New math makes mockery of Dems’ Senate “superminority”

R.J. Matson/Roll Call

Thanks to the majority of Massachusetts voters who put Republican Scott Brown in the U.S. Senate seat long held by Edward Kennedy, this was the week that the new political math in Congress finally sunk in. It went down better with gallows humor.

While he was in the Bay State to cover the special election, Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent (MnIndy’s sister site) tweeted this on Tuesday afternoon, amid speculation about a possibly narrow Brown victory:

Doesn’t Brown need to win 60% of the vote to break a filibuster? Oh, no — we use majority rule for this. Weird.

Once Brown won, it was time to hail what Gawker’s Alex Pareene called ”our new unstoppable Republican Superminority“:

The Republicans now hold 41 seats in the US Senate. As we all learned in Civics class, Glenn Beck’s Secret Mormon Founding Fathers always intended for the party that controls slightly more than two fifths of one house of the legislature to have complete control over the government. It is in the Constitution! Our finest Democratic Senate leaders have honorably admitted that this brief experiment in Majority Rule was a horrible failure.

In the election’s aftermath, a tweet from Think Progress’ Matt Yglesias looked ahead:

If Democrats lose 18 more Senate seats they’ll have 41 and, thus, a mandate.

On Tuesday, Comedy Central’s Indecision blogger Matt Tobey put it in more colorful terms, noting that a Brown win would “cut the number of Democratic Senators to 59, a scant 18 seats more than the Republicans, which only seems like a pretty strong majority if you aren’t using pussy-math.”