There would be no hearings that afternoon the general and the admiral would have to come back another day. The Republicans had turned this old rule into a new means of obstruction.
(The desks, some built as long ago as 1819, are mahogany, and their lids lift up, like those in an old schoolhouse the desks of the Majority and Minority Leader are still equipped with brass spittoons.) In the press lounge, McCaskill said, with light sarcasm, “Somebody told me the rule is to make sure people pay attention to what’s happening on the floor during debate and not be distracted by committee work. Like many other aspects of senatorial procedure, Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5 is a relic from the days when senators had to hover around their desks to know what was happening on the floor during the main afternoon debate. The Senate chamber is an intimate room where men and women go to talk to themselves for the record. On this afternoon, two portly bald men in suits stood facing the speaker from a few feet away, tapping at the transcription machines, which resembled nineteenth-century cash registers, slung around their necks.
The only people who pay attention to a speech are the Senate stenographers. The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the Web for analysis of current Senate negotiations television screens alert them if something of interest actually happens in the chamber. Therefore, I would have to object.”īetween speeches, there are quorum calls, time killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes. But, he added, “there is objection on our side of the aisle. “I have no personal objection to continuing,” Burr said. So, four hours earlier, when Levin went to the Senate floor and asked for consent to hold his hearing, Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and a member of Levin’s committee, had refused. Republicans, who had fought the bill as a bloc, were in no mood to make things easy. But this was March 24th, the day after President Barack Obama signed the health-care-reform bill, in a victory ceremony at the White House it was also the day that the Senate was to vote on a reconciliation bill for health-care reform, approved by the House three nights earlier, which would retroactively remove the new law’s most embarrassing sweetheart deals and complete the yearlong process of passing universal health care. Typically, it wouldn’t be difficult to get colleagues to waive the rule a general and an admiral had flown halfway around the world to appear before Levin’s Armed Services Committee, and McCaskill’s Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight of the Homeland Security Committee was investigating the training of Afghan police. Both Levin and McCaskill had scheduled hearings that day for two-thirty. She was referring to Senate Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5, which requires unanimous consent for committees and subcommittees to hold hearings after two in the afternoon while the Senate is in session. “It’s time we started looking at some of these rules.” “Also, it’s a dumb rule in itself,” McCaskill said. McCaskill, in a matching maroon jacket and top, looked exasperated Levin glowered over his spectacles.
It was four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. The Senators were in the Capitol, sunk into armchairs before the marble fireplace in the press lounge, which is directly behind the Senate chamber. “The obstructionism has become mindless.” “It’s unconscionable,” Carl Levin, the senior Democratic senator from Michigan, said. “This is just one of those days when you want to throw up your hands and say, ‘What in the world are we doing?’ ” Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said.
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