Harry Reid’s Graveyard: Senate Democrats are promising pre-emptive gridlock for 2013.

By: American Decency Staff

 

Consider the record. In 2011 and 2012 the House passed more than three-dozen economic or jobs-related bills and with only a few exceptions they died in the Senate without a vote. The bills dealt with regulatory relief, tax reduction, domestic drilling for energy, offshore drilling, a jobs bill for veterans, repeal of ObamaCare and many more. Many passed the House with significant Democratic support, as the nearby list shows.

 

Then there is the Democratic failure on their constitutional obligation of passing a budget. House Republicans passed their budgets in each of the past two years in the spring. The latest one, crafted by Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, contained $4.5 trillion in deficit reduction—at least twice as much as Mr. Obama's budget proposal.

 

By contrast, the Senate failed to pass any budget in 2012. Or 2011. Or 2010. The Senate hasn't passed a budget in more than 1,200 days. Sorry, Harry, you can't blame that on a Republican filibuster, because it takes only 51 votes to pass a Senate budget resolution. In 2011 and 2012 the Senate Budget Committee never even drafted a budget, thus inspiring a House bill to dock the pay of Senate Budget Committee Members for not doing their job.

 

Mr. Reid even declared in 2011 that it would be "foolish for us to do a budget," no doubt because he thought that would allow voters to see that what Democrats really want is even more spending and higher taxes. This would have made life difficult for vulnerable Democratic incumbents who pass themselves off as moderates in election years, such as Pennsylvania's Bob Casey, Montana's Jon Tester and Florida's Bill Nelson.

 

So Democrats simply sat back and took shots at the Ryan budget. Meanwhile, these same incumbents are now campaigning at home as champions of domestic energy, lower taxes, spending restraint and regulatory relief—everything the Democratic Senate helped to kill.

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