1. For the past two years, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell used the threat of filibuster based on the 49 votes in his caucus to great advantage. Those votes gave him considerable power to influence any and all legislation passing through Congress. But passage of President Barack Obama’s stimulus package late last week was a clear indication that the next two years will not be nearly as much fun for McConnell. Now, that Republicans occupy just 41 Senate seats, all it takes for Democrats to get the 60 votes they need to cut off a filibuster is to lure a few moderate Republicans over to their side on any given issue. It happened on the stimulus package, and it will happen again. As University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato told McClatchy’s Halimah Abdullah, “McConnell is in a terrible position. The Democrats have a hand full of aces. He has a bunch of twos.” That must be more painful to McConnell than having fellow Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning ignore the pressure to not seek re-election.
2. With Democrat Mike Reynolds’ defeat of Republican J. Michael Hughes in the 32nd District last week, Senate President David Williams is now tied 1-1 with Gov. Steve Beshear in seeing hand-picked candidates lose special state Senate elections. Maybe they both ought to let their respective party’s candidate selection process work without interference in the future.
3. Tuesday’s Save the Mountains rally, which drew about 800 opponents of mountaintop removal mining to the steps of the state Capitol, featured several creative signs such as “Hey King Coal Hold the Toxins I Take My Water Plain” and “470 Mountains Missing in Action.” My favorite, though, was “Topless Mountains Are Obscene.”
Noting that her Eastern Kentucky roots go back at least eight generations, featured speaker Ashley Judd told the crowd, “I’m very proud to be a hillbilly.” The activist actress also called the mountains “my spiritual home” and said it was the love of that home that “brings us to this place of power where we shall speak truth to power.”
Larry Dale Keeling, a columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader, has spent most of his 35-plus years in journalism reporting on or writing editorials and columns about Kentucky’s politics and political issues. He now brings his experience and expertise on those topics to the KyKurmudgeon blog.
You must have an ear to the ground re: #2 above.
How so?
ldk
“Maybe they both ought to let their respective party’s candidate selection process work without interference in the future.”