The Raw Hypocrisy Of Reconciliation
Posted 02/24/2010 07:06 PM ET
Democracy: Republicans are being warned they must help pass the Democrats' health reform or face the "nuclear option" preventing filibusters. But when in the minority, Democrats called such threats undemocratic.
As a powerful senior Democratic senator in 2005, Vice President Joseph Biden condemned bending Senate rules to prevent the minority from filibustering President Bush's judicial nominations.
"I say to my friends on the Republican side: You may own the field right now," Biden said on the Senate floor in the gravest of tones. "But you won't own it forever, and I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don't make the kind of naked power grab you are doing."
(power grab really? You're a fine one to be talking about power grabs)
The vice president's prayers have apparently gone unheard. The White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are mulling their chances of ramming through a big-government health reform through abuse of the budget reconciliation process.
Thanks to the election last month of Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., Democrats lost their 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the upper house. But using reconciliation would require only a simple majority in the Senate.
The Biden comment is just one of a series of samples of televised statements of leading Democrats, mostly from Senate floor speeches, gathered together by Naked Emperor News and featured on the Breitbart.tv Web site.
Nothing so far in the yearlong debate on health reform has exposed the Democrats' rank hypocrisy as much as the viewing of these past statements condemning as an unconstitutional power grab what they now propose to do.
Reid this week jeered that Republicans should "stop crying about reconciliation." But during the Bush administration, today's most prominent Democrats were singing an entirely different tune:
• "This is the way democracy ends," now-Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., warned his colleagues on May 19, 2005, "not with a bomb, but with a gavel."
In sharp variance to that, the Associated Press reported last year that if a bipartisan deal on health reform "falls apart, Democrats will have to turn to the 'nuclear option' — forcing through an inferior bill through a process that only requires 51 votes instead of 60, Baucus said."
• Then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on April 25, 2005, said that bypassing the filibuster through the nuclear option "really I think would change the character of the Senate forever." Back then, Obama claimed "you would essentially have still two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply majoritarian, absolute power on either side, and that's just not what the Founders intended."
• Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York on May 23, 2005, from the Senate floor blasted that "this president has come to the majority here in the Senate and basically said, 'Change the rules! Do it the way I want it done!'
"And I guess there just weren't very many voices on the other side of the aisle that acted the way previous generations of senators have acted and said, 'Mr. President, we're with you, we support you, but that's a bridge too far. We can't go there. You have to restrain yourself, Mr. President.'"
The Senate, Clinton argued, "is being asked to turn itself inside out, to ignore the precedent, to ignore the way our system has worked, the delicate balance that we have obtained, that has kept this constitutional system going — for immediate gratification of the present president."
• On March 18, 2005, from the floor, New York Sen. Charles Schumer declared that the nation was "on the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional crisis."
He asserted that "the checks and balances which have been at the core of this republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances which say that if you get 51% of the vote, you don't get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing. It's almost a temper tantrum," Schumer said of what he and other Democrats are trying to do now.
"They want their way every single time, and they will change the rules, break the rules, misread the Constitution so that they will get their way," he added.
(sounds like whats been going on for the last year)
• Reid on May 18, 2005, from the Senate floor said the "right to extended debate is never more important than when one party controls Congress and the White House" — exactly the situation now in 2010. He added that "in these cases a filibuster serves as a check on power and preserves our limited government."
• According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, taking to the floor on May 18, 2005, "the nuclear option, if successful, will turn the Senate into a body that could have its rules broken at any time by a majority of senators unhappy with any position taken by the minority."
She went on to warn that "it begins with judicial nominations. Next will be executive appointments. And then legislation." It would mean "the Senate becomes ipso facto the House of Representatives, where the majority rules supreme, and the party in power can dominate and control the agenda with absolute power."
Today, it is indeed legislation, in the form of their health care bill, to which Feinstein and other Democrats want to apply the nuclear option.
• Then-Sen Biden's floor speech was May 23, 2005, and he called the nuclear option "ultimately an example of the arrogance of power" and "a fundamental power grab."
• "I don't know of a single piece of legislation that's ever been adopted here," an angry Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut said on the floor on May 18, 2005, "that didn't have a Republican and a Democrat in the lead. That's because we need to sit down and work with each other.
"The rules of this institution have required that. That's why we exist. Why have a bicameral legislative body? Why have two chambers? What were the Framers thinking about 218 years ago?" According to Dodd, the Constitution's authors "understood that there is a tyranny of the majority."
Strange how now that they are the majority, Democrats no longer see it as tyranny.
