Posted on 06/27/2007 9:59:38 AM PDT by Jacksonville Patriot
Senate Sausage [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the Heritage Foundation, e-mails:
Someone once said not to watch how sausage or legislation are made. Today especially I prefer to be at the sausage factory.
As if the Senate floor situation could get any worse, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's staff is now rewriting the Clay Pigeon amendment behind closed doors. It is the intent of the Majority Leader to bring this new unread Amendment up without the Republicans seeing the language. Yesterday Senator Reid did not have his massive 373 page amendment ready when he started debate on it and mistakes were made in the initial drafting. This fact was not discovered until Republicans objected to waiving the reading of the bill, and the Senate Clerk had nothing to read. Shockingly, Reid scrambled around, put the floor in morning business for a few hours, and then allowed Kennedy's staff make final changes to the amendment. The language was finally made available around 5:30 pm and Reid "graciously" gave Republicans the night to go through it before moving to it this morning.
This morning Republicans announced that Reid's amendment did not include the Sessions EITC provision in the touchback section, despite the fact that all previously passed amendments were supposed to be incorporated in the bill and the Clay Pigeon amendment. This oversight is the only mistake so far found, yet there may be other mistakes and intentional omissions in the 373 page amendment. This morning Reid put the floor back in morning business and sent his staff off to rewrite the mega amendment once again. Today, "the most deliberative body in the world," is left to debate legislation that they do not have a copy of. When Republicans asked if the amendment could be read once it was written, Reid objected because "it would take up too much time." Reid is promising the changes in the new amendment to be minimal, yet he has yet to allow Republicans to see the amendment, much less to check the changes.
This is a true outrage and shows the extreme measures the proponents of Amnesty will use to pass this bill, without any significant debate, nor any time to read.
06/27 12:34 PM
ping
Congressman Billybob
Not much to do but express shock and outrage. If Republicans vote on amendments they haven’t seen they are insane. Remember the history when Senators attacked each other with cains? Time for someone to punch Harry Reid.
What an understatement.
Just as bad is that when the bills are voted on, many voting on them haven’t bothered to read them to see what they are actually voting on.
The Democratic party has been completely taken over by socialists.
We are in the middle of an attempted socialist coup.
Bush is going along because it helps his immigration and North American Union plans.
Canes that is . . .
They may be acting so outrageously that they will lose additional votes tomorrow on cloture — I hope.
Call it what it is, openly hostile acts of overt treason.
There is no reason to try to coax along fencesitters here, tell them the truth, and tell them it is the higfest level of treason ever committed by the elected officials of a democratic republic, in the history of mankind.
The current Senate will go down in history as more despised than the Vichy regime. Even after the Vichy fell they had better support than the current US Senate. The destruction wrought on our economy will put the Spanish civil war to shame, some day soon Reid’s foreign economic lobbies will be exposed, and the Democrat and Republican party will be rightly called what they are, a fascist enclave protected by the Potomkin.
Only the ones with "R" after their names. There are Dems who have seen the sausage-in-progress.
I have to believe that the House will look at the amendments, and that there will be lots of heat to vote this thing down - they are ALL up for reelection next year.
It is amazing - in the most disgusting sense of that word - that ANY Republican would vote for an amendment proposed by a Dem without reading it. For that matter ANY person who votes for ANY thing that they haven’t read is highly derelict in their duties. THAT ALONE qualifies them for being promoted to the private sector.
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The problem being that the jorge in the WH is on Difi's side, not ours.
The unstated agenda is which party gets the hispanic vote for the next half century. Unfortunately the president rewards the guilty and punishes the innocent (me) in the process.
Any Republican who votes for cloture or for this bill should be considered as an "enemy, domestic".
How do you say Kafka in Spanish?
The Republicans held out, demanding to see it before they voted on it. According to the house rules, the Dems didnt have to show a copy of the bill untill the day before the vote. Which is what the Dems did, adding insult to injury, they waited untill the last minute before giving the Republicans a copy. They waited untill MIDNIGHT before distributing the copies. Some Reps didnt get their copy untill after midnight, in clear violation of the house rules, but naturally, the Dems got away with that too. Many Reps had to stay up the entire night TRYING to read the entire bill before the vote. None succeeded, far as I can recall.
Nature (and the electorate) will takes it course, in due time.
The odd piece is how many dems get "it" and are siding with the pubs trying to defeat this pig.. meanwhile aRlen is calling it "trench warfare" over here in an ap piece.
This is not the real sausage. This is just appetizers. The real sausage will come out of the conference committee, unless the house GOP puts an end to this nonsense.
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