Breitbart:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is keeping senators in Washington for a rare Saturday session—and risking a government shutdown—after he went to extraordinary lengths to block Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) from forcing a vote to block President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty.
What happened on Friday night is a series of procedural tactics that Cruz and Lee engaged in with Reid. Cruz tried to force a constitutional point of order—which requires a 51-vote threshold—to challenge the constitutionality of Obama’s executive amnesty. Meanwhile, Lee was pushing an amendment to the cromnibus spending bill that just passed the House that would have blocked funding for Obama’s executive amnesty implementation.
Using parliamentary tricks, Reid blocked both Cruz’s and Lee’s measures, then sought unanimous consent to adjourn the Senate until Monday—at which time Senators would have been brought back in for passage for the cromnibus. But in consultation with Cruz, Lee objected to unanimous consent to adjourn the Senate until Monday unless Reid would allow a vote on the effort to block funding for Obama’s executive amnesty. Because Reid wouldn’t agree to allow the vote, he decided to keep Senators in Washington for the weekend.
Because Reid needs to, per Senate rules, fill the timeframe until senators can actually vote on cloture on the cromnibus bill—which they can first technically do at 1 AM early Sunday morning—Reid is now attempting to force through several controversial Obama nominees like NRA-opposed surgeon general nominee Vivek Murthy, Deputy Secretary of State nominee Tony Blinken, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director nominee Sarah Saldana.
The nominees—like Murthy—who have a hold placed on them still need to clear a 60-vote threshold to be confirmed, which means five Republicans would need to enable any nominee assuming all the Democrats vote for each one. So it doesn’t mean Reid will be able to succeed on them anyway.
“While the Senate considers the CRomnibus spending bill, all we’ve done was simply request to hold a vote on a measure to stop President Obama’s amnesty,” Cruz said in a Facebook post about his and Lee’s efforts on Friday evening. “Instead, Majority Leader Harry Reid is holding a series of votes today for the sheer purpose of blocking that vote on Obama’s amnesty. Harry Reid’s last act as Majority Leader is to, once again, act as an enabler for President Obama, by blocking this vote on the President’s amnesty. He is going to an embarrassing length to tie up the floor to obstruct debate and a vote on this issue because he knows amnesty is unpopular with the American people, and he doesn’t want the Democrats on the record as supporting it.”
Garrett Murch, a communications adviser to incoming Senate Budget Committee chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), said in an email to reporters that these tactics from Reid are similar to how the Senate Democrats haven’t produced a budget in years.