Congratulations to Harry Reid, who after five years has finally taken his manhood out of the blind trust and found his testicles with both hands and a flashlight. Today, he blew up the filibuster for Presidential appointees.
It’s a few years too late and not comprehensive enough. Had he done it once the Republicans made public their scorched-earth approach to governance, we might have gotten a stimulus of reasonable size. We might have gotten a public option as part of health care reform. We might have gotten some sort of check on the proliferation of guns in the wake of Aurora and Sandy Hook and (insert next week’s mass shooting here). We might have actually had a functioning government. Instead, we limped along begging to be allowed to have majority rule, and got stymied by a Senate tradition that appears nowhere in black-letter law, and which was never abused to the extent seen over the last three Congresses.
And Norm Ornstein nails it again – this was pretty much the plan all along. Either you get to deny the Obama administration the ability to function normally, or you get to point fingers and say “look what they did!” and claim that the Democrats tore down the filibuster for their own partisan purposes, so now it’s OK for you to finish the job. Shameless, but then, the Confederate Party has never lacked for shameless.
I’ve moved as far as I can. Next stop is Scotland, or something.