On Thursday evening, the Senate finally passed its Keystone XL bill, twenty-three days after the legislation was formally introduced. It was a long slog for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and one that will prove fruitless because in the end–even after allowing open debate and votes on several dozen amendments, he failed to muster up a veto-proof majority. The bill, per President Obama’s threats, will never become law.
In addition to futility, the last month also served as a sign of things to come in a Senate where a new majority leader is pledging to return to regular order, and dealing with the consequences that come with openness in the age of obstruction—one gleefully embraced by Republicans throughout the Obama administration.
“The last two weeks is an example of governing,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) Thursday morning on CSPAN’s Washington Journal. He touted the amendment process and compared it to how former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) routinely restricted amendments and limited debate in the face of what was historic stonewalling by the Republican minority.
“In one week, we have had more than 20 roll call votes on one bill,” Sen. Grassley said referring to the Keystone XL legislation. “That includes half Democratic amendments and half Republican amendments.” He added that Sen. Reid wouldn’t let Republican amendments come up.
“You can see that we’re governing now, whereas, the last four years the Senate was shut down,” Sen. Grassley said.
But governing means dealing with discontent. It’s clear from the Keystone affair that Democrats in the Senate are eager to employ the same tools of obstruction that the GOP relied on to grind the chamber to a halt while they were in the minority. That includes inundating the process with amendments that, for now, Sen. McConnell is allowing despite how time-consuming the strategy can be.
The Senate Majority Leader is now looking at a far more truncated schedule to approve the next major piece of legislation, a funding measure for the Department of Homeland Security, which unlike Keystone, is a must-pass bill. On Friday, Sen. McConnell announced that the upper chamber would take up the legislation next week, beginning with a procedural vote slated for Tuesday.
Already passed in the House, the DHS spending measure includes provisions that roll back President Obama’s executive actions deferring deportation for millions of undocumented immigrants. Democrats have promised to kill the bill, and are calling for a clean measure to keep the department funded for the rest of the fiscal year.
It took Sen. McConnell nearly a month to usher the Keystone bill to passage, even with a number of Democrats vocally supporting the measure. He doesn’t have much time to delay when it comes to a DHS funding bill, especially in the face of unified Democratic opposition, and a quickly approaching deadline of February 27th, when the department’s current funding authority expires.
Up against the clock and the same dilatory tactics he used as minority leader, Sen. McConnell will have to make some tough choices about how to manage the upper chamber. While a return to openness and regular order that Sen. Grassley praised may be a good thing for the deliberative process, it may also be a pipedream in a Senate broken after years of dysfunction and delay—a breakdown caused in part by then Minority Leader McConnell’s belief that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
In the end, to carry out an ambitious GOP agenda targeting the Affordable Care Act, the EPA, and Dodd-Frank, Sen. McConnell may have to ditch the idealism, and take some lessons in fighting obstruction from an old boxer from Nevada, Harry Reid. Politically speaking, Democrats would be fools if they didn’t try to hamper Republicans’ deregulatory legislative agenda until 2016, when the GOP looks likely to again lose control of the Senate.
