Collective Conscious

Thanks to Legal Insur­rec­tion for pro­vid­ing the fod­der for today. As his first line claims, “Hissy fit alert:”

Hissy fit alert. The left-​​wing blogs are scream­ing in per­fect har­mony about bad, bad, bad Richard Shelby of Alabama (R-​​of course), who put a hold on the entire government.

That’s not quite clear at this point, it appears that Shelby used a long­stand­ing Sen­ate mech­a­nism to put a “hold” on numer­ous Obama appointees (Shelby says sev­eral, the blo­gos­phere says 70 or more).

We must stop this Sen­ate with all its rules and pro­ce­dures and cus­toms and prac­tices, they say. Gov­ern­ment can’t func­tion this way. Shelby has “shut down” the government, OMG.

Except that he hasn’t. Just as there are rules to place a “hold” on nom­i­nees, there are rules to remove that hold. The Democ­rats just don’t want to fol­low those rules.

Okay. Stop right there. I need to know whether Mr. Jacob­son here has even read the sources he links to through­out that blurb. Let’s check them for him. The first one is accu­rate enough — every­one has indeed noticed the extra­or­di­nary Shelby mass-​​hold. The sec­ond one, Shelby’s offi­cial state­ment, is a blast:

Sen. Shelby has placed holds on sev­eral pend­ing nom­i­nees due to unad­dressed national secu­rity concerns.

Note that he doesn’t say he has a prob­lem with the nom­i­nees them­selves, which is the usual rea­son for hold­ing up a nom­i­na­tion. As far as “shut­ting down the gov­ern­ment” goes, it’s a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion, but indeed Shelby has guar­an­teed that a wide range of gov­ern­ment ser­vices with con­tinue to oper­ate with­out their heads, plus basi­cally giv­ing the rest of the Sen­ate a giant mid­dle fin­ger. But it’s that last link that really gets me. Insur­rec­tion links to this arti­cle, claim­ing that there is a proper process for hold­ing and remov­ing a hold,  and that Democ­rats sim­ply don’t want to play by the rules. So let’s read the arti­cle for him:

The first thing to under­stand is that there’s no such pro­ce­dural move as a “hold.”

Okay, so far so good. Wait, what?

[H]ere’s the short ver­sion: The Sen­ate gen­er­ally uses unan­i­mous con­sent agree­ments to set the rules for a bill or a nom­i­na­tion. A hold, in its sim­plest form, is a promise to object to unan­i­mous consent. […]

The action in ques­tion can still come to the floor. But all bets are off. In prac­tice, this means a fil­i­buster of some sort is on. […] In the­ory, that means Harry Reid can just call a clo­ture vote and break his fil­i­buster. Prob­lem solved, right?

To break a fil­i­buster, the major­ity leader has to file for clo­ture. Then there’s a two-​​day wait­ing period before a vote. Then there’s a 30-​​hour post-​​vote debate period. And vot­ing on one bill might require break­ing mul­ti­ple fil­i­busters, because the motion to pro­ceed to debate can be fil­i­bus­tered and the amend­ments can be fil­i­bus­tered and the motion to vote can be fil­i­bus­tered and each fil­i­buster requires the same lengthy workaround. Even if you can crush every one of these fil­i­busters with­out break­ing a sweat, you’ve still just seen a whole week — or maybe much more — of the Senate’s time chewed up.

Ah, now I see what Legal Insur­rec­tion actu­ally meant to say. There is no such thing as a pro­ce­dural “hold,” and there is no for­mal way for Democ­rats to remove it with­out wast­ing a ton of the nation’s valu­able time. And he prop­erly sourced that state­ment, too! B-​​E-​​A-​​utiful. So let’s go on to see what he’s con­cluded from that.

I’m not in favor of pork-​​barrel pol­i­tics, but it’s all the Democ­rats have been about this year. Democ­rats have no stand­ing to cry foul. Which is another way of say­ing, what goes around comes around.

Let’s just get some facts out there (from the 2009 omnibus spend­ing bill):

Repub­li­cans in Con­gress vil­i­fied Democ­rats for both the over­all size and the num­ber of ear­marks attached to the $410 bil­lion omnibus appro­pri­a­tions bill that Obama signed Wednes­day. How­ever, despite the rhetoric, Repub­li­cans requested 40 per­cent of the ear­marks and ranked among the high­est pork bar­rel spenders.

Six of the 10 sen­a­tors that requested the most ear­mark dol­lars were Repub­li­cans, accord­ing to Tax­pay­ers for Com­mon Sense, a non-​​partisan bud­get watch­dog group. In the House, Repub­li­cans accounted for five of the top 10.

Ouch. Back to the LI crit­i­cisms then:

For the past year the Democ­rats in the Sen­ate con­nived and schemed to shut Repub­li­cans out of all major pieces of leg­is­la­tion, and are con­niv­ing right now to fig­ure out a way around the Sen­ate fil­i­buster rule to pass the abom­inable health care plan. Using those quirky, pesky Sen­ate rules.

Sorry. For­got that the Gang of Six was six Democrats.

The same set of rules Democ­rats invoked when they almost sparked a con­sti­tu­tional cri­sis a year ago by ini­tially refus­ing to seat the duly appointed Roland Burris.

The only per­son who wrote about this was William Jacob­son. The same guy who’s writ­ing the cur­rent arti­cle. Shame­less self-​​promotion?

I guess some Sen­ate rules are more equal than others.

It may be that the admin­is­tra­tion has to engage in dia­logue with Repub­li­cans, rather than dic­ta­tion. A lit­tle give and take, not just give and not just take.

You know, we don’t always have time for 80-​​minute Q&A ses­sions. Espe­cially Sen­ate Repub­li­cans, who are too busy to have a chat with Obama.

That is how these rules devel­oped over the decades, to ensure a bal­ance of power lack­ing in other parts of the gov­ern­ment. Deal with it, now that Scott is in town.

Actu­ally, that’s not the rea­son for the rules. It was, among other things, intended so that Sen­a­tors who were out of town could have enough time to get there for a vote via horse and buggy.

This is one big waaah from peo­ple who thought they were omnipo­tent, but have been brought back down to earth. And what a long, strange trip it’s been.

Thanks for that. Any­way, tune in next time!