If Democrats actually feel they have something akin to a hostage crisis, they shouldn’t be paying ransom–this only encourages more hostage-taking in the future, with demands for even bigger ransoms. The proper response to a hostage crisis is to disarm the hostage takers. This is, in effect, what Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-IA) push to end the current filibuster would do at the beginning of next year.

Next year, at the beginning of the next Congress, the Senate has the opportunity to change its rules by a majority vote. Tom Udall has been pushing this all year; he calls it “the Constitutional option.” Udall would ask for a ruling from the chair, probably Joe Biden, to make a ruling on the ability of the Senate to change the rules. If Republicans object, Democrats will move to table their objection, and they only need 51 votes to uphold it. After that, the Senate can rewrite the rules.

Some old-line Democrats have been wary of this approach, but you get the sense that they are completely fed up with how the Senate operates. So they have set a date – January 5 – to attempt to change the rules.

When health care reform was passed, we were told by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) it was only a “starter home” that would be improved later. We were also offered vague promises from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that we would get a vote on a public option in the months following the passage of the new law. Obviously this hasn’t happened.

But there is no reason why Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid couldn’t bring up the public option for an up or down vote next week.

Tomorrow afternoon, Congress will once again take up new legislative proposals to improve coal mine safety. After decades of repeated mining disasters, countless unnecessary deaths and injuries, and continual demands for remedial action, can Congress finally get mining safety legislation right? The outward signs are not encouraging.

This administration has been through one budget cycle. Mistakes like this are either unconscionable or deliberate. The $500 million for border security attached to a National Guard presence gets tossed in at the last minute, and a teacher funding bill which has been on the priority list for two weeks gets scuttled amidst mixed messages. Can’t anyone here play this game?

Yesterday’s results in the election showed what has now become conventional wisdom: an “anti-incumbent mood,” something the media will parrot from now to November. They can find the reason by looking no further than what they ignored during election coverage – last night’s debacle in the Senate on financial regulation reform.

On a conference call sponsored by Families USA and HCAN, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) urged Democrats to pass the reconciliation bill of fixes to the health care law without any amendments or additions, so it can go directly to the President for his signature. When challenged on the likelihood of that happening, given the probability of small points of order from Republicans knocking out pieces of the bill, Harkin dismissed that as speculative.

The public option was never just a “sliver” as Obama tried to claim. It was about a fundamental moral right and the role of government. But what it was also about was a huge amount of money.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) spent most of the year claiming he was a champion of the public option. Now that there is a possibility of getting a public option with a simple majority using reconciliation, Harkin has made clear that he will actively work to kill the public option, while tying himself in incoherent, illogical knots trying to justify his actions–while still trying to claim he supports the public option.

Tom Harkin said that negotiators had reached a deal on health care shortly before Scott Brown threw a wrench into it by winning that Senate election in Massachusetts. This is further than anyone has been willing to go before; we knew that a deal was reached between labor and the White House on the excise tax on high-end insurance plans, but we did not know that all elements of the deal was settled as well.