techpresident
GRITtv: Should We Do Away With the Senate?
With the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat, Democrats in DC seemed to give up on getting any major legislation passed. 59 votes (well, 58 and Joe Lieberman) was just not good enough. The blame has been flying -- it's Obama's fault, Rahm Emanuel's, Harry Reid's -- but what if the problem simply is the Senate? What can we change? Would eliminating the filibuster -- the so-called "nuclear option" back when Republicans were suggesting it -- be enough, or is the Senate, with its two-Senators-per-state-regardless-of-population mandate, just too fundamentally undemocratic? We ask the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, author of OBAMANOS!: The Rise of a New Political Era, Lawrence Lessig, Harvard professor and author of a new Nation cover story on the subject, and Nancy Scola of the Personal Democracy Forum.
Email this pageGRITtv: What Happened to the Grassroots Obama Movement?
The people who voted for him weren't organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests -- banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex -- sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting. So says Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum; Karoli of the blog Odd Time Signatures disagrees and says that with help from volunteers like her, Organizing for America is continuing to push for change. They join us in studio to debate the present and future of progressive organizing, both within the Democratic party apparatus and outside of it. We'll also be speaking to Geoff Berman, New York Deputy Field Director for OFA, about what's actually going on with his organization and what he thinks of the critiques.
