Not Working

Sometimes this place seems crazy.

To get a law passed, you need to submit a bill to the House of Representatives, and get 218 (half plus 1) votes for it, submit a -separate- bill to the Senate and get 51 (out of 100) votes for it, reconcile any conflicts between the 2 bills, get them voted on a 2nd time in both parts, then get it signed by the President - if he vetoes it, you then need (I think) 290 votes in the House to overcome this. That all more or less makes sense, in a cumbersome eighteenth century horse&buggy sort of approximation to sense. It certainly ensures there will be no hasty Muldoonian legislation rammed through in an eyeblink.

However, it turns out, that 41 Senators can 'filibuster' - i.e. indefinitely block - any bill,without a final vote, so effectively you need 60 votes in the Senate, to get any bill passed.

That's pretty Rube Goldberg, but I can sort of see some point in terms of giving a large minority protection against a majority ... at least in principle. It seems to have worked fairly well in less ideologically fanatical times, up until, oh, about 1994: and since then, as party discipline has become less lax, it has been working progressively less well. But, fair enough.

What's absolutely crazy - I mean, totally beyond comprehension, just drug-sniffingly hallucinatorily mad - is that a single Senator has the power to 'hold' or block anything by withholding his consent for a vote, but this appears to be the case. We had an instance of this a couple of weeks ago, when a vile slimeball called Shelby put a hold on 30 or more appointments to various government positions (which apparently need ratification by the Senate), because he wanted some government contracts to be directed to his state, rather to a different part of the USA where the contracts could be more cheaply & efficiently completed. Well, that's pretty naked greed, but I guess you have to expect a certain amount of that from politicians, who fairly universally favor naked self-interest* over ... anything, really.

And now there is another crazy delusional fool, by name of Bunning, who is blocking a bill permitting the payment of unemployment benefits to the unemployed (and also various government infrastructure projects, such as highway and bridge repairs) on the basis of (a) they are just lazy and not looking for jobs, and (b) the government is paying for it with deficit financing (something he apparently had absolutely no objection to when Bush was crippling the country with deficits for the last eight years).

And apparently nothing can be done about this, unless they find some sort of bribe to shift him. This, when his own state (Kentucky) has 10% unemployment and the whole country is grinding through a terrible economic constraction, seems beyond just vicious, cruel and spiteful - it seems utterly, incomprehensibly savage and insane.

*not to mention egos so bloated as to obscure any flicker of intelligence thoroughly.