Mitch McConnell Made Full Use of the Senate’s Customary Hour of Mischief
The cicadas are less annoying, and they’re grounding airplanes these days.
Shortly before this exercise in enforced futility, of course, the president gave up on the time-wasting exercise of trying to get bipartisan support for his infrastructure bill. The dowser for Republican crocodile tears on this one was Senator Shelly Moore Capito, the slightly less frustrating of the two senators from West Virginia. She has the mournful face down cold. From the New York Times:
A Democratic president won’t do what we want him to do. Where has my country gone, anyway?
On Wednesday, there were reports that, as the president left for Europe, the White House had organized another legislative snipe hunt.
This effort will fail, and everybody knows that it will fail. Even if it produces a bill, nobody ever will debate it, because there aren’t 10 Republicans left with a sliver of a soul. The Senate now resembles how the House operated in the 1840s, when it enacted a rule that tabled automatically any and all petitions regarding slavery. The (ultimately successful) fight against that “gag rule” was the last great fight undertaken by doughty old John Quincy Adams, who saw enforced legislative inaction to be an offense against the Bill of Rights. At one point, Adams inveighed that:
The Senate has gagged itself, but it’s gagged the national will as well.
