How Democrats Should Play Going Forward

Here's what I see as the medium-term Democratic strategy for making the world suck less than it might otherwise, given that the Republicans control Congress right now:

1. Spend every day between now and early November 2012 making sure you win the election.
2. Win the election. That means re-electing Obama, holding the Senate with as big a margin as possible, and taking back the house.
3. Let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. Mention Step 5 on this list while you do this step.
4. Abolish the effing filibuster. Seriously, guys. It's time. No way you'll have anything near 60 votes in the next Senate, and you need to be able to do something.
5. Early in the next Congress, pass a tax reform bill that a) introduces a carbon tax, b) closes assorted regressive tax loopholes and tax expenditures, and c) plows most, all, or slightly more than all of the revenues from the first two into cutting taxes for lower/middle class people, adjusting the impact of Step 3.
6. Roll back as much of the cuts from the current deficit deal or any future spending-cuts agreement made under the Republican rule, and pass a bunch of new programs that Democrats like. Go crazy, you're in charge again.

Obviously the key to this is Steps 1 and 2. The point is that as long as Republicans control any branch of the U.S. government public policy in this country is going to slowly, inexorably decay toward utter suckitude. That's bad. So rather than worrying too hard about how much the Republican House is able to mess things up (although you should still fight that as much as possible), just make sure we don't have another two years of this nightmare. The trick of Steps 3 and 5 is that they allow Democrats to get more revenues, restructure the tax code in various ways that we like, and shift tax burden off of the lower reaches of the income distribution all at once, by using the one tax situation where Democrats have the leverage. Do all of this, and the Republican Congress will not have managed to inflict too terribly much harm on the world.

I hope.