Now that she’s retiring, Olympia Snowe suddenly realizes that her Republican colleagues are behaving like two year-olds?
Snowe is now looking at ways that Senate procedure could be reformed to help alleviate partisan gridlock. “I’m doing some research on how cloture has been used” since it was put into effect in 1917, she explains. In classic Snowe form, her hope is to try to find a procedural fix that would also be a compromise between the minority and the majority — “so that neither gets the upper hand,” she explains.
She should have started looking at that years ago. But at least that article is a more honest portrayal of our current system than this piece of crap. When your article notes that the Farm Bill passed over Bush’s veto a few years ago, you probably don’t want to hold up bipartisan cooperation on this year’s Farm Bill as evidence of a thaw in partisanship in the Senate.
Umm, in the current climate, how would such procedural change(s) be put into place? Surely not by a vote.
“Neither side has the upper hand.” So no one has power and nothing gets done? And this is a change how?
Good riddance. SHe is such a hypocrite. She did the same stuff the others did.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~benv/files/poll%20responses%20by%20party%20ID.pdf
More than half of all Republicans still believe there were WMDs in Iraq. More than half say the President was not born in America.
The Republican base had their collective brain broken by a black president. But they were already fucking crazy to begin with. But not wild, unpredictable, every-man-for-himself crazy. Lockstep crazy. The worst kind of crazy.
The situation is fucking hopeless. The party is lost.
Compromise is out of the question. Conquest is the only real option.
If she thinks she can create a consensus to make this happen then she’s about to find out just how ineffectual a note her tenure will play.
You quote somebody quoting her.
“[Snowe’s] hope is to try to find a procedural fix that would also be a compromise between the minority and the majority — `so that neither gets the upper hand,’ she explains.”
Isn’t that what gridlock is?
And isn’t this the same stupid, anti-democratic argument conservatives always invoke when they want to protect the wealth and power of the rich?