Campaign Action
The Senate’s filibuster-proof majority now hangs by one vote, following the results of a special election. The majority party is pushing a massive piece of legislation, one that could cement the legacy of the president, that is all done but the final voting. The majority leader is in a tough position, under tremendous pressure from both sides—one saying pass the bill now and the other saying recognize the will of the people and wait for the new senator to be seated before taking such a momentous vote.
No, we're not talking about Doug Jones, Mitch McConnell and the tax bill. We're talking about Scott Brown and Harry Reid and the Affordable Care Act. What did Majority Leader Harry Reid do? What his constitutional duty demanded. Here's January, 2010:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that there is no firm commitment for Democrats to rush a health care bill through Congress this year.
"First of all, we're not going to rush into anything," he said. "We're going to wait until the new senator arrives until we do anything more on health care."
In a press conference the day after Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown shattered the Democratic supermajority in the Senate, Reid said he'd spoken with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a number of issues, including the fate of the health care bill.
That's not how Republicans told it, of course. In 2013, Brown himself was revising that history. "They rammed it through before I got there, knowing I would be there in a week or two," he said on Fox News. "They delayed my swearing-in here in Massachusetts for a couple weeks so they could ram it through and did not pass one amendment to make it better for the American people, and they should be held accountable."
Fast forward to today, December 13, 2017, and the massive social engineering project Mitch McConnell has embarked upon. His tax bill is quite possibly the worst major policy-making a Congress has attempted since, say, 1926. It's a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom up and is remarkably unpopular. And McConnell has to make a decision. Does he follow the example of his predecessor and do the thing his oath to the constitution would demand, which would be to wait to pass this tax bill until Doug Jones is seated.
Right. It's McConnell. Of course he's not going to do the right thing. But that doesn't mean we don't raise holy hell about it, and make those handful of Republicans who keep bleating about "principle"—Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Marco Rubio, John McCain—answer for it.
Jam your senators' and representative's phone lines at (202) 224-3121. Tell them to vote "no" on the Republican tax bill.