I don’t know if anything’s going to get done in Congress in 2012, but one thing is becoming clear – Senate Democrats will try to put Republicans up against the wall on taxes. They already have on the record multiple instances of Republicans voting almost in unison against millionaire’s surtaxes. Now we’ll see votes on fossil fuel subsidies and that alternative minimum corporate tax the President mentioned in the State of the Union and other tax fairness issues.

The National Organization for Women accused AARP of implicit corruption in their statement, recalling the 2003 prescription drug benefit battle. NOW brings up Medicare Advantage, the privatization scheme that ultimately passed as part of that bill.

Make no mistake, not only did Sen. Wyden get this colloquy into the Senate record, but there appear to have been several threats hiding behind the Senate blather. DiFi has said she thinks the way to fix a secret law is to change it in a secret committee meeting. But Wyden et al have made it clear that if she doesn’t agree to fix it in her secret committee meeting, he will try to do so on the Senate floor.

I’ve been reviewing the docket on Thomas Drake’s case to see whether it touches on the privacy concerns Drake had about NSA’s post-9/11 activities.

It appears it doesn’t. . . .

The other day, when Sheldon Whitehouse asked Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar why BP had gotten an exemption from the full-blown NEPA process from which it presumably should have been categorically excluded, Salazar referenced a 30-day deadline from Congress to approve exploration plans. Senator, there has been significant environmental review, including Environmental Impact Statements that [...]

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse corners the Department of Interior yesterday as to why British Petroleum had been exempted from doing an Environmental Impact Study on the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig at leasehold Mississippi Canyon 252. Although the DOI was a little defensive, it’s clear BP really gave environmental concerns little more than a passing thought.

Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee today urged Attorney General Eric Holder to stick to his initial determination that the alleged 9/11 plotters should be tried in civilian court, and not bow to partisan politics on what should be a legal determination.

Bernanke’s “ideas” are all over the 2008 collapse of our economy—and his uncaring hand on the rudder has helped steer us into this “jobless recovery” (a term I am embarrassed by every time I use it). The American people know it, some senators know it, and the Obama Administration is foolish to pretend that they don’t know it.

The filibuster is finally getting a reputation as the progenitor of Senate dysfunction, in a way we hadn’t seen before. Republicans in the minority have used the filibuster more and more since 2007, but this year, with a Democrat in the White House and no backstop of a Presidential veto, the number has just skyrocketed

This is the final entry in a four-part series covering Rhode Island’s Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s keynote address at the recent Brennan Center for Justice’s Second Annual “Living Constitution” event.