Regardless, the only thing it really crystalized for me was the ability, or inability, of athletes to see just how much they mean to the people they play for. LeBron James grew up in Ohio and was drafted by the Cavaliers, two ingredients that make for an incredible love between a city and an athlete. He left. Dwayne Wade is loved in Miami nearly as much as James was in Cleveland. He stayed. The fact is that sometimes they break your heart, and sometimes they don’t.

I was listening to Bill Simmons’ The B.S. Report Podcast with Miami commentator Dan LeBatard, and they brought up a decent point: athletes don’t think the way fans do. We assume that because we feel the love and loyalty to our fans and our favorite players that they will be reciprocated (not like that). But they don’t think like us, and we can’t understand their reasoning. We attribute values like “loyalty” and “home town love” to them when they do decide to stick with our favorite teams, but the real reasoning is probably something along the lines of “money”, “$$$$$”, “state income tax laws” and “$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$”.

Why am I rambling on about this? Because these situations are fast approaching for my beloved San Francisco Giants. I’d like to believe that Tim Lincecum (or farther down the line, Buster Posey) is more Dwayne Wade and the Twins’ Joe Mauer than he is LeBron James. I’d like to believe that his status in the city of San Francisco will be enough for him to take a drastic pay cut to stay with the Giants compared to a team like the Yankees. But how do I know? Maybe the cheers we shower on him every 5th day don’t mean anything next to the gajillion figure salary the Mets will give him in a few years.

I hope not, but you never know. I would bet that Lincecum doesn’t go on national television to break up with the Giants, but if he wins another couple Cy Youngs everything is off the table.

Go Giants!

So enjoy – and more specifically, enjoy this video of Maiden Lane performing one of our originals “Stranger” live.

Oh, and don’t forget: Maiden Lane’s official website is: http://www.maidenlanemusic.com/

In my post I described how Democrats in Washington were going to try to use the Summit to push Health Care Reform the extra few inches it needs to get passed. Thus, the audience for the Summit was not the public as much as it was the Congressional Democrats who needed to be persuaded to fight for this legislation, and who needed to be persuaded that Republicans had no real ideas that would turn into votes.

The hope is that this summit will give Democrats enough political breathing room (read: spine) to force the House of Representatives to pass the Senate version of HCR and the Senate to fix some problems with their bill through reconciliation. If that happens, Obama will have his victory. As Sullivan would say, “meep, meep“.

(Whoa, I just quoted myself. A blog first. How meta!)

While we have yet to see if the Summit will be seen as a galvanizing force behind a reform bill being signed by Obama, as the bill has not passed (yet?), it seems to have done exactly what I thought it would do, and the President did just about exactly what I thought he would do. As Politico’s Glenn Thrush noted, the President was “Lots of Spock, mixed with flashes of Kirk”.

At times, he’s been an impressively dispassionate moderator and observer, repeatedly offering to consider Republicans arguments with a professorial “that’s philosophically valid point” before picking them apart.

By the end of an admittedly grueling 7 hour event, I couldn’t help but think that the President succeeded in showing the Republican’s lack of ideas as a collective. Individual Republicans, like Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, showed genuine understanding of the health care debate. As a whole, however, the Republicans stuck to their talking points of “scrap the current bill” and “start over” (which is code for “kill the bill”), which made them look very bad compared to the President, and basically proved the point that Mark Schmitt, Andrew Sullivan, and others had been making about the “Obama Style”. Jonathan Chait notes:

Most of the Republicans have relied upon scripted talking points and generalized denunciations of big government and a “government takeover.” Numerous Democrats in the room have explained why it’s not possible to ban insurance companies from discriminating against those with preexisting conditions without also covering everybody and subsidizing those who afford it. (Short answer: people would just game the system, going without insurance until they get sick.) Obama has spoken at enormous length today about why letting insurance companies sell policies across state lines would let insurers siphon out the healthy and leave the sick behind.

John Boehner, the House Majority Leader, simply repeated the GOP talking point about scrapping the 2,000 page bill and doing the easy popular stuff: “Why can’t we agree on those insurance reforms we talked about? Why can’t we agree on purchasing across state lines?” It’s like he wasn’t even there. Does he not understand what the other side is saying? Does he not care at all? It’s not that he’s provided an answer to Obama’s arguments that I disagree with. He’s just totally unable to acknowledge or engage at any level with the arguments presented. You’re debating a brick wall.

