For the last couple hours I've been battling a failing computer as Harry Reid has been fixing the Senate. So, taken together, my day has been a delightful aggravation.
Today's filibuster change has been long in coming, since obstruction is the only political program that Republicans have. Not to hear Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tell it, though. Why, Senate Republicans, according to McConnell, have been a veritable model of cooperation and agreeability, unlike those incorrigible Democrats, who wish only to "play politics" with the Senate's esteemed tradition.
McConnell's oratory today had the honest ring of a besotted Huey Long. Tradition indeed.
From there the minority leader moved to another Republican virtuosity: vicious threats. "I say," he said, "to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this." Poor Mitch, his ire was way up but it had no place to go. Earlier today I referenced that 19th-century giant of the Senate, Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton, who, in 1850, in another context, had a pistol pulled on him by a Mississippi senator, at whom Benton bellowed while ripping open his shirt, Let the assassin fire!--and I swear I thought for a moment I'd hear the same from Mitch, poor thing, while fuming at Harry.
McConnell went on to threaten: "And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think." If by "sooner than you think" McConnell meant the next Republican president's appointees, then there's very, very little for Senate Dems to worry about. Socialist Bernie Sanders has as much chance of being elected to the White House as any in the GOP's stable of buffoons. But I imagine McConnell only meant that he and his party would redouble their efforts at being extraordinarily childish, as in today and tomorrow.
Meanwhile, John McCain hurled some of that quality level-headedness, for which Republicans are known, at the filibuster change: "Now there are no rules in the United States Senate."
Where do they get these guys?