarkets by greenwashing BP’s response was poisonous, carcinogenic, full of oil and heavy metals and suchlike. (Actually, this is already proving true) It won’t lead to any significant environmental reforms though.

–More tax cuts for the wealthy. I mean, this one’s so obvious it’s a gimme.

That’s the agenda for the next two years, I’d say. More death all around, more war, less money for the poor and sick, more for the rich, no action on climate change, health care reform failing either because his plan stays in effect (and sucks) or because it’s torn apart, and anyone who’s been eating Gulf seafood? I’d get good life insurance before the rates go up.

You might be asking yourself, “Why? Why is he doing this?” (unless you’re a rabid Obama diehard in which case you’ll sound a lot like this video).

There seem to be two arguments about that. The first, as articulated by Matt Taibbi recently for Rolling Stone, is that Obama is an unprincipled flip-flopper, a bad leader with few, if any, core beliefs:

I contrast this now to the behavior of Barack Obama. I can’t even count how many times I listened to Barack Obama on the campaign trail talk about how, as president, he would rescind the Bush tax cuts as soon as he had the chance. He stood up and he said over and over again – I can still hear him saying “Let me be clear!” with that Great Statesman voice of his, before he went into this routine – that the Bush tax cuts were wrong and immoral. He said more than once that they “offended his conscience.” Then, just as he did with drug re-importation and Guantanamo and bulk Medicare negotiations for pharmaceuticals and the issue of whether or not he would bring registered lobbyists into his White House and a host of other promises, he tossed his campaign “convictions” in the toilet and changed his mind once he was more accountable to lobbyists than primary voters.

…

This idea that you can’t be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don’t stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It’s possible to do this job with honor and dignity. It’s just that most of our politicians – our president included, apparently – would rather not bother.

The second, articulated below by Ian Welsh, and which I’m think, sadly, to be more correct, is that Obama in fact has principles, albeit evil ones, and the current state of affairs is *precisely* what he’s wanted all along:

He’s a Reaganite. It’s what he believes in, genuinely. Moreover he despises left wingers, likes kicking gays and women whenever he gets a chance and believes deeply and truly in the security state (you did notice that Obama administration told everyone to take their objections to backscatter scanners and groping and shove them where the sun don’t shine, then told you they’re thinking of extending TSA police state activities to other public transit?)

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security. The Senate, you remember, voted down the catfood comission. Obama reinstituted it by executive fiat.

If the left doesn’t stand against Obama and doesn’t primary him, it stands for nothing and for nobody.

Regardless of what goes on inside Obama’s head, the larger proposition is undeniable: Obama is a bad man. Anyone who would torture and murder without trial is a bad man. Anyone who would clusterbomb Yemeni civilians is a bad man. Anyone who would accept a peace prize while escalating hopeless wars he knows cannot be won is a bad man. Anyone who would steal food from starving kids to rack up a cheap political victory for his unelected wife is a bad man. Anyone who wants to destroy Social Security, a wildly successful public program that has rescued millions of elderly people from poverty and want? A bad man.

You get the idea, and over the next two years, America’s going to get yet another object lesson in governance by bad men.