Sigh.

Sigh.

Pro-immigrant advocates are pushing back against the Gang of Eight’s strategy to win 70 votes or more for comprehensive immigration reform, fearing it would require too many concessions to Republicans. Liberal advocates of comprehensive immigration reform argue the bill only needs 60 votes to clear the Senate and that additional concessions to pad the vote total are not necessary.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other members of the gang are pushing for 70 votes to give it maximum political momentum out of the upper chamber. But the cost of winning 15 to 17 Republican votes could prove steep.

I like how the "liberal" position is now that passing something in the damn Senate should require "only" 60 votes, those hippies, and the moderate position is now, screw it, something that controversial is gonna have to have a full 70 votes if it wants momentum and legitimacy and the magic Senate rainbows that shoot out in all directions and temporarily blind Sen. Inhofe so that the rest of the legislative body can scurry past. The "conservative" position, of course, remains as it has been, these last years: Everything requires eleventy billion percent of the votes, all the time, and each individual senator should be given a shiny red button that, when pressed, lights any given bill on fire and dispatches a team of dogs to pee on the remains. They call it the Fidobuster, and that team of dogs is one of the few new expenditures Republicans are willing to make.I sympathize with the notion that whatever the Senate comes up with is somehow going to survive the anarchists and arsonists and flying monkeys of the House, I really do, but this constant push from every other part of elected government to self-negotiate first in an attempt to compromise with the whackjobs has never seemed to produce the desired results. Let's say the Senate can pass something with 70 votes instead of 60; does that really translate into more effective legislation on the House side of things? Why is that the new magic number—and is the premise that House Republicans will somehow be so intimidated by a dozen or so Republican senators signing up for the plan that they'll say "oh, well I guess now we have to think about this seriously?" No. They'll just ask for yet another thing, like always, or threaten to kill the deal. They're working on their own plan. Their own plan is to slow walk some do-nothing stuff through a few committees, gripe about the hopelessly liberal Senate Republicans and their stupid attempts to appeal to the Brown Folks, and call it done.

The House is a bunch of crackpots. They really are, and there's nothing anyone but the voters themselves can do about it. The Senate is already almost entirely dysfunctional, thanks to the blocking of every single substantive bill or presidential nomination in some ridiculous act of sadism that everybody pretends is "comity"—if you manage to somehow fetch a full 60 votes for something in the current Senate, you're already considered so damn bipartisan that the clerks all throw in $10 for the eventual bronze statue in your honor. So I'm skeptical of the notion that tying the Senate into further knots will do a damn thing to get something substantive passed the House; it seems to be based on the notion that the lower asylum gives a damn about what the upper asylum thinks or does, and the House has been very, very forthcoming about declaring the opposite.

