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ANY Senator can vote outside their party line, or caucusing affiliation, at any time. Not just Joe Lieberman. Not just Jim Jeffords or Bernie Sanders.
In many ways that's often a good thing too. I don't think many of us want a party composed of lock-step voting clones after all. I'm not particularly happy about the particular issues where Lieberman is likely to vote with Republicans instead of the majority of Democrats, but it's not like he has any special awesome power to break with the party line, any more than anyone else. In fact, Lieberman will still end up voting as a fairly liberal Democrat a good portion of the time on many issues.
I'm pissed at Lieberman too, but too many people are being blinded by their anger into making highly exaggerated statements like "he might as well just be a Republican", and into believing he's put himself into some especially potent position to play for political power.
The one big issue where Lieberman has broken with Democrats, Iraq, has now soured greatly for many Republicans as well. Republicans were already distancing themselves from Bush on Iraq before the election debacle. You can be damn sure that a lot of Republican support for Bush's stance on Iraq has faded enough that even if Lieberman remains stubbornly supportive of Bush on Iraq, it won't have much impact anymore anyway.
There's only one very limited special "power", if you even want to call it that, that Lieberman has, and only to a slightly higher degree than any other Senator: he could switch who he decides to caucus with, thus switching the balance of power for control of the Senate, and claim that being voted in by the people of Connecticut as an Independent gives him the freedom to do so without going against the way he represented himself to voters. So what? He'd probably catch hell for it anyway, and be decried just as much by Democrats for switching as Jeffords was decried by Republicans back when Jeffords decided to switch from Republican to Independent and caucus with Democrats, even though Jeffords was, technically speaking, more open to criticism for running as a Republican then allying himself with Democrats. (No criticism from me, however... I was awfully damned happy when Jeffords switched.)
The fact is, however, with such a slim Democratic majority as we'll have in the Senate, that ANY DEMOCRAT, even those who won their primaries and actually ran as Democrats, have the ability to switch sides if they feel like doing so, if they care more about power than their principles, and if they're willing to put up with the flack they'd take if they'd cut themselves good enough a deal with the Republicans. (Thank God Zell Miller still isn't around!)
While Lieberman can go either way on any particular vote -- just like any other Senator, maybe just a little bit more often -- it's not like he can flitter around from day to day deciding who he'll caucus with. Switching caucusing affiliation throws the whole Senate into major turmoil. It's a kind of "nuclear option" that can't be exercised lightly, or realistically exercised more than once. I don't think Lieberman hungers for a one-way trip into the Republican Party.
Democrats will control the Senate. Period. Lieberman is terribly unlikely to mess that up, and he's not unique in his ability to change control of the Senate either. Like him or not, with Lieberman we get a Democratic majority leader, we deprive Dick Cheney of playing tiebreaker, we control all of the Senate committees, and control which bills make it to the Senate floor. Is the fact that he won't vote in lock step on every single issue with the majority of Democrats really worth making so much fuss?
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