You'll recall the good Senator said:
And the final thing I'd say is, if he does retain his chairmanship, we still exert oversight over him and control over him. He doesn't have the ability to just do whatever he wants. The caucus still has the right to remove him from that position at any time if he starts going off on some kind of tangent.
Kinda what I was pinning my hopes on. Problem is, it won't work out that way.
According to former Democratic Senate Staffer Martin Paone (don't worry, he hasn't heard of you, either) if the Democrats would attempt such a switch, mid-year, for any reason, the Republicans would likely filibuster it.
"It takes a Senate resolution to change a chairmanship, and that resolution could be subject to a filibuster," Paone told the Huffington Post. Put simply, under Bayh's proposed scenario, Republicans would have every reason to filibuster a new Senate resolution taking Lieberman's chairmanship away if he was proving an effective antagonist of President Obama.
Paone noted that a similar game of political chess played out in the Senate's recent history. "We had a similar situation in the past with a Republican moderate senator, Mark Hatfield from Oregon, who voted the wrong way in the eyes of [former Sen. Rick] Santorum and others on the constitutional amendment on a balanced budget," Paone said. "There were rumblings they wanted to take his chairmanship away. But the ranking member on the committee was [Democratic] Sen. Robert Byrd, who wrote Hatfield a nice note saying, 'if they ever try to take your chairmanship away, I'll make sure we [Democrats] will filibuster such a resolution."
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