Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska ran rings around Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, on the Senate floor Thursday, making three important points in the process.
Earlier, Murphy had tweeted out the following, misleading attack on nine colleagues: “Of the Republican Senators who attended this weeks [sic] ‘Biden isn’t doing enough for Ukraine’ press conference … 2/3 of them [whom he listed by name, including Sasse] voted AGAINST the bipartisan $12B Ukraine aid package.”
Sasse took to the floor to respond. He explained that it wasn’t primarily a Ukrainian aid bill, but a $1.5 trillion bill, passed in the middle of the night, which not a single senator actually had time to read, and of which just eight-tenths of 1% involved assistance for Ukraine. He said all nine of the senators slandered by Murphy supported assistance to Ukraine and that the Ukraine portion of the bill could have been handled separately, and passed overwhelmingly, in just 10 minutes — but that they were not going to let a whole lot of objectionable stuff be passed merely because Democratic leaders held Ukraine aid hostage to the rest of it.
In an 11-minute floor speech and a subsequent floor debate with Murphy, Sasse repeatedly made three points. First, Ukraine desperately needs help, and Republicans are eager to provide it. Second, Congress’s budgeting process is badly broken when the entire government (aside from entitlements) is funded by a single, up-or-down vote, in a 2,700-page bill that no senator actually has read. Third, senators who misleadingly attack other lawmakers are engaging in “tribal hackery” and that the misuse of social media and other means of communication was beneath the Senate’s standards.
In the course of trying unsuccessfully to defend his dishonest tweet, Murphy eventually conceded all three of Sasse’s points.
Asked by Sasse whether he really thought “a single person” attacked in the tweet was actually “against Ukrainian aid,” Murphy replied, “Absolutely not.”
In other words, the whole premise of the tweet was false.
On Sasse’s assertion about Congress’s insistence on massive “omnibus” spending bills rather than smaller bills breaking spending down into bite-sized chunks, Murphy also was beaten.
“I think Sen. Sasse makes an important point,” Murphy said, “which is that the way we are doing things right now with respect to the budget is insanity.” And “there are legitimate reasons why members of this body would vote against the budget” in question.
Finally, he said, rightly, that across the political spectrum, senators are too often communicating just to “rally the faithful” and “speaking to base audiences.”
It is the second point, ultimately, that is the biggest disservice to the public. There are only two real reasons for shoehorning thousands and thousands of items into massive bills rather than considering smaller bills that both members and the public can actually read and understand. One is sheer laziness. The other is to play political hardball to force into law plenty of items that could never earn majorities on their own.
Neither reason is acceptable. As even Murphy admitted, the current process is “insanity.”
Well, if it’s insanity, we await any sign that Murphy or his colleagues will even try to convince the Democratic leadership, which runs both chambers of Congress and the White House, to fix it.
Sasse is more right than he knows. It isn’t just the misuse of Twitter that is “full-time tribal hackery.” Full-time tribal hackery also describes how the Democratic leadership is running our government.
