Harry Reid Changes Senate Rules…Goes Nuclear

Oh boy….Reid has gone over the edge and he will rue the day once the Republicans retake the majority in the Senate:

Reid rewrites Senate rules with shocking move

In a stunning turn of events this evening, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., used an arcane legislative maneuver to effectively rewrite Senate rules to make it harder for the minority party to force uncomfortable votes on the majority.

The buildup to this point started on Tuesday, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tried to force a vote on President Obama’s jobs bill as well as other Republican priorities by offering them as amendments to the China currency bill. Reid blocked the move.

Tonight, McConnell made what’s called a “motion to suspend the rules,” to allow a vote on the amendments. Such motions are almost always defeated, because they require a two-thirds majority to pass. But they’re another way for the minority party to force uncomfortable votes. Even though the minority party doesn’t get a direct vote on the amendment, how somebody votes on the motion becomes a sort of proxy for such a vote. In this case, for instance, if Democrats had voted down a motion for a vote on Obama’s jobs bill, it would have put them in an awkward spot.

Though it’s been the standing practice of the Senate to allow such motions by the minority, tonight Reid broke with precedent and ruled McConnell’s motion out of order, and was ultimately backed up by Democrats.

So, the end result is that by a simple majority vote, Reid was able to effectively rewrite Senate rules making it even harder than it already is for the minority party to force votes on any amendments. Should Republicans retake the Senate next year, it’s something that could come back to haunt Democrats in a major way.

The Hill calls it “shocking”

I call it stupidity.

Jim Demint:

“World’s Greatest Deliberative Body now doesn’t allow minority amendments unless we get majority’s permission.”

…“Dems rammed through Obamacare, stimulus and now rammed through rules to gag minority rights.”

This is about a jobs bill that Obama wants passed. A jobs bill that the Democrats whined needed to be passed. So the Republicans want to put it up for a vote. Obama said “pass it now!” right?

But to spare Obama the humiliation of seeing many in his own party vote against this fiasco of a bill he goes nuclear.

If he doesn’t back down this WILL come back to bite them in the ass….guaranteed.

UPDATE

Agree with Jeff here:

People: Look at what’s happening in the Senate. Listen to the President and his demonization of the private sector. Look at what’s happening on Wall Street, where the leftists are literally marching for Marxism — and the contemporary Democrat Party (and Ron Paul) are supporting the “movement” (largely peopled with anti-Semites, 911 Truther, hard-core leftists, and the modern labor movement, essentially a client of the Democrats.)

For years I’ve noted that the move to socialism generally stops at the corporatist/liberal fascist stage — where the small business private sector is gutted through regulation and taxation, a few large corporations “partner” with government to provide the veneer for a market system, and we are left with a powerful centralized government that holds sway, by way of lawmaking and regulatory ability, over a few large corporations who themselves have profited from death of competition.

For the Utopian leftist, the next stage is government takeover of the remaining mega-corporations, followed by socialist bliss (read Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward for the People’s blueprint.) In reality, though, the fascist dynamic is perfectly symbiotic, and need not evolve any further. Power is concentrated. The masses are dependent upon the government. And because they are dependent they will always vote in their “economic interests,” keeping the permanent political class in power. Party ceases to matter.

This is an attempted coup we’re witnessing. Grab your gear, Visigoths. The ugly is on its way.

Ross Kaminsky at The American Spectator:

…One of the aspects of Obamacare which made Americans so angry was the process during which Democrats ramrodded, steamrolled, “deemed and passed”, and generally bullied their way to passing Barack Obama’s signature achievement. It was an exercise in tyranny which had probably drifted from many people’s minds. Reid’s maneuver will remind Americans that congressional Democrats have zero respect for rule, law, ethics, or precedent if they impede the passage of their desired legislation. This isn’t a surprise for the party of Woodrow Wilson, a man who held the United States Constitution with utter disdain as preventing him from putting government in charge of…well, pretty much everything. But it serves as a great reminder to the American people of just what Progressives reallly are, namely tyrants in sheeps’ clothing.

Curt

See author page