...":There is a corollary to this practice of avoiding the hard votes – one I’ve been complaining about for a while now: Taking the hard votes fraudulently.
This is often accomplished by the cloture game Republicans have become especially skilled at in the Obama years. Desirous of credit for opposing Obama policies but fearful of actually doing anything meaningful to stop them, Senate Republicans often refrain from using what GOP leader Mitch McConnell has acknowledged is their best weapon to block the worst Democratic-majority bills: the supermajority 60-vote requirement to end debate on most legislation.
So the game works this way: Republicans cast a “yes” vote for cloture, knowing as they do so that, by ending debate, legislation they purport to oppose is now guaranteed to pass – with the final vote requiring only a simple majority, which Democrats can easily muster. Of course, at that final vote stage, Republicans turn around and vote “no,” knowing that this opposition is futile. They then go home and tell voters that they bitterly opposed Obama policies that, in reality, could not have been enacted without their collusion.
A similar tactic employed by many of the GOP’s self-styled “constitutional conservatives” is the unconstitutional process fashioned for extensions of the debt ceiling.
Republicans (who ran up astronomical debt themselves when they controlled Congress) want to pose as opponents of Obama’s even more astonishing accumulation of debt … but they do not want to do anything that might actually stop it, for fear of being blamed for government shutdowns, derailing the gravy-train, etc. They have a problem, though: Our system is designed to make them accountable. Congress is in charge of spending. Obama cannot spend a dime unless Congress approves it; and Republicans, with control of the House and a sufficiently large minority to scuttle many things under Senate rules, have the means to refuse to authorize new trillions in debt spending.