The image problem was not limited to Congressional Republicans. Most Democrats in the room not named Barack Obama or Joe Biden came off pretty poorly too. That problem was due to the structure of the event, which basically never strayed from both parties throwing talking points and speeches at each other. The Democrats would have done much better if they had simply let the President do ALL of the talking for their party, because the grand exception to all of this was, of course, Obama. As Andrew Sullivan wrote, “can he have a cigarette now?” Ezra Klein makes the point best:

The people who came off best were those who knew the most about the issue. Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn on the Republican side. Dick Durbin and Chris Dodd for the Democrats. But above all of them, the president, who got to enter, adjudicate and conclude discussions at will — not to mention say when others didn’t know that much about the issue, or weren’t offering comments in good faith. That willingness to put himself above Congress, combined with the structure of the event, allowed Obama to fully dominate the proceedings, and he used the opportunity to firmly assert ownership over the health-care bill. This is now his legislation.

It is now his legislation. After all the talk about “Obamacare” the past year, there was never a White House health care plan. There were 5 bills (one for each committee the legislation had to go through), then there were two (the Senate’s and the House’s), and now, finally, there will be one. And it will be Obama’s to win or lose. He spent a year letting Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Congress take the lead, a lesson from his background as a constitutional law professor as well as a lesson learned by Democrats from Bill Clinton’s failure to pass health care reform in 1993. Now it is his.

However, three days after this summit, I don’t feel like it did all that much. Obama was smart and was a good presider, the Congresspeople talked over each other, Republicans have no political reason to capitulate in any way, and Obama showed they have no ideas with the style that has become patented Obama. But he took control of this plan, and perhaps Congressional Democrats will take this event as a turning point towards passing a bill. Regardless, it was a fascinating look at how this President works.

And most importantly, we got tons of shots of the Obama Death Stare. See the photo above. And wither as your face melts off.

Update (3/1/2010):

Ezra Klein on the real purpose of the Health Care Summit:

The Blair House Summit had its purpose, but the major impact was distracting the media for three weeks while Democrats figured out what their next legislative step was going to be. Things like reading the plan aloud or wheeling cameras into the room while partisans make self-serving arguments about the worth of various proposals might serve some purpose, but that purpose isn’t informing people. Instead, it gives people the illusion of being informed, which might be better or might be worse, but is definitely different.

This tends to be the consensus a few days after the event. However, whatever practical purpose the Summit may have served, it was a fascinating look into the style of the President, who ran the discussion.

Because the Washington media loves those like Bayh who position themselves as bipartisan or centrist (especially when it comes to the issue of the deficit), progressives derided his so-called “centrism” as mere political positioning that helped Republicans obstruct Democratic initiatives, and met his exit with a flurry of blog posts with titles like “Bye, Bayh” or “Bayh Low” (“Bayh” is pronounced “Bye” or “Buy” – thus explaining my overly complicated attempt at a joke in my blog title). Ezra Klein called him an “ordinary politician” and a “minor deficit hypocrite”. Jonathan Chait goes farther, and notes that “If Bayh’s loss is a “brain drain,” then the Senate is in even worse shape than I thought.”

I once had the chance, along with numerous other reporters and editors, to speak with Bayh in an off-the-record context. I’d say the group was quite favorably disposed toward him going into the discussion — here was a young, popular, telegenic moderate Democrat everybody could see on a presidential ticket soon. As far as I could tell, everybody came away thoroughly unimpressed. He said nothing especially disagreeable, it was just that he seemed so mediocre. He expressed himself entirely in terms of platitudes. Not a single interesting thought escaped his lips.

