Dave Anderson wrote a post at Balloon Juice about, basically, how slow the Senate is. Of course, he’s right. If we accept the current norms and rules of the Senate, not a lot gets done there.
Yet, today, a holiday, Veteran’s Day, the Senate is in session to vote on some amendments or changes to BAAJA. Why? Because Thune and the Republicans want to do it, because their donors want it:
Also, this is what’s happening in the Judiciary Committee:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) ditched a number of the panel's standard practices Tuesday to line up votes on President Donald Trump's judicial nominees in an 11th-hour effort to get as many as possible confirmed before Democrats take control of the Senate in January.
In the committee's first hearing since the GOP's drubbing in the midterm elections, Grassley signaled plans to hold nomination hearings this week and next week, violating the panel's bipartisan practice of holding such hearings no closer than two weeks apart.
The Senate makes its own rules. A majority vote can abolish the filibuster. Members can vote to schedule more votes, to have longer sessions, to have more ways to curtail debate. “Sacred norms” can be broken.
This is what the Schumer fight is about. The new members and some of the current members are tired of living on Senate time. To pick one example, Abdul El-Sayed was elected on a platform of doing things. He’s also one of the newly elected Senators who’s (wisely) asking for a lot of small, specific message bills. What AES wants isn’t going to happen in a business-as-usual Senate, so he isn’t supporting Schumer.
I’m not picking on Dave Anderson here — he’s done us all a service by pointing out what little will happen under the current Senate rules. We need to push our Democratic Senators to make some changes. And we should have zero tolerance of explanations and excuses given for inaction, when the Republicans have shown that norms can be ignored if they want to get something done. Democrats should do the same.
