The question is, while the grandstanding gets folk hot under the collar, what nasty little bills the GOP Congressional Leadership will try to sneak by?

For example, one might wonder at the odd conjunction of the Schiavo Circus with cloture on the odious bankruptcy bill.

Or the start of the Bolton confirmation hearings with the vote in the House on passage of the Lochner-era estate tax repeal bill.

The media are notoriously prone to exhibit a pack mentality. And blogs suffer from a similar problem. (The lefty fixation with a gnat's fart like Jeff Gannon, for instance.)

This session, when supposedly Bush has flopped legislatively, we've seen a steady stream of corporate welfare bills appear on his desk for signature. Several of them passed only with the support of Dem members. He's crying all the way to the bank!

It's my impression that the left of the 'sphere tend not to be terribly keen on the hard work of burrowing into THOMAS, and much prefers to mock the slapstick of Gannon and fellow buffoon Robertson, or enjoy high dudgeon over Robert's twenty year old monkey shines.

Under cover of the Roberts hearings, one might expect a move on the 'death tax' bill in the Senate. It seems that the GOP is only two votes shy of making cloture.

There is even a suggestion that a social security privatization bill will be tried.

There should surely be no chance of finding five Dems on such a party-line issue. But a sustained Roberts Circus sucking the attention of MSM and bloggers of all stripes might just do it. (Given also that the GOP already has three for its Liberty League tax bill!)

It seems to my that the answer is clear: a pledge to enact universal health. Every other G7 country has it; most have had it for fifty years. Bringing the US into the 20th century on an issue so critical to the middle- and (particularly) working class (supposedly the constituency of the Democratic Party - MBNA might be happy to disagree!) would be worth two presidential terms of inertia on other issues.

Malcolm Gladwell's piece in the current New Yorker blames the economists: apparently, the dominant strand of thinking in the US is that health insurance is bad. It creates a moral hazard whereby health care is consumed in excess of that actually required.

And social insurance - unrestrained by the iron rule of actuarial statistics - is worst of all.

The piece offers a delicious piece of casuistry from the Are there no prisons? school:

The most expensive - and most futile - interventions - tend to take place in the final months of the patient's life. And where the patient's health has been ruined by failure to seek treatment earlier (when liable to be much cheaper and effective) because of fear of medical bills...

The puzzle is - how to do it? There's the Harry and Louise factor - no doubt the medical and insurance lobbies would raise big bucks from the fat-cats on the back of such a proposal.

Perhaps the bigger problem might be that Congressional Dems and potential Dem presidential candidates think the current system, with a bit of tinkering, does just fine.

(None of the 04 Dem presidential hopefuls proposed universal health care, as I recall.

And can one forget that the Medicare bill - that stockyard full of pork for Big Pharma - only passed because of the support of Democrats?)

If Dem pols can get (re-)elected without taking on the Harry and Louise alliance, it would not be human for them to take the risk.

Now that's what I call a moral hazard!

Other churches, it seems, have made a start in the same direction, though without having gone so far.

Since these churches are democratic, rather than feudal, the change in course comes only because of popular support - the Presbyterians voted for divestment in principle last year in their General Assembly.

Contrast the performance of leading Democrats from various wings of the party at the AIPAC shindig a couple of months ago. The uniformly craven cringing of the likes of Clinton and Pelosi, avoiding the slightest deviance from the party line (the Likud Party, that is), showed the very opposite of leadership.

But it will, no doubt, be the percentage play for pols for a long time to come, given the entrenched nature of popular support for Israel against the Palestinians.

The Presbyterians give a glimmer of hope, though, that a more balanced policy may eventually be possible.

Seems that Ted Stevens has developed himself an old-style machine based on front companies contracting with the Federal government which benefit from privileges accorded to Alaskan natives.

Only - surprise, surprise! - Alaskan natives aren't the ones that score the big bucks.

One of these companies

The parallels with the Indian gaming racket are clear: megabucks for a few, zippo for most Indians in gaming tribes (and all in non-gaming tribes) and plenty of moolah for pols and K Street.

Have the Dems in Congress been protesting this Alaskan rip-off? The piece doesn't say so. It does say that Inouye has got a similar racket worked out for his Hawaiians, and that the (generally Dem-voting) tribes in the contiguous states, from opposing the Alaskan chicanery, now want some for themselves.

We've seen the bipartisan Corporate Welfare Coalition come through with the tort 'reform' bill, the bankruptcy bill, the energy bill, the highway bill: I'm pretty damned sure they'll see no evil in extending this little boondoggle!

(One word from Harry and he does as he likes...)

The horse has clearly bolted: 37 states have general concealed weapon statutes, Gun is Good. And - bonus! - it stiffs the trial lawyers. Case closed.

The conference report would have failed to pass had it not been for 75 obliging Dems.

Fully 31 GOP 'braves' could be let off the reservation as a result.

I get it! It's all a Dem leadership cunning plan to let the air out of DeLay's whipping system. Lull the GOP into a false sense of security, saving his ass on every crucial vote like that.

Then, when they're least expecting it, the Dems will unite to make their move.

Poor Tom won't know what hit him - with all that Dem unity and all...

But surely we should be asking, about each of them, why they voted with the GOP? Because, though there is overlap, the personnel differ from bill to bill - tort 'reform', estate tax, bankruptcy, etc.

On CAFTA, one might consider ideology and constitutency.

Ideologically, based on the Fab Fifteen's DW-NOMINATE scores for the 108th Congress (Bean and Cuellar weren't members then), it's a mixed bag: Towns and Meeks (both NY) are the most liberal of the bunch (48th and 69th respectively). The rest range from 117th to 202nd most liberal.

Clearly, they skew to the conservative end of the Democratic spectrum: but most of their fellow moderates did not bolt.

Constituency interests are more difficult to get data on. But then, as Sirota points out, most of the renegades are pretty much unbeatable. (An exception, Bean (IL-8), is one those threatened by name in a letter to Pelosi from leading unions. She relied a good deal on union funding in 04. Oh dear.)

I'm not clear that how widely, and how far in advance, the identity of likely CAFTA renegades was known.

What's the next bill coming down the pike in the House? HR 1295, the latest loan shark bill? HR 3035, the latest speed-up-the-death-penalty-conveyor-belt bill?

Ten to one, Central Casting will send a different bunch of Tom's Little Helpers over from the Dem side of the aisle for each of them.

Unless someone is doing the whip counts early and making them known, it's hard to see how any leverage can be brought to bear by mere voters. (That leverage will no doubt be slight: but I'm not sure that the threat of a having an opponent run against them in the primary is, in most cases, liable to be more credible. There are dozens of offenders, after all...)

Quick question: how close was the CAFTA vote really? How many of those GOP renegades were on catch and release? Not that I'm excusing the Fifteen, of course...

What these legislators have in common, unfortunately, is that none of them can do anything about it!

Sen Rockefeller, on the other hand, can do plenty.

As Vice-Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he is empowered to order official SIC investigations to be made with only the support of his fellow Dems on the committee. He doesn't need GOP to act.

Back in 2003, when Roberts was dragging his feet about issuing any sort of report on Iraq intel, that's exactly what SIC Dems discussed.

A partial report was issued; but the more embarrassing stuff - the Administration use of intel - was kept back for after the election. Which was nine months ago.

If Dems in Congress really wanted to something about the DSM, they would fire up Rockefeller to get an official SIC investigation started pronto. (For which hearings would not be in the basement!)

My guess? The Dem leadership in both Houses aren't interested in going beyond futile protest on the matter for fear of appearing confrontational or oppositional. My impression is that, given the choice, they generally prefer to be statesmanlike and ineffective!