Scoring Lieberman

Ezra Klein thinks Democrats made the right calculation:

Here's what you need to say about Lieberman: His heterodoxies have remained contained. Unlike John McCain, who conveyed his post-2000 disgust with the Republican Party by sponsoring a lot of liberal legislation on essentially random issues, Lieberman's fight with the Democrats has not strayed from foreign policy. For instance: His 2007 AFL-CIO voting record was 84 percent. That's exactly the same as his lifetime AFL-CIO voting record. In the most recent Congress, his score from the League of Conservation was 96 percent (which is actually a recent career high). Lieberman is, arguably, an extremely reliable Democratic vote. The exception, of course, is foreign policy, where he's an extremely reliable Republican vote.

But he's not really needed on foreign policy votes. The president has broad autonomy on strategic questions. The recent votes to force Bush to withdraw from Iraq were Congress trying to impose its will on the executive. Obama can withdraw almost without congressional involvement, unless they decide to muster 60 votes to stop him, which is not going to happen. So Lieberman's heterodoxies are now almost irrelevant from a legislative perspective.

That said, the operational effect of stripping Lieberman would have been that he becomes a Republican, and caucuses with them. It would have meant his incentives shift to curry favor with Republican voters. It would have, in other words, made him a fairly unreliable Democratic vote on domestic issues. The question became, then, does the satisfaction of retribution outweigh the value of one more vote in an extremely close Senate? It's hard to say that it does. And now, of course, Lieberman owes his safety to Obama, and is certainly aware that there's a healthy constituency that would love to strip him of his seat, or his chairmanship. So he'll presumably go out of his way to be helpful. That's not to say it's a satisfying outcome to see him escape all consequences for his actions in recent years. But this isn't about satisfaction. It's about votes.

Let's be careful here. Remember, Lieberman doesn't just vote Republican on foreign policy issues. He votes Republican on the entire panoply of national security issues. Not just on Iraq withdrawal (admittedly less of an issue now) or whatever symbolic anti-Iran vote is on the agenda, but on torture and wiretapping and so on and so on. In the 110th Congress, his voting record earned him an ACLU score of 36 percent--well off from his still-uninspiring lifetime score of 57 percent. That'll be a problem if, say, the Democrats want to re-amend FISA to bring it into line with the Bill of Rights (a boy can dream) or if he chooses to use his committee to obstruct Obama's attempts to dismantle Guantanamo.

And on that point, it's also important to recall that Democrats can't just revoke Lieberman's Homeland Security chairmanship as easily as they decided to let him keep it. So why would he atone? Lieberman has crossed the line and betrayed his old party over and over again and--either by luck or guile or a combination of the two--he has always gotten away with it. He just got away with it again. Why shouldn't he keep doing it? If endorsing a Republican presidential candidate, campaigning with him, speaking at his convention, and smearing the Democrats' choice didn't get him into any real trouble, what on Earth possibly would?

So there's potentially a real price to pay for not reprimanding him. Was that price worth it? Well, I suppose that depends on what you get (or think you get) when you multiply the importance of a single vote in the Senate by the likelihood that Lieberman would have gone rogue on domestic issues across the board. We'll never know the answer for sure, but, to my eye, the risks involved in cutting him loose were low, and the Democrats blew it.