The Job, It Is Harder Than It Looks

Jon Chait's smackdown of Rachel Maddow's "here's the Oval Office speech I would have given" is not only appropriate, but delivered with the necessary force to knock Rachel off the Firebagger train.  Hopefully.

In reality, you can't pass any of the climate bill by reconciliation. Democrats didn't write reconciliation instructions permitting them to do so, and very little of its could be passed through reconciliation, which only allows budgetary decisions. Maddow's response is to pass the rest by executive order. But you can't change those laws through executive order, either. That's not how our system of government works, nor is it how our system should work.

If Maddow's speech had to hew to the reality of Senate rules and the Constitution, she'd be left where Obama is: ineffectually pleading to get whatever she can get out of a Senate that has nowhere near enough votes to pass even a stripped-down cap and trade bill. It may be nice to imagine that all political difficulties could be swept away by a president who just spoke with enough force and determination. It's a recurrent liberal fantasy —Michael Moore imagined such a speech a few months ago, Michael Douglas delivers such a speech in "The American President." I would love to eliminate the filibuster and create more accountable parties. But even if that happens, there will be a legislative branch that has a strong say in what passes or doesn't pass. And that's good! We wouldn't want to live in a world where a president can remake vast swaths of policy merely be decreeing it.

The reality is that Obama is constrained by checks and balances, especially when it comes to money.  He's constrained even more by the ego of 535 members of Congress.  but Rachel did make a good point in her speech:

All the might of this, the mightiest nation on earth, and the combined expertise of the richest, most technologically ambitious corporations the world has ever seen, cannot, it turns out, cap an oil well when it breaks five thousand feet-deep in the ocean. It is something that mankind does not yet have the technological capability to fix.

Then why firebag on the President over this?  My goodness.  I never thought I'd have to put Rachel Maddow in a Useful Idiots and Village Stupidity post, but there you are.  Chait's lesson is important:  The President has rules to follow, folks.  Dr. Rachel Maddow -- Rhodes scholar, mind you -- should be smart enough to know this.

He can't magically fix the damn problem.  He can't magically force BP to do it either.  He can try to lead on getting climate legislation passed, but it abundantly clear he doesn't have the votes.  He can't magically make the Senate vote for what he wants to do, nor should he.

Folks, we're in a long term disaster situation here.  Wishful thinking will not solve this issue any more than Obama bashing or even GOP bashing.  At this point we need answers on how to cope, how to survive this, and how to put it all back together, and in the long run we need to assure this never happens again.  yes, I've said time and time again we need to use less oil...but that was true before the spill, just like it's true I've got to drive my Hyundai to work every weekday.

There are no easy answers, and in out quick fix instant gratification society, that's a problem.  Time to learn some new skills, folks.