Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s performance last week was notable for two things — his zeal to protect the corrupt, political cash cows Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his subversion of one of the Senate’s most noble traditions of open debate.
Things came to a head when South Carolina’s Republican Sen. Jim DeMint sought to offer an amendment barring political donations and lobbying by the two mortgage giants.
Ordinarily, the idea of barring political participation, especially the right to petition government (i.e. lobbying), would be suspect. But Fannie and Freddie aren’t ordinary private outfits. Instead, they are “government-sponsored enterprises” granted special discounted loan rates and other financial advantages and protections. And the bill DeMint sought to amend — the housing bailout bill that President Bush signed early Wednesday — gave Fannie and Freddie billions more in government backing.
Allowing these two political monsters to dole out campaign cash (an astonishing $800,000 so far this election cycle) and spend a whopping $200 million on direct and indirect lobbying is, in effect, using tax dollars to agitate for more government cash. DeMint’s amendment was appropriate and should have been considered.
Reid, however, protected the Fannie/Freddie sleaze train, flatly rejecting DeMint’s several compromise offers. Two centuries of parliamentary tradition requiring that all Senate bills be open to amendments meant nothing to Reid. So much for the world’s greatest deliberative body demonstrating the ordinary workings of democracy.
Unfortunately, Reid’s tactics against DeMint have been all too typical of his regime. Reid repeatedly has used parliamentary devices to silence the Senate minority. In particular, he has used an underhanded tactic called “filling the tree,” which involves pushing through fake amendments by the majority [such as changing the bill’s official filing date] and then re-amending those changes so as to use up all the available amendment “slots” before the minority can offer its own. Past majority leaders rarely have filled the tree, usually once or twice each Congress. But Reid already has done so 15 times.
Voters understandably tossed out the corruption-ridden GOP majority in 2006 and returned Democrats to power in part on their promise to run Congress in a more open and civil manner.
Instead, with his “my way or the highway” approach (mirrored in the House by Speaker Nancy Pelosi) Reid has made a bad Congress even worse. Is it any wonder that Congress now ranks last in public respect among America’s public institutions?