He had no better luck appealing to the other side. The allure of centrism is that it is at the edge between the left-most Republicans and the right-most Democrats, and thus the deals are made and the power is held in the center. Bayh (and Max Baucus, and most Senate Democrats, and even President Obama) have learned the hard way that there is no reason to be centrist if the other side – even at its left-most reaches – refuses to do anything but obstruct. But Bayh wasn’t close to right-wing enough for any Republicans on any key issues, as Ross Douthat says:

His big issue was supposed to be deficit reduction, but you wouldn’t catch him dead proposing anything remotely like Paul Ryan’s fiscal roadmap, with its detailed list of programs to be reshaped and reduced.  (Bayh preferred the “bravery” of punting the issue to a commission.) On foreign policy, he was a liberal hawk on every vote except the hard ones: He backed the Iraq invasion in 2003 and takes a hard line on Iran today, but in the debate over the surge, when being hawkish was suddenly costly, he sided with the doves. Wherever the Beltway conventional wisdom settled, there was Evan Bayh — and he was rewarded for it with endless presidential and vice-presidential chatter, which has followed him, absurdly, even now that he’s announced his retirement.

The incredible thing, however, is what Bayh has done since announcing his retirement.  A two-faced politician of average intelligence to the left and too far left for todays right, Bayh has grabbed the issue of Senate disfunction with both hands. He penned an op-ed for the New York Times on Feb. 20th that outlined his reasons for leaving the Senate, and decrying the “institutional inertia gripping Congress” and the fact that “Congress must be reformed”. Its a remarkably thoughtful document (I would urge everyone to read it through), and one that (in addition to Bayh’s media tour since announcing his retirement) has brought the issue of Senate reform and filibuster reform into the Washington Conventional Wisdom (yes, the CW does need to be capitalized). Bayh’s most important ideas are these:

Filibusters should require 35 senators to sign a public petition and make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. Those who obstruct the Senate should pay a price in public notoriety and physical exhaustion. That would lead to a significant decline in frivolous filibusters.

Filibusters should also be limited to no more than one for any piece of legislation. Currently, the decision to begin debate on a bill can be filibustered, followed by another filibuster on each amendment, followed by yet another filibuster before a final vote. This leads to multiple legislative delays and effectively grinds the Senate to a halt.

What’s more, the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.

It is not so surprising that many of those voices decrying Bayh’s legislative record and subsequent retirement are now singing his praises. Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein are the most prominent, with Klein bemoaning the fact that Bayh decided to make Senate reform an issue after he decided to leave the Senate instead of staying in the Senate to fight for those reforms. I’m not sure I agree. I believe the whole saga speaks to my personal view of the Senate, which is that those on the inside of the Senate are unable to see the dysfunctions that cripple the institution. Bayh is probably smarter than I gave him credit for before this weekend – I think his op-ed proves that – but something about being in the Senate, whether it was the constant campaign or the hunt for legislative power, hurt his ability to see the Senate as it really is. The moment he decided to leave the Senate he saw the dysfunction, and despite the jokes about his involvement in the dysfunction he insisted on using that as his reason for leaving. I don’t want you to stay in the Senate, Mr. Bayh. You’re much better off as a living, breathing example of why the Senate needs to reform itself.

As someone who constantly (compulsively?) checks Twitter, RSS, the Huffington Post iPhone App, or anything else that will give me news about the political happenings of the moment, I can easily see the draw of a program like Netvibes. Netvibes is an online portal (a sort of advanced RSS reader with widgets) that can combine all the information you have, sort it into categories, and even – with some nifty programming – filter out the unless crap that comes with inhabiting this wonderful invention we called the “Internets”.

For my Netvibes page, I created pages for all the topics that interest me, but obviously put much more effort into my Comm217 beat: politics and the Senate. Thus, my politics page is organized especially well. I combined the mainstays of any political RSS I will ever create (Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Spencer Ackerman, etc), added a few more that I found via Delicious, and then created RSS feeds for Twitter searches and Google News searches of “senate filibuster”. Add in the New York Times politics widget and I felt like I was good to go.

More Senate learning, here I come!

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists — it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with people with intractable demands — put ‘em on a committee.

Andrew Sullivan called this the “Long Game” – describing how Obama’s political opponents, from Hillary Clinton to John McCain to Congressional Republicans, play and are playing a short game of 24-hour news cycle victories while Obama slowly backs them into a corner to enact lasting, long-term victories. I have no doubt that if Scott Brown hadn’t won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat a few weeks ago, Obama would have signed health care reform legislation and we would be reading many articles with themes similar to Sullivan’s.

