Here I thought my anger had dissipated over the weekend, turning into a mild melancholy that just left me wanting to hit the road, see the family, and generally enjoy the holidays and try to forget about the farm bill a while. But no. The good old anger is back, with a vengeance.

An interesting little story today in the Washington Post alerted me to the existence of a planned filibuster by Chris Dodd of the upcoming FISA bill:

Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), back from the presidential trail in Iowa, is expected to take the floor at some point today or tomorrow and launch an old school, Mr. Smith-style filibuster of the bill if his amendment to strip the immunity grant from the bill fails. But his effort is not likely to succeed - rules do not allow him to sit down, he is only allowed to yield to a colleague for a question and he cannot take restroom breaks - as his staff have acknowledged he will speak for "as long as he can."

So that's the way it is. Now, you may recall last week several organizations roundly denounced the political manueverings that required the Dorgan-Grassley payment limits amendment to get 60 votes to pass. And you may recall that those manueverings started off with Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) threatening to filibuster the entire bill if the amendment passed.

And Senate leadership caved to that threat. They engineered the 60 vote rule. And you know what? They didn't have to. They could have passed Dorgan-Grassley with 56 votes and forced Lincoln to filibuster the whole bill. And then you would have to invoke cloture to end that filibuster. And I guarantee you would have gotten the 60 votes needed for cloture, and you could have moved on and passed the farm bill. Which is what ended up happening anyway, just without Dorgan-Grassley as part of the bill (that cloture vote, by the way, was 78-12).

But no. Senator Dodd is required to get up and hold a real filibuster. But not Blanche baby. No way. She just mentions the word filibuster and she gets what she wants. This is nothing but pitiful caving in to big corporate interests, on both counts. And I'm angry all over again. Absolutely incredible.