Memo to Senators Kennedy and Kerry: No Homeland Security chairmanship for Joementum [updated]
[UPDATE: You know, it occurs to me that they should wait until after the new Congress is sworn in to worry about this. There’s no urgency to do it now, and if they do strip Lieberman of his chairmanship and he bolts, there will be a tie in the Senate for the next six weeks, which is plenty of time for the Republicans to screw things up. Why not just wait ’til January?]
The big vote is on Tuesday.
Senate Democrats will decide by secret ballot Tuesday whether to take away Sen. Joe Lieberman’s chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee - a post from which he oversees U.S. security issues, as well as the operations of a wide segment of the federal government.
Two Senators — Leahy and Sanders of Vermont — have called for Lieberman to lose his chairmanship. Dorgan has come close. Beyond that, folks are understandably being pretty tight-lipped about it.
We’ve been over this before. It simply makes no sense to allow Lieberman, who is no longer a Democrat, and who actively campaigned against the Obama/Biden ticket, to the point of openly disparaging Obama’s patriotism, to continue in his position as chairman. Elections have consequences, and Joementum lost. If Lieberman’s remaining in the caucus really mattered, maybe I’d think differently — but it doesn’t, because the Dems will now have well over 51 solid votes to control the Senate. The filibuster stuff can wait (and, as I’ve said before, even if he stays in the caucus, that’s no guarantee of voting for cloture).
So hear this, Senators Kennedy and Kerry: no Homeland Security chairmanship for Joe Lieberman.