That style, however, is declared a failure with Brown’s victory giving Republicans 41 Senators, enough to sustain a filibuster and block that signature piece of legislation – Health Care Reform. But, that legislation is not dead, and President Obama does want to give it an extra shove of momentum. That momentum could come from the Feb. 25th health care Summit, where Obama, Democratic leaders, and Republican leaders will publicly discuss how to proceed on health care reform. As Jonathan Chait says:

Obama knows perfectly well that the Republicans have no serious proposals to address the main problems of the health care system and have no interest (or political room, given their crazy base) in handing him a victory of any substance. Obama is bringing them in to discuss health care so he can expose this reality.

The hope is that this summit will give Democrats enough political breathing room (read: spine) to force the House of Representatives to pass the Senate version of HCR and the Senate to fix some problems with their bill through reconciliation. If that happens, Obama will have his victory. As Sullivan would say, “meep, meep“.

The comparisons always come fast and hard. Since the popular music industry was first, it must always be the industry that all others are judged against when the Internet catches up with old business models. After popular music went down movies, TV shows, newspapers, and even bicycles followed soon after. Yes, even the bicycle industry is being hit hard, since local bike shops can only stock so many different kinds parts and EBay can stock an infinite number, cutting heavily into revenue for local bicycle shops. The common denominator in all of these situations is the Internet breaking old business models. Music and newspapers, for instance, have both come to find themselves in a place where the cost of producing content remains pretty high, but the cost of distribution and reproduction has gone to basically zero. Thus, money cannot be made in the distribution of music or newspapers in the quantity that it was made before by record companies and newspapers. But while there are similarities between the situations that these institutions find themselves in, there are major differences as well. Thus, the modest success those certain industries have had in tweaking their business models to fit this new Internet age cannot necessarily be transferred to another industry. There have, for example, been many words written about the need for newspapers to create their own iTunes, or their own Hulu, when many problems with these comparisons arise with some scrutiny. First, iTunes and Hulu are not exactly successes for their respective industries (both are successes for technology companies, however). Hulu may not survive without a paywall (which will eventually kill it), and iTunes has not come close to replacing the revenues that CDs used to bring in. Secondly, it is incredibly difficult to imagine exactly what a Hulu for newspapers would look like. There is no single model that the newspapers have rallied behind, but if (or when) it comes, it will not look like iTunes (unless the Apple iPad really is the savior of newspapers) or Hulu. It will look completely different, and the newspaper industry will wonder why it didn’t think of whatever that model is earlier.

The music industry is definitely the industry that has experienced decline for the longest, and has done the most to combat it. The business models are much different, though they are still based on the assumptions that got them into trouble in the first place. Consumer patterns changed with the technology, and the music industry has coped reasonably well. None of the major record companies have gone under, they have simply changed how they get their money. While digital music sales have risen, they have not been able fill the void left by drops in CD sales. In 2008, we discovered that “The latest recording industry statistics show digital music sales are rapidly increasing as a percentage of total industry sales, but not by enough to offset a dramatic fall in compact disc sales.”[1] So, digital sales have not been the reason that the music industry has coped with the Internet age, despite all the press that Apple gets for iTunes saving the music industry. No, instead, revenues from live music has actually increased substantially since recorded music revenues began to peak. Since 2006, recorded music revenue (from CDs, tapes, vinyl, and digital sales) has stayed stagnant at $12.6 billion (which is considered a drop adjusting for inflation), while live concert revenues have jumped from $7.3 billion to $9.1 billion in 2009.[2] And most importantly, the growth in live music revenue has happened in a way that is consistent with the social norms of the Internet age: the Top 100 tours have produced less revenue, but underneath the Top 100 there has been huge growth in smaller shows and in the festival market (lots of acts getting together to put on one big event). You can see the makings of a business model starting to take shape with these statistics: the money comes not from the sale of a single piece of music that can be copied a million times for free. Instead the money comes from live touring and merchandise like t-shirts. Thus, the recorded music becomes simply a marketing tool. Play a hit single on the radio not so the listener will like that song and buys the album, but so that the listener likes the song and attends a concert. The Internet is simply allowing the music industry to grow from the bottom up. There are more music choices, more ways to listen to them, and more ways for more artists to make more music available now than there ever has been. Thus the consumer has more of an ability to become attached to music that he or she will enjoy, and thus artists that aren’t backed by giant record companies have a better ability to make a living making music by recording on their own, giving away their recordings (or selling them through iTunes independently, which allows them to take a bigger percentage of each sale than if they had a record deal), and making money off ticket sales and merchandise. Thus more people listen to more kinds of music, go to more concerts, and spend more money – the industry does fine. The stories you hear about music’s slow death are from the record companies themselves, since they are the ones who will become irrelevant as this trend continues.

