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VP Biden: Beau doesn't want to run

By HARRY F. THEMAL • The News Journal • January 24, 2010

In January 2009, when Joe Biden said goodbye to the Senate where he had served for 36 years, he told his colleagues, "I will always be a Senate man. Except for the title of 'father,' there is no title, including 'vice president,' that I am more proud to wear than that of United States senator."

Now, one year later, he is dismayed by what has happened to the Senate, and he is trying to convince a reluctant son to run for his former seat.

In a wide-ranging interview last week about his first year as vice president, Biden said a "lamentable atmosphere" exists in the Senate, a view he says is shared by some of his long-time Republican friends. Sixty votes are needed to pass almost anything to forestall a filibuster, because the Republicans are unanimously saying no. How did a deliberative constitutional body lose the basic principle that a majority -- in the Senate's case, 51 votes -- doesn't count?

"I have never seen one party [standing] the rules on their head like this," Biden says. "I can't think of a time when every single vote, from an NLRB nomination to health care, required 60 votes. No democracy can long be sustained where you can only rule by supermajority."

So Biden has constitutional scholars researching whether and how such a stalemate can be broken. As vice president, he presides over the Senate he so loves and where he can cast the tie-breaking vote. "I never thought we would get a genuine bipartisanship on health reform, but I also didn't think people would vote against funding our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by directly voting against the defense appropriation bill."

Calling that Senate stalemate the greatest disappointment of his first 12 months as the nation's second-highest elected official, Biden said his two greatest surprises have been "institutional constraints" and how he has become an "impact player." The constraints he most chafes against are the security arrangements required by his office, when "I got to have 28 Secret Service agents when I take off," and when he cannot easily invite or circulate with the Delawareans who have long been his friends.

More . . .

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Call it the Scott Brown effect...

Woot woot!!