Mitch-Slapped

Just when you think that nothing ever happens late at night, to say nothing of anything positive, life hands you some 7-up along with the lemon:

A remarkable thing happened in the United States Senate earlier this evening, and it occurred over a rather unremarkable piece of legislation that was being debated. Conservatives, frustrated at the lack of a genuine leader of their party, may have finally found one in Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell.

After Democratic leader Harry Reid’s MoveOn.org all-night session Tuesday night, a move that resulted only in helping unify the weak-kneed Republicans who were peeling away from continued support of the Petraeus surge in Iraq, McConnell, the Republican leader, served notice to anyone watching C-SPAN that he now runs the Senate.

The Senate spent much of the day discussing the merits, or demerits, of HR 2669, the Student Loans and Grants Act. Maybe it was the culmination of a long week already, or maybe it was the upper chamber being lulled off guard by the increasingly senile senior Senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, who spent twenty-five minutes decrying the plight of the helpless fight dog in response to the weird Michael Vick story in the news, but tonight, McConnell and the Republicans decided to take control of the Senate. The Republicans offered amendment after amendment to the bill, catching the Democrats flat-footed....

Done your spit-take yet? As for me, my double-take almost sprained my neck.

But Generalissimo's account gets better:

After a couple of Republican amendments failed, Mitch McConnell took to the floor and offered his own amendment, which was a Sense of the Senate that Guantanamo detainees not be allowed released or moved to the U.S. soil. To conservatives, this obviously makes sense. To liberals, especially California’s Dianne Feinstein, one of the chief proponents of the effort to close the detention center at Gitmo and relocate these detainees into the American justice system, especially when tagged onto a student loan and grant bill, you’d think this measure would go down in flames. Except a funny thing happened. The bill was titled in a way that you had to vote yes to vote no, and no to vote yes. The final vote was 94-3, officially putting the Senate on record as saying terrorist detainees shouldn’t be moved to the U.S. Before the Democrats, who clearly hadn’t read the amendment, realized they screwed up, the vote was recorded.

Har-de-har-har. Can you say "taste of their own medicine"? Can you say, "Revenge is sweet"? Can you say, "Payback is a bitch"? I sure as hell can. And Uncle Teddy does not take come-uppances well.

But wait! There's more!:

Once the rant was over, Kennedy threw the Senate into a quorum call so that the Democrats could regroup. The session progressed well into the night, and McConnell could easily have rested on his laurels, but he wasn’t finished. Colorado Democrat Ken Salazar offered his own irrelevant amendment, asking for a sense of the Senate that President Bush not pardon Scooter Libby. McConnell, with that wry smile he offers when he’s up to something, countered with a secondary amendment to Salazar’s, saying that if it’s fair to bring up the Senate’s view of potential future inappropriate pardons, maybe we should also have a sense of the Senate of past inappropriate pardons, and proceeded to maneuver the Senate clerk into reading off the laundry list of Clinton administration pardons, including those of Marc Rich and others, which again set the Democrats off in a tailspin. After throwing the Senate back into a quorum call for half an hour, the beleaguered Harry Reid came out and pulled the Salazar amendment off the floor. He’d been Mitchslapped twice in one night.

I don't know that it's that much of an accomplishment to beat Senator Pencil-Neck's ass, but it's something Bill Frist couldn't do in the last Congress. And it must be of some significance if it earned the world a second Massachusetts Manatee diatribe in a single evening.

That being said, it's also true that it doesn't take a lot of skill or effort for a minority leader in a closely divided Senate to gum up the works beyond recognition. Any number of GOP leaders of the past generation have been able to manage that much. Hell, Dirty Harry did it so well over the previous couple of years that you'd think he wrote the manual.

Now part of it is that that's how the Senate is designed - it's "deliberativeness," if you will. The House was meant to be the majoritarian chamber, immediately responsive to the people, while the Senate is supposed to be a step removed in order to act as a brake on the House's presumed excesses. But there have been tremendously effective Democrat majority leaders - George Mitchell comes quickly to mind - who didn't have the horrendous difficulties ramming their party's agendas through the Senate, steamrolling minority opposition in the process, that GOP majority leaders from Howard Baker to Bob Dole to Trent Lott to Bill Frist have endured.

Put more concisely, I don't buy Generalissimo Duane's overselling of Mitch McConnell as "the Senate leader Republicans have been looking for". If he'd been Majority Leader in the 109th Congress instead of Fristy, I highly doubt that the results would have been markedly different.

Of course, there's no way to prove that without the Republicans somehow regaining the majority. And as Dirty Harry himself proved a year ago, blanket obstructionism is one of the tools of that process.

So the question becomes: Was tonight a one-time deal? Was it a tit-for-tat after the Donk "Snooze Till We Lose" extravaganza? Or have the Dems finally pushed the seemingly endlessly docile Pachyderms too far, and this is the beginning of genuine political warfare that will continue right through next November?

I'd love to believe it's the latter. But there will need to be a lot more nights - and days - like this one before I'll be convinced.

I hope Uncle Teddy's heart - and liver - can take it.