The House passed a U.S. Postal Service reform bill last week with a huge vote, 342-92, with 120 Republican votes. Yay, bipartisanship, right? Here’s how much Republicans care about bipartisanship: “Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, objected to a unanimous consent request from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to make a technical fix to the bill. Scott argued that there are issues with the legislation and that the Senate should slow down and work to improve it.”
That’s your Republican answer to Democrats’ calls for bipartisanship. A bill that 120 House Republicans voted for, that has 14 Republican cosponsors in the Senate, that even Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy supports, is getting held up over a clerical error. And don’t for one minute believe that this is just Sen. Rick Scott going rogue. This has Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s stamp all over it.
There aren’t issues with the bill. It’s a simple clerical error Schumer was trying to fix. Last Thursday, Schumer moved to advance a version of the bill that was incorrect. The House clerk had sent over a version of it that didn’t have all the amendments. Once the error was discovered, the House moved quickly to correct it, and the Senate could have done the same with a simple unanimous consent vote—nobody would have even had to vote or come to the floor. But the Republican who is in charge of getting more Republicans elected to the Senate said no. No simple fix. He doesn’t care how many Republicans voted for it in the House, nor how many Republican senators support it—enough to pass it easily.
Schumer knew this was coming. Over the weekend, his staff released a statement from a spokesperson about it. “Senate Republicans keep saying they want bipartisanship but one of their leaders is standing in the way of the Senate from taking action this week on historic, bipartisan Postal Service Reform.
“Now, Senator Rick Scott is threatening to block the same fix by Unanimous Consent on Monday in the Senate,” the statement continued. “It is time for Senate Republicans practice what they preach and rein in reckless Rick Scott’s political games so we can pass bipartisan legislation.”
How about it’s time to stop fixating on “bipartisan” and start calling out Republicans for being assholes? How about Democrats don’t spend the rest of this election year chasing the bipartisan unicorn?
And how about Democrats really stop doing this:
If you’re really going to try to trash Republicans over their failure to get the job for America done, don’t give them credit for the Democrats’ hard work at the same time!
The new law has a perfectly good name: the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” Why in the world are Democrats giving Republicans any credit for it? Particularly when the majority of them—206 in the House and 30 in the Senate—voted against that bill.
Chasing bipartisanship has been a fool’s game for years. Because Republicans don’t give a damn about it unless they can somehow twist it to screw Democrats, like Sen. Susan Collins has been doing for years. The Democrats’ bipartisanship fetish is what has given Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema the power to destroy President Biden’s agenda. It’s stopped filibuster reform, which has in turn killed efforts by all the other Democrats to save democracy.
Meanwhile, Republicans are threatening to shut down government over ridiculous conspiracy theories and taking extreme measures to block Biden’s critical nominees, in this case to the Federal Reserve, which is kind of important right now.
The Postal Service reform bill will pass, no thanks to Republicans and probably not for at least another two weeks. The government will not shut down Friday, no thanks to Republicans. But the spending bill they pass will only last three weeks and it will continue to force government to function under Trump spending levels. It’s 2022 and the Biden administration is still operating with budgets passed in 2020 because that’s what Republicans want.
It’s about time Democrats stop trying to plead with Republicans to play nice and work with them, then whine about hypocrisy when they don’t. It’s about time Democrats start labeling them what they are: insurrectionist obstructionist assholes who want the nation to fail.
And is it too much to ask that Democrats call the damned infrastructure bill by its name?
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