Unlike their partners in the newspaper industry, however, record companies have begun to change their ways somewhat. It may be too little, too late, but they have made enough moves into the live music arena that revenues can begin to trickle back in. The biggest moves, however, have come from live music promotion companies, such as LiveNation (which is a part of ClearChannel, a radio conglomerate). LiveNation has begun signing artists like Madonna to deals that replace and expand on what is traditionally a “record deal”. “This unique business model will address all of Madonna’s music ventures as a total entity for the first time in her career”[3]. The equivalent for the newspaper industry would be if a newspaper helped pay for journalists’ speaking tours but also took a cut of those engagements. This is something that one can’t really see with newspapers or journalists because journalists do not tend to become famous in the same way that musicians and entertainers do.

This is the first place where the music industry and the newspaper industry parallels diverge. The music industry’s failing are all in the inability to sell discreet creations (recordings), but unlike newspapers they have another product that they can sell in a different way: the artist/musician/entertainer. Newspapers do not really have this luxury. There is no backup plan after selling content. Unlike their media partners in TV – especially at Fox News – they don’t have personalities that they can sell. On TV the personalities, who these days are simply opinion personalities instead of straight news gatherers or reporters, get face time with an audience and usually can sell themselves in a way that newspaper writers (even opinion writers) can’t. They can’t at least in a way that allows their parent company to cash in on their personal image.

Thus, we come to the reason why newspapers cannot weather the Internet age storm the same way that music did – the only business model from the music industry’s experience that they can copy is the model that music now has for recorded music. In other words, the only option newspapers have (unless we completely rethink the idea of a newspaper or news organization) is the option that the music industry has shown doesn’t really work very well. Pay barriers for newspaper content has a very shaky track record, and those are only being considered because of lost ad revenue from both print and online newspaper ads. In the 1^st quarter of 2009, Internet advertising dropped across the board. “The biggest drop was in real-life newspaper ads with a 29.7 percent decline to $5.9 billion. Online newspapers ad sales also declined by 13.4 percent to just $696.3 million in the same period”[4]. So how can newspapers begin to make some of the money back?

There are a few answers to that question, and all of them have to work in conjunction with each other. First, no one disputes that newspapers were incredibly slow on the uptake when it came to taking advantage of the Internet, and thus still lag behind even many blogs when it comes to integration with new and emerging technologies like Twitter, social bookmarks, and the like. Newspapers have not taken a good hard look at what it means to be a newspaper in the 21^st century, and until they do publicly they will be seen as stuck in the glory days. Secondly, they need to start working together. Perhaps, as the argument of this paper goes, there is no clear correlation between the newspaper industry’s crisis now and the music industry’s crisis a few years ago, but perhaps there are better parallels when we look at the music industry of 50-60 years ago. Instead of looking at how the music industry has dealt with distribution problems, newspapers could look to how the music industry dealt with licensing and publishing issues. “Under the music industry model, a venue or media outlet that wants to use a songwriter’s work can purchase a yearly blanket license from the organizations that control the public performance rights to the compositions. The two largest organizations, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and Broadcast Music Incorporated, together represent the writers of millions of songs. ASCAP and BMI distribute the money to songwriters and music publishers based on a complicated formula designed to ensure that a major television network pays a higher fee than a bar in Texarkana”[5]. This model could absolutely work for articles in blogs the way that it works for the music industry and plays on the radio. This would make it cheaper for articles used in small blogs, but more expensive if a major newspaper quoted from a blog. The questions remain very big. Are there anti-trust implications? Since there is already a model with songwriters then an arrangement like this may hold muster in the courts. Should it be newspapers that band together or journalists themselves? After all, it was the songwriters, not record companies, who banded together to form ASCAP and BMI. If journalists banded together to form a similar situation then newspapers could still benefit – they have the famous names that will draw the best journalists who will get read the most, thus bringing in more money to the newspaper when those journalists’ articles get linked to or quoted in other websites. The technological and logistical hurdles would be immense, but so are all other options.

