http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-02-12/what-ted-cruz-won-t-do-to-crush-obama-s-immigration-policy?cmpid=yhoo
On Thursday afternoon, flanked by House Republicans, Texas Senator Ted Cruz gave the umpteenth iteration of his St. Crispin's Day speech on immigration. It was up to his fellow Republicans to end the president's immigration orders in the must-pass DHS funding bill.
"We should use every constitutional check and balance we have,” said Cruz. “There are a host of constitutional checks and balances, including confirmation power, that we should be using."
Yet there was one power Cruz was uncomfortable talking about. In the hours before the presser, some fed-up Republican congressmen started asking why the Republican-controlled Senate didn't simply change its rules and allow the DHS bill to be passed with 51 votes.
Why was an appropriations bill subject to cloture? Why were defeated Democrats, reduced to 46 seats in the Senate, allowed to hold it up?
Brooks's idea caught on. "Mitch McConnell can change the rules of the Senate," said Idaho Representative Raul Labrador at Thursday's presser. "This is important enough for Mitch McConnell to change the rules of the Senate."
Kansas Representative Tim Huelskamp agreed. "I don't think Mitch McConnell should let the Senate rules trump the Constitution," he said. Another Republican Congressman, speaking on background to reporters Thursday morning, said that the idea of filibustering must-pass appropriations bills was reprehensible; it was just obvious that it should have been undone.
This put Cruz in the unfamiliar position of siding with the GOP's leader over the hard right wing of the House. McConnell is adamant about the Senate rules. He's so adamant that he did not open the new Senate by reversing recent rules changes by which Democrats ended filibusters on executive branch nominees (and anyone nominated for a judicial job lower than the Supreme Court). To do so, as McConnell used to put it, would mean "changing the rules to break the rules," and would not consider it.
The ad hoc Brooks/Labrador reform group does not have anything to offer Democrats. It's not asking for a bipartisan reform; it wants McConnell to crack the whip as hard as Harry Reid did. It even has Speaker of the House John Boehner, who in 2014 praised "Leader McConnell’s efforts to protect minority rights," carping about the "undemocratic" Democratic effort to filibuster the DHS bill.
have paid out a min wage of 174,000 dollars per house member senate and congress to do nothing for us that remotely looks like they earned it, now by a fluke they have control and we are still paying them for nothing, does that make us the electorate of doing nothing if we keep allowing this atrocity to continue bad enough that we do but they flip us the finger when it comes to doing their job and proceed to tell us what we need, want and how we elected them to do our work, we are being punked.
