The Denver Post this morning continues its fine tradition of election year in-kind contributions to Democrats with two pieces, one an editorial and one a blog post that may as well be.
Allison Sherry’s blog post (“Travel perks pervasive for Colorado lawmakers“), about Congressional travel perks, leads with Representative Doug Lamborn’s exciting life as a Congressional t0urist, and goes on to give more than twice the ink to Republicans as to Democrats, despite the fact that, including Senators, Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-4 in our Congressional delegation. Why?
Democratic Reps. Ed Perlmutter and Jared Polis filed extensions for 2011’s financial disclosures. They will be available this summer. On the Senate side, trips are not reported with the personal financial disclosures, but separately, and were not immediately available.
There’s nothing the matter with filing for an extension, I suppose, but if the congressmen can wait until summer to tell us where they’ve been on whose dime, one wonders about the urgency of the report in the first place.
The other piece is an editorial complaining about filibusters in the U.S. Senate. Such complaints have become fashionable, now Majority Leader Harry “Digger O’Dell” Reid (D-NV) has begun making noise about ramming through changes to the rules. It’s hard to say whether this is a signal that Reid is more or less confident of retaining control after November’s elections, but at a minimum, it dovetails nicely with the President’s efforts to blame his failures on the house of Congress that his party controls.
The problem is the DenPo bill of particulars:
This is the body that hasn’t passed a budget in three years, where dozens of judicial and executive appointments have been delayed for purely political purposes, where even measures with bipartisan support run into unnecessary opposition.
The editorial staff apparently still don’t have access to the Internet, where they’d find out that the budget is passed under something call Reconciliation rules, and thus not subject to a filibuster. Even if they can’t find the telegraph operator, carrier pigeon, or owl to get a question through to their research service, they might at least remember that the Senate Dems considered trying to pass Obamacare under Reconciliation in order to avoid the need for 60 votes.
As for judicial appointments, it’s old news that it’s only Democrat appointments that the Post worries about. Back in 2005, they objected to Republican suggestions of limiting filibusters of judges -who can’t be sent back to a committee for amendment – and referred to the so-called Gang of 14 Compromise as “sanity” and “cooler heads.”
Well, if it’s insanity at the DenPo, it must be an even-numbered year.
