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Friday 5 February 2010
Senate Shark Jump Announced

You’ve seen the reports that Sen. Richard Shelby (R) of Alabama has taken the perhaps unprecedented step of placing holds on ALL of President Obama’s nominees until he gets the money for a couple of big earmarked pork barrel projects he feels entitled to back in his home state.

It’s an eye-popper no doubt, with gallons more audacity than Obama ever could have hoped for. But I wonder if this story might not end up amounting to much more than the sum of its parts because it brings together three or four of the issues roiling American politics today in a bundle of smack-you-in-the-face arrogance that’s too much to ignore.

For Republicans and the Tea Party set you’ve got pork-barrel spending and earmarks, two catchwords that are frequently abused and used to paint with too broad a brush but in this case seem pretty fairly to describe a senior senator’s power to wrestle tens of billions of federal dollars back into his home state.

For Democrats, there’s the outrage at archaic Senate obstructionism which has rapidly escalated from annoying to outrageous to pure comedy with a mind-numbing speed. It’s the heart of the story about the demise of Health Care Reform, the slow death of so many unobjectionable nominees and much else.

19 notes

  1. jeffmiller reblogged this from squashed and added:
    First, Shelby can’t be defended for this—it’s stupid and awful....hope he loses his seat...
  2. squashed reblogged this from robot-heart-politics
  3. robot-heart-politics reblogged this from azspot
  4. southpol reblogged this from azspot and added:
    Where’s Mr. “I will make them famous and you will know their names” these days? Oh yeah, he’s on “don’t ask, don’t gay”...
  5. azspot posted this

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