Well,it’s not like it happened in a vacuum.

wisdom of powwow:

The Senate Democrats have really gone ‘a con too far’ on this legislation… Power and ego are a potent combination when the ends start “justifying” the means, come hell or high water.

Senator Jim Webb (D-Marine Corps) just had the nerve, about twenty minutes ago, to try to get unanimous consent to get two bills (one passed by the House on Saturday, and one or both still in committee in the Senate) around regular order so that they could be discharged from committee and brought immediately to the floor and passed independent of the reconciliation fix bill the Senate has been working on all day and evening – on behalf of himself, Akaka, and every other Democratic Senator as co-sponsor – even though Senator Burr had the identical provisions in a pending amendment to the reconciliation fix waiting to be voted on.

The Webb-favored bill was to fix some problems in the health care legislation signed into law yesterday with regard to Tri-Care for Veterans (the Akaka bill was some similar fix).

Meanwhile the Democratic Party, with the silent acceptance of Sanders and Feingold and Merkley, and everyone else in the caucus, has been happily deploying the Senate nuclear option of tabling to avoid even casting a vote on each Republican amendment in turn (as opposed to on the motions to table) – even when the Democrats completely support the policy in the amendment, as with the Burr amendment (Senator Gregg also offered a paid-for three-year “doc fix” amendment) – apparently all because they want to deliver to Obama only what Obama ordered the Senate to deliver (and who are they to disagree…).

And then Democrats like Webb have the gall to play politics and take umbrage that Republicans somehow aren’t grateful for the Democratic Party’s appalling abuse of power and open disdain and deliberate shut-down of democratic, legislative process in the Senate for no good purpose except to protect people like Michael Bennet from the consequences of their own deceit and cowardice.

Lack of “gratitude” that Tom Coburn immediately, and rightly, displayed – by “objecting” to Webb’s unanimous consent request, after pointing out that the Republicans received the Webb/Akaka bills for review literally two minutes earlier, and that apparently all Webb and the Democrats had to do was to support the pending Burr amendment to get those same changes made (and thus – horror of horrors – wait for the House to quickly rubberstamp the Senate reconciliation changes). Whereupon Daniel Akaka then immediately moved to table (kill, without an up or down vote on the amendment itself) Senator Burr’s reconciliation amendment containing the very changes Webb/Akaka want made in the underlying bill, out of spite and because of the brazen, shameless refusal of the Democrats to do their duty as representatives of the American people on this health reform policy, because a President told them not to do that duty.

Dear Michael Bennet, Tom Harkin and fellow Democratic “Senators” and “Representatives”: You don’t “support” a public option if you in fact not only refuse to fight for it, but work to defeat it just because the President won’t support it or told you not to. So stop pretending or claiming to independently “support” policies, unless and until the President has informed you that you do actually support them. Since that’s obviously now the true, if unspoken, unauthorized, unConstitutional, grossly-irresponsible and despicable, current function of the Democratic-majority “Congress.”

shekissesfrogs, if you haven’t already, you might want to read powwow’s diary, Anatomy of a Backroom Deal’s Public Face: The case for letting Congress do the legislating on health care reform.

not in a vacuum indeed.

if we’re going to have a reality-based discussion of congressional abuses, it will have to include the abuses by both parties.

I love powwow’s diaries and comments. I wish I had CSPAN so I could watch it.

I think all of the abuses should be laid bare without regard to party.

you don’t need cable tv to watch cspan. you can stream online or, if you have dialup and the video is too much bandwidth, listen to the audio only on the stream for cspan radio. here are some of the direct realplayer links i hope are of use to you:

cspan1
cspan2
cspan3

cspan radio

also, a while ago i made a webpage with lots of the direct realplayer links to cspan and the audio feeds for congressional hearing rooms that you might find helpful.