A note from your friendly Oversneer: Deceiver reader “Barney Snakes” has contributed another Guest Blogger piece. E-mail me at oversneer@gmail.com if you want to be cool like him.
In what amounts to one of Norman Lear’s wet dreams, Rachel Maddow and Howard Dean go on for ten minutes chastising Senate Republicans for stonewalling the Democrats’ socialist agenda much needed reforms, like Card Check, Cap and Trade, and ObamaCare.
But they never once mention that until Republican Scott Brown won the Senate seat previously occupied by the late Captain Oldsmobile Ted Kennedy, the Republicans were entirely powerless with their measly 40 votes.
If Maddow were to use, I don’t know, facts to construct her argument, it would have been a very short segment. Instead, she uses statistics from the 110th Congress, which was seated from 2007 to 2009, back when Dubya still occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So even in Maddow and Dean’s parliamentary utopia — in which Republicans are barred from using that inconvenient little filibuster rule that’s been around for more than 200 years — any legislation passed out of the Democrat-controlled Congress that didn’t jive with Bush’s agenda would have been vetoed and sent back to the Senate. And in order to override that veto, the Senate would need 66 votes (which they didn’t have), with or without the filibuster.
We’re now one year into the 111th Congress. With a Democrat president and (until recently) a Democrat super-duper-ooper-schmooper filibuster-squashing Senate majority. And it’s still the Republican’s fault? Those pesky Republicans.
Until last week the Democrats had 60 Senate votes. They call that a “filibuster-proof majority” for a reason, folks. So sure, Rachel, those “obstructionist” Republicans have magically been able to use the filibuster more than ever before. Except that they didn’t have enough seats in the Senate to filibuster a change on the cafeteria menu, let alone a major piece of earth-shattering legislation.
Maybe Maddow and Dean (wasn’t that a figure-skating couple?) should go back to blaming Dick Cheney. That seemed to work.