Tyrannical Incompetence

I don't know which is the more astonishing: that the Senate border erasure crowd tried yet another "jam-down" of the immigration amnesty bill, or that Dirty Harry Reid so thoroughly botched the attempt.

As Dave Berry says, I swear I'm not making this up.

On Tuesday eveing Richard Miniter sounds the red alert:

Rocketing through Republican Washington is a memo predicting Senator Harry Reid will use a unprecedented combination of legislative procedures to shove through the immigration bill today—without real opposition.

The memo was drafted by a former Secretary for the Majority and Minority in the U.S. Senate, Elizabeth B. Letchworth. As an expert in senate rules, she was asked by several senators skeptical of the immigration bill to use her sources and her expertise to anticipate the legislative moves of the immigration bill supporters. She wrote the memo as private work, for concerned friends.

This memo, made public on Pajamas Media for the first time, lays out a purported plan by Democrats to use obscure senate procedures to force through the immigration bill hworkwith no amendments from skeptical or critical senators.

Letchworth predicts that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will try this [Wednes]day.

She calls it “The Reid scenario,” which she says will kick off in less than two hours from this writing. Letchwork writes in an email: “The Reid scenario of offering amendments in strategic places in order to block any and all other amendments will commence when they return from their weekly party caucuses @ 2:15PM. [Today, Eastern] At the end of the amendment. offering process Senator Reid will file cloture on the bill.”

The mind reels. This is the second time that backers of this turkey have tried to use a parliamentary battering ram to force it through the Senate without scrutiny or amendment. Whereas the first attempt last month was a wished-for act of stealth and legerdemain that stepped on a couple of squeak toys called talk radio and the blogosphere, this one was a piece of legislative thuggery that would have made even Uncle Hugo exclaim, "Espere un minuto, tipo."

Even the inattentive intellect has got to start getting the impression that this bill, in the words of Hank Hill, "just ain't right". All the GOP senators who keep keeping this monstrosity alive in order to "improve" it via amendments that Dirty Harry has now (again) tried to prevent them from attaching - all in the name of the illogical but all too typical Beltway groupthink legislative instinct to "Don't just stand there, DO something!" - should be getting the message from Reid, if not the avalanche of angry phone calls and emails melting their deactivated communications apparati, that Bush-McCain-Kyl-Kennedy-Take A Number is not something that should be enacted.

What's the old expression? If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably not a shetland pony.

Not to worry, though. Senator Pencil-Neck's haste made for some hilarious waste:

Someone once said not to watch how sausage or legislation are made. Today especially I prefer to be at the sausage factory.

As if the Senate floor situation could get any worse, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s staff is now rewriting the Clay Pigeon amendment behind closed doors. It is the intent of the Majority Leader to bring this new unread Amendment up without the Republicans seeing the language. Yesterday Senator Reid did not have his massive 373 page amendment ready when he started debate on it and mistakes were made in the initial drafting. This fact was not discovered until Republicans objected to waiving the reading of the bill, and the Senate Clerk had nothing to read. Shockingly, Reid scrambled around, put the floor in morning business for a few hours, and then allowed Kennedy’s staff make final changes to the amendment. The language was finally made available around 5:30 pm and Reid “graciously” gave Republicans the night to go through it before moving to it this morning.

This morning Republicans announced that Reid’s amendment did not include the Sessions EITC provision in the touchback section, despite the fact that all previously passed amendments were supposed to be incorporated in the bill and the Clay Pigeon amendment. This oversight is the only mistake so far found, yet there may be other mistakes and intentional omissions in the 373 page amendment. This morning Reid put the floor back in morning business and sent his staff off to rewrite the mega amendment once again. Today, “the most deliberative body in the world,” is left to debate legislation that they do not have a copy of…

That's right, dear readers, a 373-page "amendment" to a 388-page bill. Doesn't that little detail alone tell you how utterly bleeped-up this whole thing has become? Multi-hundred page "amendments" nobody has seen, full of "mistakes" and "omissions" that strangely only seem to affect Republican amendments, that when they're noticed get the "amendment" sent back for "re-write," AGAIN with no chance to read them. And yet floor debate goes on anyway! How can you f'ing debate an f'ing bill before it's f'ing written? Can this get any worse?

C'mon, GOP Senate caucus. I know Darth Queeg and Darth Small and T.L. Worthless have flown the coop, but the rest of you have no excuse for continuing to facilitate this travesty.

Jim DeMint (the Republican senator from South Carolina), seems to understand what's going on:

After the Senate voted to cut off debate on the question of whether to resurrect the Senate immigration bill, Senator Reid set up unique debate process that guarantees votes several hand-picked amendments but blocks consideration of all others. Senator Reid used a parliamentary tool called a “clay pigeon” to divide a giant amendment into multiple amendments and then moved to block all others. No other member of the Senate besides Reid could have accomplished all of this without being stopped by another Senator. No other Majority Leader in history has done this.

Republicans better wake up soon or they can expect Senator Reid to use this tactic in the future to raise taxes, increase spending, and weaken our national security. [emphases added]

So much for "the greatest deliberative body in the world". Dirty Harry is turning it into a synthesis of the House of Lords and the Mafia.

And, in so doing, winning a battle (if even that) but losing the war:

That’s why the fundamental bill has no credibility, and basically what we are saying today is it is dead on arrival in the House, we can’t have secret deals, this has to go through committee, it has to go in pieces. A comprehensive bill will not pass the House.

The evil Barney Fife has overreached so far he ripped his own arms out of their sockets. Now the GOP has to take this exercise in corrupt authoritarianism and flog the Democrats mercilessly between now and November 2008 the same damn way they used the so-called "Republican culture of corruption" against us in 2006.

Yeah, that's probably a fantasy. But it's a darned pleasant one.