Judas got 30 pieces of silver. Benedict Arnold got a pension of £360.
Arlen Specter gets bupkis. His seniority is gone.
Now it appears that Harry Reid was unable to keep his promise to award Specter his seniority. According to CNN, a resolution today prevented Specter from retaining his seniority. This is a double blow for Specter. First, he can no longer argue to Pennsylvanians that his seniority is a benefit to the state. This makes problem one and two above harder to overcome, as he loses one of the major arguments for his candidacy. Second, Specter does not strike me as a man with a small ego, yet he has dropped from being the twelfth most senior senator to coming in right below Kirsten Gillibrand, who was in diapers when Specter was starting his political career. I would imagine that isn’t easy to take. To make matters worse, there isn’t much he can do about it; what can he do, switch parties back?
More from Memeorandum. Arlen’s fall:
Arlen Specter infuriated Senate Republicans when he bolted from their party last week. Now he’s alienated just about everybody in the Senate Democratic caucus, too.
Since declaring himself a Democrat last Tuesday, Specter has defied Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the White House on virtually everything that’s come down the pike: the budget, mortgage reform, the Al Franken-Norm Coleman race, even President Barack Obama’s appointment of Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
All while quibbling over whether he said he’d be a “loyal Democrat” – and insisting that he had an “entitlement” to transfer his Senate seniority from one side of the aisle to the other.
The blowback came Tuesday night: On a voice vote, the Senate voted to strip Specter of his 29 years of seniority, effectively transforming him in a blink-and-you-missed-it-moment from one of the most senior senators in the body to a lowly freshman on most committees.
“There were concerns about his actions,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), chairwoman of the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, which sets committee assignments.
Specter is not a loyal Democrat anymore than he was a loyal Republican. Specter’s only loyalty is to himself. Four fingers straight up of self interest.
That his self-centered move backfired so spectacularly in such a short time speaks volumes about his ability to calculate what, exactly, is in his best interest.
Republican or Democrat, my money is on Pennsylvania having a new Senator in 2010.
When Specter made the shift to the Democrat Party a lot of talking heads on TV (including, I am sorry to say, Scott Rasmussen, the respected pollster) crowned him a shoo-in next November.
But I never believed that. While I admit that Specter still has the edge in the Democrat primary, I also think that he is far more vulnerable to a challenge from the Left than most people realize. In any Democrat primary fight between a Stalin wannabe like Specter and a MoveOn DailyKos Vast-Right-Wing-Conspiracy Stalinist-all-my-life Democrat, the latter usually wins.
The irony of all of this is that Specter has no place left to go. Become an independent? Too late! Going from Republican to Democrat to independent works only if you wait years between each move. Specter has no choice but to play along with his Democrat overlords, who have already treated him far worse that the GOP ever did.
As I said in another forum, no one trusts a traitor. If he can turn his coat once, he can turn it again just as fast. What I found interesting was the revelation that before he made his announcement, he apparently went straight to the top and talked with Harry Reid about the conditions under which he would turn traitor (rather like Arnold negotiating with the British) and was promised by Reid that he would keep his seniority and all of his committee assignments. Then, once he was firmly commited, wonder of wonders, Reid, typical Democrat that he is, flip-flopped and Arlen is out on his ear. The wages of betrayal are bitter, aren’t they, Arlen?
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy…
I fully expect that between now and the primary – maybe two months before it – Sen. Specter will announce he is withdrawing from the race for unspecified “health reasons”. His ego can’t handle the possibility of defeat and he’ll want to go out a “winner”.
As of late yesterday morning, the Democrats in the Senate flip-flopped again and allowed Specter to take over the Chairmanship of the Crime and Drugs subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee which automatically retains his seat on the full Judiciary Committee. The Crime and Drugs panel is Judiciary’s busiest subcommittee, responsible for oversight of the Justice Department, federal prosecutors, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and drug control policy. This is actually a plum assignment. I guess Harry Reid and his fellow Dems finally figured out that reneging on their original promise to Specter to allow him to keep his seniority made them look like a rather nasty bunch. And, since they are all about appearance, they had to do something to improve theirs.