The Jilted Miss Havisham of the Senate - Reid the Rat

He has Great Expectations to punish all of we Pips who think we should have free will. m/r

Reid the Rat | National Review Online
NOVEMBER 27, 2013  
By  Andrew Stiles

Harry Reid is having a banner year. The Senate majority leader has emerged as an unlikely darling of the Left, most recently because of his decision to annihilate longstanding Senate precedent by “nuking” the filibuster on executive-branch and judicial nominations. In the near term, this move will allow President Obama to pack the lower courts with liberal justices to rubber-stamp his extensive regulatory regime; in the longer term, it potentially sets the stage for the outright demise of the filibuster and “the end of United States Senate.”

At least, that’s how Reid himself put it in 2005, when the Republican majority almost took the drastic step that he has now embraced. “A filibuster is the minority’s way of not allowing the majority to shut off debate, and without robust debate, the Senate is crippled,” Reid wrote in his 2008 memoir, The Good Fight. “Trying to blow up the Senate” in a “fit of partisan fury” would be a “very radical thing” for Republicans to do, and “would tamper dangerously with the Senate’s advise-and-consent function as enshrined in the Constitution.” After all, the filibuster was a “a perfectly reasonably tool to effect compromise.” Preserving it, he would later boast, was “the most important thing I ever worked on.”

Reid clearly felt strongly about the issue when Democrats were the minority party in the Senate, and he insisted that as majority leader he would never target the filibuster. However, as the problems with the Obamacare rollout continue to mount, and the president barrels headlong into lame-duck territory amid plummeting poll numbers, Reid is invoking his “right to change how I feel about things.” As is the president, apparently.

Reid’s change of heart dates back to October 2011, when he used the nuclear option to scale back the ability of the Republican minority to offer amendments, something he has effectively restricted for years — in unprecedented fashion — through a process known as “filling the tree.” Republicans have often cited this tactic of “filling the tree” in defense of their decision to filibuster legislation. Earlier this year, Reid threatened to go nuclear again to eliminate the filibuster on executive-branch nominees, but not for judges. Feelings change.

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