Laura Clawson
wrote earlier about the farce that is new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's "open amendment" process for the Keystone XL bill. She included a snippet of video from the floor "debate" in which Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) repeatedly tried to ask for one minute to explain his proposed amendment before the Republican majority voted to table it. He was essentially ignored by McConnell.
But there's a longer clip of how the Democratic amendments were handled by McConnell, and it's worth watching to see Markey as well as his colleagues Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed (D-RI) get shut down.
Just for fun watch the woman in yellow, McConnell's floor aide, as she prompts Republicans too lazy to pay attention as to when to raise their hands, and how another whispers instructions on how to dispense with Democratic objections to the presiding officer, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE). So now I guess we know how McConnell is going to handle his promise to give Democrats votes on their amendments—as soon as they try to bring them up, there will be a motion to table, and then they'll be totally shut down. But then McConnell can say "look at all the amendments I'm allowing from Democrats!"
We know he's going to do that because he already did:
“We've actually reached a milestone here that I think is noteworthy for the Senate. We just cast our 15th roll-call vote on an amendment on this bill, which is more votes—more roll-call votes on amendments than the entire United States Senate [did] in all of 2014," he said.
Technically, yes, even though
half of them were votes to table Democratic amendments. Which really isn't the same thing as having an actual up or down vote on them. Here's the other part. One of the reasons there were so few votes on amendments under Harry Reid is perhaps that there were so few votes on anything but cloture. There were more cloture votes taken in the 113th Congress alone than there had been from World War I through 1985 combined. They never got to where they could actually do the amendment thing on a whole lot of bills, because Republicans filibustered them.