So much for Senate comity. I’ll leave the expert analysis to Andrew and Yuval, only to observe that the Left has been itching to do something like this for a long time. The “arcane” Senate rules, which give the minority party considerable leverage (unlike in the House, where the hammer comes down routinely), have long frustrated ideologues exasperated by tradition and “messy democracy.” When McConnell slipped the new “jobs” bill into the mix, the mask slipped and Reid reacted exactly as one would expect by a leader of a party whose motto is “by any means necessary.”
True, in this case the goal is damage control, as Reid and his confreres face a ballot-box debacle of epic proportions next year. As Yuval points out, the Democrats are doing their best ostrich imitation, hunkering down and hoping to weather the coming Obama storm, even as the president goes around pretending that he hasn’t been in charge in the past three years, and everything is the fault of those intransigent Republicans.
Speaking of demagoguery, it’s hard to beat this clip. Everything about it ought to chill you, especially the audience’s reaction to Obama’s breezy expropriation of private-sector money for government use:
