His Spine Is Showing
It was not enough for Senator Harry Reid to just dismiss Republican offers as “vexatious” or “kid’s stuff” or “one cockamamie, can’t-pass idea after another.” He called the White House and asked it to issue a veto threat, which it promptly did.
It was not enough for Mr. Reid, the majority leader, to accuse his counterpart in the House, Speaker John A. Boehner, of being dragged around by a tribe of rogue “banana Republicans.” He leaked a series of e-mails between their offices in an attempt to humiliate the speaker.
With Congress locked in an intractable budget dispute that kept the federal government shut down for a second day on Wednesday, Mr. Reid is not only acting as the public face of the no-compromise posture of Democrats on Capitol Hill, he is the power behind the scenes driving a hard-line strategy that the White House and Congressional Democrats are hoping will force Republicans to crack.
His tactics have been unapologetically aggressive, even when measured by the fast and loose rules of engagement in a political climate so bitterly polarized.
Advisers and Senate colleagues say that Mr. Reid, of Nevada, who at 73 is more wily and scrappy than his stooped posture and shuffling walk suggest, is animated and outraged to a degree they have rarely seen in his 25 years in the Senate.
Click here for reuse options!Copyright 2013 Liberaland
By: dave-dr-gonzo
David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.
* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.