Why the Senate should be sold for scrap and its members hauled off to the Smithsonian as the museum pieces that they are.
He promised, promised, promised, promised, promised, promised, promised, promised that the modern Senate filibuster -- the pipe-bomb that the crackpot minority party has duct-taped to the throat of our democracy -- would be substantially reformed.
So, of course, once the power to enact his promise was put in his hands, Harry Reid weaseled out.
From anonymous holds that let any Civil-War-grudge-holding flake randomly bring the government to its knees...to filibusters-by-proxy that let the minority rule by decree and ransom note...to mysterious, obscure double-magic-reverso rules which can undo all that has gone before (but only if invoked on the third Tuesday of a month when the official Senate chicken has laid an egg with a double yolk)...if the last two years has demonstrated anything, it is that America's House of Lords has failed.
Since the beginning, practically the Senate's only reason for being has been to act as a firewall against the excesses of the House, and the only weapons it really had were collegiality, compromise and an arsenal of arcane rules that punished outliers who wanted to push things along too quickly.
But Conservatism's engineered rage retrovirus -- spliced meticulously together out of racism, ignorance, fundamentalism and lies, and delivered everywhere at the speed of light via Fox News and Hate Radio -- has now done exactly what it was designed to do: kill any vestige of collegiality or compromise or reason on the Right. And now that this wingnut contagion has broken through the containment field and is running like wildfire through the halls of the Senate
the same, powerful, entangling tools which were originally designed to halt the progress of the disease have been turned into instruments for worsening its spread.
Thanks to the Republican Party, the Senate is no longer capable of performing its most basic bodily/political functions. Thanks to the Republican Party, the "World's Greatest Deliberative Body" has been reduced to a hopelessly dysfunctional sack of plague, bleeding out.
So if our fever ever breaks and we limp back to national sanity we can bring the Senate back from mothballs, but for now it is time to get rid of it.