If one looks hard enough, parallels can be found between any media industry. Newspapers and the music industry are simply two of the simple parallels that people use. Pick two of music, the news, TV, and feature films, and contrast them with each other. There are lessons to be learned in every story, and some lessons can be applied to the situations facing other industries. But they are not analogous, and trying to save the newspaper industry by copying the music industry is basing your strategy on a failed premise. What is clear, however, is that the old way for all of these industries is over, and that new business models have to be in place. Some are farther along than others in the race to revamp themselves for the 21^st century. Time will only tell how far they get.

[1] Stein, Mark. Daily Brief. Porfolio.com. April 28^th, 2008.

[2] Grabstats.com, Music Industry Stats. Source: eMarketer

[3] “Madonna Joins Forces With LiveNation in Revolutionary Global Music Partnership”. PR Newswire. October 16, 2007.

[4] Parfeni, Lucian. “Internet Advertising Revenue Down in Q1 2009”. Softpedia News. June 5^th, 2009.

[5] Jones, Ashby. “Come Together! On Newspapers’ Big Antitrust Hurdle”. Wall Street Journal Law Blog. June 4, 2009. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/04/come-together-on-newspapers-big-antitrust-hurdle/

In an unrelated development, here’s an 800 word Dana Milbank article in The Washington Post about why is Peter Orszag sexy.

Meanwhile, here’s Jeff Frankel (presumably wearing pajamas) talking about Chilean economic policy and the political economy of counter-cyclical budgeting.

Thus, I have compiled a map of our local Senate and Congressional offices in a Google Maps Mashup:

View Offices of Members of the U.S. Congress, Bay Area Edition in a larger map

What the Senate is not allowed to do, however, is tell future senators what rules must apply to their proceedings. Because Reichelderfer prohibits a previous Congress from tying the hands of a future Congress, the rules governing Senate procedure in 2010 cannot bind a newly elected Senate in 2011. The old Senate rules essentially cease to exist until the new Senate ratifies them, so a determined bloc of 51 senators could eliminate the filibuster altogether by demanding a rules change at the beginning of a new session. Once the new Senate begins to operate under the old rules, however, this can function as a ratification of the old rules — essentially locking those rules in place for another two years.

Millhiser is basically arguing that two Supreme Court decisions, Newton v. Commissioners in 1879 and Reichelderfer v. Quinn in 1932, make it possible for each new Senate to eliminate the filibuster, since the new Senate (the next one beginning in January 2011) isn’t beholden to any Senate procedures from previous Senates.

Practically, from the Democrats’ point of view, I do how this helps anything. First of all, Millhiser does not mention the procedures with which each new Senate, after swearing in any new members, ratifies the new rules that the body functions under. If the Senate begins to proceed without changing anything, then that acts as a ratification, but how procedurally difficult is it for 51 Senators to push through a new set of rules when a functioning Senate (oh my goodness what an oxymoron) is all that it takes to not eliminate the filibuster?

Secondly, I can’t imagine the Democrats having the political will or ability to do something like this next January. They are almost certain to lose seats in November, and due to the specific seats that are up for grabs this year the seats the Dems are most likely to lose aren’t the most conservative Democrats (for a good roundup of next November, check out Nate Silver’s analysis. His most recent update is here). Thus, while there may be 51 or 50 Senators in this Congress willing to eliminate the filibuster, the median Senator next January is most likely going to be too far to the right to want to mess with Senate procedures in a way that would benefit the Democrats.

Finally, I can only imagine that this sort of uprising, if it took place, would need the approval and cooperation of Majority Leader Harry Reid, who I cannot imagine approving of something like this. It tends to be the longest tenured Senators who are the most likely to defend arcane Senate procedures like the filibuster, and I doubt Reid is any different.

Basically, liberals have been frustrated by uniform Republican opposition and the super-majority requirement since President Obama took office, and this is the first I have heard of this proposal. It is a very interesting idea, but I can’t imagine that it is anything more than a very intriguing shot in the dark.