Finding God in a Dog

The big news is that Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), the current Senate Minority Leader, has announced that he will not run for re-election in 2016.

As usual, this comes with good, bad, and ugly sides.

THE GOOD, for Democrats anyway, is that the timing of the announcement couldn't be better. Nevada is a razor-edge purple state such that Reid would have lost his last election (in 2010) if not for his GOTV machine. 2016 is a much more favorable environment for Democrats, as long as Hillary Clinton runs and the usual groups (OFA, DFA, MoveOn, etc.) are firing on all cylinders. They also have a popular candidate in recently retired Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, whom Reid endorsed today.

THE BAD for Democrats is that this gives the GOP an opening to take this seat. Right now the GOP have a great candidate in the current Governor of Nevada, Brian Sandoval. He's enormously well-liked, and if he runs, even with all the advantages Cortez Masto has, it's going to be a toss-up. If he doesn't run, Cortez Masto is an easy favorite. So the GOP is going to work very hard to recruit him.

THE UGLY is that Reid has already endorsed his pick for the next Senate Majority Leader as of 2017, Chuck "I Love War and Gun Control" Schumer. Even without this endorsement, Schumer has seniority and is the most likely pick. Elizabeth Warren, the progressive favorite, has less than four years of seniority, so you can forget about her having a shot as Leader for a while. Those groans you hear are partisan Democrats being forced to bite the bullet and swallow yet another move by their party to the neoconservative center-right.

AP has called it: Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker is the new US Senator from the state of New Jersey.

He was an awesome mayor. Now let's see him be an awesome Senator.

Quoting Politico:

“I’ve had at least five senators call me and say, ‘Can’t we do something about this?’” Biden said. “The calculus has changed, and so we’re in an effort to try to work out how we can provide another opportunity for those who voted no to change their vote. We all know that’s the hardest thing in politics, to change your vote. That’s why we’ve got to get a rationale, another reason why this could be done by changing the specifics of the legislation.”

Biden hasn’t conveyed which senators he’s spoken with or how the background checks bill might be altered.

I have my doubts that Biden actually has 60 votes, or that the calculus has changed that much since the first bill failed. The only major change, other than the declining support for new gun control measures, is Michael Bloomberg's willingness to buy elections. So, who could he buy in order to get them to switch their vote?

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That said, all of this is idle speculation. Nobody is going to switch their vote to help pass a universal background check bill unless Bloomberg's money is an unqualified benefit for their re-election, and nobody on the list of "no" votes meets that criterion. The reason for this is simple: the vote in the Senate is purely symbolic. Whatever gun control measure passes the Senate is dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House, which is likely to stay in Republican hands until 2023.

In other words, it's actually pretty likely that Biden is just spinning tales to keep the base enthusiastic.