This is making me chuckle:
A little after noon eastern time, McConnell rose to object to Majority Leader Harry Reid's motion to confirm several Obama Administration officials, including appointees with jurisdiction over issues of national security.
[...]
As if that isn't broken enough, McConnell also admitted that he didn't know why he was objecting to Reid's motion other than he was doing it on behalf of Richard Shelby, the Republican Senator from Alabama, who was in some sort of dispute with the Obama administration.
The dispute? Shelby wants to take American jobs connected to our nation's security -- and ship them overseas. Seriously.
If this sounds familiar to you, congratulations: You likely remember the Dubai Ports World scandal. (More after the jump.)
Marcy Wheeler states the following:
The key issue is that Shelby wants the Air Force to tweak an RFP for refueling tankers so that Airbus (partnered with Northrup Grumman) would win the bid again over Boeing. The contract had been awarded in 2008, but the GAO found that the Air Force had erred in calculating the award. After the Air Force wrote a new RFP in preparation to rebid the contract, Airbus calculated that it would not win the new bid, and started complaining. Now, Airbus is threatening to withdraw from the competition unless the specs in the RFP are revised.
Essentially, then, Shelby’s threat is primarily about gaming this bidding process to make sure Airbus–and not Boeing–wins the contract (there’s a smaller program he’s complaining about, too, but this is the truly huge potential bounty for his state).
So Richard Shelby wants to shut down the Senate to make sure his Airbus buddies overseas get the contract for performing an important military function -- and Mitch McConnell's backing him on this. Oh, and it's a French company. I'm sure the "Freedom Fries" folk will loooove that.
In other words, the optics on this couldn't possibly be worse for the GOP. It's like a replay of the whole Dubai Ports World mess, except that the Republican base might hate the French even more than they hate Arabs or other Middle Eastern people.
C'mon, Harry Reid. Mitch is just begging to be allowed to own this turkey. Let him have it!