Guns, Geysers and Mr. Reid

By GAIL COLLINS, NY Times

Whenever life feels dark and difficult, it’s always helpful to think about people who have it worse. Be thankful, for instance, that you’re not one of those co-pilots for regional airlines who make $16,000 a year and have to commute from Seattle to Newark. Or a person currently riding in a plane with a $16,000 co-pilot in the cockpit. Be thankful you aren’t a Chrysler dealer. Or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Nothing is simple if you’re Harry Reid. This week the Senate was working on a consumer rights bill for credit card holders when Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, suddenly proposed an amendment to allow people to carry loaded guns in national parks.

This would seem relevant only if consumers are worried that they will not be able to use their American Express at a souvenir stand in Yellowstone, and will need to hold up the cashier in order to bring home a much-anticipated geyser refrigerator magnet.

Coburn said it was not a “gotcha” aimed at forcing the opposition into a corner on a hot-button issue, although when you say you’re offering an amendment “to protect innocent Americans from violent crime in national parks and refuges” I think you are kind of stacking the deck.

But one way or another, the Democrats clearly did feel trapped into placating the gun lobby. Twenty-seven of them wound up voting yes on an amendment that would arm the tourists and make final passage of the credit card bill more complicated. Including Reid.

Then Reid tried to get the Senate to confirm David Hayes, Obama’s nominee to be deputy secretary of the interior. This proved to be impossible even though Hayes was both uncontroversial and a man whose qualifications for the job include having already been deputy secretary of the interior. But no, the Republicans threatened a filibuster because Senator Robert Bennett of Utah was ticked off at the Department of the Interior for canceling the sale of oil and gas leases on public lands in his state.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar told Bennett that he’d review the leases and could probably reinstate some of the sales, but that it would be a lot easier to do all that if he had, um, a deputy. No deal.

This is exactly the sort of procedural roadblock that you need 60 votes to overcome, and people are beginning to ask why the majority leader can’t handle these things since Arlen Specter’s defection gave the Democrats 60 votes. Do not say this to Harry Reid! For one thing, Al Franken is still in court in Minnesota, and when you ask the Republicans how long they’re going to litigate the results of an election that took place last November, they murmur vaguely about how Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Anyhow, Ted Kennedy is sick and Robert Byrd is 91 and it’s a miracle some of the other ones can find their way to the Capitol. Even if you eventually get all 60 Democratic votes in the same room, how do you get them to do the same thing? You will remember that when Specter came over, Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska instantly said: “They might have a 60-member majority. That doesn’t mean they have 60 votes.” Reid must have found the point Nelson was making less chilling than the fact that the senator kept referring to his own party as “they.”

Next week, some supporters of Dawn Johnsen are hoping that Reid will take up Johnsen’s nomination to run the Office of Legal Counsel, the place where the president goes for advice on whether whatever he wants to do is legal. This causes the majority leader’s office to hold its collective head and moan.

Johnsen actually is controversial. She was once a lawyer for the National Abortion Rights Action League. Twenty years ago, she put a footnote in a legal brief saying that forcing a woman to give birth to a child against her will was “disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude.” This has been creatively translated into the charge that Johnsen, the mother of two, believes pregnancy is akin to slavery.

Also, she has spoken out so forcefully against the Bush administration’s politicizing the Office of Legal Counsel that Republicans are claiming she’d ... politicize the office.

The inevitable filibuster threats have been made. Since the Office of Legal Counsel doesn’t actually have anything to do with abortion, it might be reasonable for Reid to expect that anti-choice Democratic senators could throw him a vote on the procedural issues and then oppose the actual nomination, when Johnsen would only need 51 votes and Reid would not require their help.

That, however, would presume a degree of consistency that is hard to get in a place that holds one important aspect of credit card reform is giving people the ability to pack a handgun at the Grand Canyon.