Exasperated House Democratic leaders have compiled a list showing that they have passed 290 bills that have stalled in the Senate.For many months the GOP was powerless to stop anything Harry Reid or Dick Durbin wanted to pass in the Senate, so blaming the GOP for the failure to pass all this nonsense is, well, nonsense.
The list is the latest sign that Democrats in the lower chamber are frustrated with their Senate counterparts.
An aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says the list is put together during each Congress, but that this year’s number is likely the largest ever. However, he said Pelosi blames GOP senators, not Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) or Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
“The Speaker believes that the filibuster has its place, but clearly Senate Republicans are taking what was once a rare procedural move and abusing it to the detriment of progress for America’s working families,” said Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill.
But some House Democrats and their aides have shown no reticence in blaming Senate Democrats, who enjoyed a supermajority until Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) was sworn in earlier this month.
In January, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) suggested the Senate was out of touch with Americans, and did not differentiate between the two parties.
“[Senators] tend to see themselves as a House of Lords and they don’t seem to understand that those of us that go out there every two years stay in touch with the American people,” Clyburn said in an interview with Fox News Radio. “We tend to respond to them a little better.”
And what legislation vital to America is still awaiting Senate action?
The Jimmy Carter National Peanut Farm and Nut House will just have to wait.The list of stalled bills includes both major and minor legislation: healthcare reform; climate change; food safety; financial aid for the U.S. Postal Service; a job security act for wounded veterans; a Civil War battlefield preservation act; vision care for children; the naming of a federal courthouse in Iowa after former Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa); a National Historic Park named for President Jimmy Carter; a bill to improve absentee ballot voting; a bill to improve cybersecurity; and the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
This is all part of a bigger effort to get the Senate to change their rules regarding filibusters, something I guarantee they'd want to change again once the GOP became the majority party.
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1 comment:
This is government as our founders anticipated and approved. The senate was by design the forum in which debate and procedural rules slow down legislative action and give states equal representation and greater sway in the legislative process. Giving sole power of law enactment to the house would be to provide a never ending stream of legislative acts designed to bolster the well being of large states at the expense of the small.
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