Don’t say I didn’t warn you about jackassholery:
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) will force readings of both a nuclear arms treaty and $1.1 trillion spending bill that could eat up hours of the remaining lame-duck Congress.
DeMint will invoke a senatorial privilege to ask that texts of both the New START Treaty and the 2011 omnibus spending bill be read aloud on the Senate floor.
The readings could take seven to 12 hours to verbalize the START Treaty, while the omnibus could take 40 to 60 hours, according to a spokesman for DeMint.
The readings could eat up a substantial amount of time in the closing days of the lame-duck Congress, in which Senate Democrats are racing against the clock to pass through a number of priorities. Democrats hope to pass a tax-cut bill, on which they’ll vote Wednesday afternoon, along with a repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the START Treaty and the DREAM Act immigration bill.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) “hoped” in a floor speech Wednesday that DeMint would not force a full reading, calling the move a “colossal waste of time.”
Just wait until Mike Lee and Rand Paul show up in January. They’ll help DeMint out so that if he is mysteriously overcome with a sudden misplaced sense of reasonableness he has backup to make sure nothing good happens in the Senate. We’ll have to see whether Kelly Ayotte and Pat Toomey is up for the tomfoolery. Will Rob Portman want to be a jackass, too? How about Jerry Moran? Is he Tea Baggy? Is he Tea Baggy like Ron Johnson?
Of course, all this delay is not actually pointless. It’s part of their plan to destroy Obama’s presidency.