Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled an unprecedented maneuver in the Senate yesterday that is undoubtedly going to have major implications for the way Senate business is conducted in the future.
Following a routine cloture ( end of debate) vote on the Chinese currency bill Reid is touting,Senate Republicans attempted to use the rules of the Senate to attach a post-cloture amendment that would have required a vote on the president's jobs bill he wants passed now, now, in its original, highly embarrassing form.
Because the Senate Democrats lack enough votes to enforce cloture or pass the bill, they were put in the position of having to vote against the amendment, which would have exploded President Obama's myth that only the Evil Republicans are the obstruction to getting his jobs bill passed.
What Reid did then was to object to the affirmative ruling on the amendment and force a vote along party lines, 51-48 to disallow the amendment and change the Senates rules to stop the minority party in the future from offering post cloture amendments ...even though he had to ignore the Senate parliamentarian's ruling to do it.
This thuggish behavior, known as the Nuclear Option, is exactly what the bi-partisan Gang of 14 got together to prevent back when the GOP had the Senate majority, in order to safeguard the rights of the minority party.
The Republicans like Lindsay Graham and John McCain who formed the Gang of 14 back then reasoned that the day would come when they would be in the minority and they expected the Democrats to likewise honor the agreement when things changed.
Suckers.
However, as the Senate Republicans who formed the Gang of 14 noted back in 2005, things change.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and most of the other Senate Republicans were absolutely livid at being sandbagged and said do openly. The odds of a GOP takeover of the Senate in 2012 are pretty good, and Harry Reid's little parliamentary mugging is not going to be forgotten.
Come January 2013, look for ObamaCare and other elements of Obama's agenda to be dismantled in exactly the same way if the GOP takes the Senate.
That's a very good thing on its face, but a bad thing overall because the precedent Reid just set is going to further poison the climate in DC and make it harder for the two parties to work together.
A despicable action from a fairly despicable man. It takes a rare bird to crap in his own nest.
2 comments:
I wish it were true. But sadly our Republican politicians are nuetured and won't dismantle Obamacare in the same way. They will make nice and go along to get along.
What makes you think the RINOs in charge will have the backbone to use the newly changed rule to repeal ObamaCare, or anything else for that matter?
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