Legal Commentary

Call Your Senator about Lieberman (UPDATED)

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Help remind your Democratic Senator that Lieberman should go (or at least pay a very serious price) for his election-season behavior.

Clicking above will take you to a tool that will ask you for your phone number. When you submit, it calls you, plays a recording with suggestions as to you how to frame your conversation, then connects you with your senator’s office. No actual phone dialing is required.

UPDATE: Not sure if this is worth the trouble in light of this news from the HuffPo: Obama Wants Lieberman To Remain In Democratic Caucus.

There is some daylight between “remain in caucus” and “remain unpunished” so I suppose it’s not yet an unmitigated disaster, but it will soon be.

I think this shows two things. First, that Obama will tack heavily to the right on many, most issues outside those few liberal issues he directly campaigned on. Rahm Emanuel may be only the beginning.

Second, I think it shows that the Obama people haven’t learned as much from the Clinton admin as they should — or are the Clinton admin!

Recall that President Clinton’s first controversy was over ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. He’d said he was going to do something to increase gay rights in the military. Senior brass objected. Clinton backed down. The lesson learned by the Hill was that Clinton had no backbone as he could be buffaloed even by people who had to salute him. And the costs were soon seen as Clinton’s health care and other parts of his legislative package plan went down in flames (although there were substantive reasons for the health care plan to run into trouble, the political reality was that Clinton looked weak).

There’s a similar danger to Obama if the lesson learned from the Lieberman episode on the Hill is that there’s no cost to trashing Obama.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on November 10, 2008 (boomark / email).