Right/Left Coalition Forming Against Blank Check Government?

I was on Top Line with Rick Klein and David Chalian yesterday, who expressed a lot of interest in the ad hoc left/right online effort to stop the $108 billion bailout of European banks from going through yesterday.

Couple of things worth noting: People are saying five Republicans crossed over, but that’s a deceptive figure. It was a 15 minute vote and Democratic leadership had to hold it open for 10 more minutes to get to 218 (something, I recall, they went apeshit about when the GOP used to do it).

No Republican had voted "aye" at the end of the 15 minute voting period, and it wasn’t until the Democrats put it over the top themselves at 218 that five Republicans switched their votes for optics sake — even McHugh, Obama’s appointment to Secretary of the Navy, switched to "yea."

So, Cantor held his votes.

There are 89 Democrats still in Congress who pledged in 2007 to de-fund the war as a means of ending it. Had 60 of them not gone back on their word, the bill would have failed. Far from stopping it, they are the sole reason it continues. It’s a Democratic antiwar war now.

But everyone knew that was going to happen from the start, so no headlines there. What is news are the new coalitions coming together to put the brakes on unchecked spending. We already saw it emerging with our campaign to whip cosponsors to H.R. 1207, which now has 234 cosponsors — well over the 218 majority needed to pass. They range from Lynn Woolsey and Jackie Speier on the left, to Michelle Bachman and Dana Rohrbacher on the right.

This is happening just as the administration is moving to give the Fed even more unchecked power. How does the administration plan to force that through Congress when 234 members have publicly said the Fed needs to be reined in?

KagroX wrote a compelling post in the middle of the supplemental battle that didn’t get the attention it deserved, entitled "Are we getting a glimpse of the future of netroots activism?"

Effective online activism is going to mean stepping out of the preexisting mold that serves to reinforce traditional power structures, and approaching politics from a new direction. I think we’re already starting to see that happen.