Back in the day, you couldn't spit without hitting some Republican senator—often Mitch McConnell—complaining about then-Majority Leader Harry Reid's
tyranny in using a procedure called "filling the tree," using his power as majority leader to block amendments to bills. One Republican senator even wrote that the tactic was
"the end of the Senate" and
way too many political reporters bought it. Mostly he did it to stop Obamacare repeal amendments from being offered on everything that moved on the Senate floor, since minority Republicans were way more concerned with making political points and obstruction than actual governing.
My, how little things have changed with the new Senate management.
[I]n his first seven months as Senate majority leader, McConnell has employed that same tactic to push through a highway bill, trade legislation and a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. McConnell has used the maneuver more often than past Senate majority leaders—Robert Byrd, George Mitchell and Tom Daschle, all Democrats—and he's done it just about as much as Reid did during a similar time period in the Nevada Democrat's reign.
That’s the conclusion of a new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which found that McConnell has invoked the parliamentary maneuver—called "filling the amendment tree"—six times since taking office in January. In the first seven months of Reid's tenure as majority leader in 2007, he used it five times—on his way to using the procedure a record-shattering 95 times during his eight-year tenure. […]
Yet the new report is certain to give new fodder to McConnell's critics in both parties, including his archnemesis, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). They contend the GOP leader is backtracking from his vow to return the Senate to its freewheeling nature.
That's what makes this actually almost fun. McConnell has to use the same tactic as Reid for the same reason—his fellow Republicans are offering bullshit amendments and still obstructing in the majority as much as they were in the minority. That's only giving Cruz more fodder. He's having a grand time raising money for his presidential campaign by calling McConnell out for "engaging in the same procedural abuse that Harry Reid did over and over and over again in this body."
So far, Cruz is the only senator accusing McConnell of being a tyrant. His other colleagues sound an awful lot like Reid's supporters of yore. "The majority leader is like a traffic cop," says whip John Cornyn (R-TX). "And he's got to keep traffic moving. And you gotta get things completed on time." Funny how keeping traffic moving wasn't a requirement before 2015.