Campaign Action
If you're a C-SPAN2 watcher, you've noticed something really unusual happening over the last few days. There's been a lot of roll call votes, very slow roll call votes, and not a lot of action. That's Democrats resisting, without much fanfare, with the strongest tool they have right now—the ability to slow things down.
The Senate's rules traditionally are all about protecting the rights of the minority party, so almost everything that goes on there has to happen with everyone's consent. Normally, the housekeeping stuff happens routinely and without fanfare. A majority party senator asks for unanimous consent to do something like waive the vote on approving the previous day's Journal—the minutes of the previous day's meeting—which they are required to by the Senate rules. Normally no one objects, it's agreed to and they move on to destroying something else that matters to the country. But this week is different. This week Democrats objected, and they required a full roll call vote on everything that requires unanimous consent.
They had very good reason to do so. First of all, on some of the worse nominees like Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education, Republicans rushed the hearings, limited the amount of time Democrats had to ask questions and the time they had to fully vet the nominees. And even when the nominees were fully vetted—by the Democrats and traditional media, anyway—Republicans shut down Democrats in committee. It happened in the Finance Committee, where Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) rammed through Steve Mnuchin and Rep. Tom Price even though they had clearly lied to the committee and have some pretty serious ethical problems.
Senate Republicans are clearly happy to thwart the rules in order to fast-track Trump's destructive agenda. It's great that Senate Democrats are committed to using the rules to slow that train down. It does one key thing—it gives us time to make our voices heard. Thank your Democratic senators for their resistance.
And if you don't have Democratic senator(s), call your Republican senator(s) to tell them to oppose Trump's nominees—particularly Betsy DeVos.